The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

Between the inauguration and living in DC, all anyone can talk about lately is politics. So I&#x27;ve had the opportunity to probe a bunch of mainstream Democrats on this issue. The overwhelming response has been not caring (though many are more worried now that Trump is in the charge of the surveillance apparatus rather than Obama). Even to the extent people care, nobody cares enough to want to spend limited political capital on the issue. To the extent policy is necessarily subject to political compromise, privacy doesn&#x27;t seem to even make the top 10 of issues Democrats are willing to fight for.<p>It seems inevitable to me that the same generation that willingly hands over all their personal information to Google and Facebook, and sees government mostly as a positive force for enforcing civil rights and increasing social equality will embrace the expansion of the surveillance state.

Please stop pointing fingers at the American &quot;government&quot; and realize that the issue is really the average American.<p>The US public has had over 10 years to figure it out, blaming the government is just causing more problems, not less; to understand why it&#x27;s been 10 years, Google &quot;Room 641A&quot;, which was exposed in 2006.<p>Sure, there are people in America that are opposed to mass surveillance, but the bulk of Americans willfully allow it.<p>If you think the issue is important, do me a favor: find 10 people next week that do not believe it is an issue, help them see it is, and get them to the point that they want to help do the same thing you just did the following week.<p>Even if only 5 of the 10 people go on to do the same the week after, if that pattern went on for a year, by the end of the year mass surveillance would no longer exist; happy to explain, but math is a basic viral coefficient[1]; that is if only one person reading this did it and succeed, which would mean in less than three months the majority of the US would have been &quot;converted&quot; to supporting change.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nichevertising.com&#x2F;viral-coefficient-calculator&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nichevertising.com&#x2F;viral-coefficient-calculator&#x2F;</a>

&gt; (If you’re wondering what data the NSA collects, its own site[1] offers a list and this statement: “The standard operating procedure for the Domestic Surveillance Directorate is to ‘collect all available information from all available sources all the time, every time, always.’”)<p>The linked site is a PARODY. There is no such thing as the Domestic Surveillance Directorate, that would be the FBI. How the author of this article fell for that, I don&#x27;t know.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info&#x2F;data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info&#x2F;data&#x2F;</a>

I agree with the main point of the article, but feel like it undermines itself in a couple of ways. Firstly (and by far most importantly), the alleged quote from the NSA[1] comes from a parody site which explicitly states &quot;[t]his parody website has no connection whatsoever to the National Security Agency&quot;[2]. If a reader isn&#x27;t already convinced of the potential harms of mass surveillance, (accidentally, presumably) using such quotes makes the arguments easier to discard.<p>Secondly, and this is more of a pet peeve of mine, is the &quot;top highlight&quot; that appears mid-way through the article. I know they aren&#x27;t really comparable, but &quot;mass surveillance is bad, but, by the way, we are totally tracking every interaction you make with this article&quot; doesn&#x27;t feel like a particularly consistent position to hold.<p>[1] &gt; The standard operating procedure for the Domestic Surveillance Directorate is to &#x27;collect all available information from all available sources all the time, every time, always.&#x27;, per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info&#x2F;data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info&#x2F;data&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info&#x2F;about&#x2F;about.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info&#x2F;about&#x2F;about.html</a>

Mass surveillance in the digital age is a Pandora&#x27;s box that&#x27;s been opened.<p>Without comprehensively putting extreme restrictions on what people can put online, there is only ever going to be an exponentially growing trove of data to mine that reveals implications far removed from whatever whoever made it available intended to communicate.<p>While it may be possible to significantly cut back the amount of surveillance done on communications intended to be private, I think people need to accept that the automation of surveillance and of inferring likely connections from it are developments which irreversibly change how society functions going forward.<p>What&#x27;s more, technology has a very persistent tendency to become accessible to more people over time. I have yet to see any reasons this wouldn&#x27;t be true specifically in the case of automated surveillance. Remember the story about someone trying facial recognition to tie pictures of strangers on the subway to VKontakte profiles? That&#x27;s just a small taste of the implications.<p>I think it&#x27;s realistically possible to push back a large portion of the surveillance that invades private communications, likely by technological means more often than legal ones. And I think the article highlights that possibility, especially at a time when distrust in government is reaching a peak in America and elsewhere. That said, I&#x27;m waiting for the Pandora&#x27;s box of wide access to powerful surveillance tools using publicly available information to be seen for what it is.

Putting the debate over actual necessity aside, it&#x27;s not a great political move to be the one to actually abolish any of these programs. God forbid a future attack is shown to have been planned through a medium that you or your party ended surveillance of.<p>Realistically, I don&#x27;t expect to see these programs change much until terrorism ceases to be a force in the world.

&gt; Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.<p>Calling all engineers! We do have the power amongst ourselves to add technical impediments to surveillance to the services we&#x27;re building, and to the internet as a whole.<p>The technology exists to prevent surveillance, we just need to care, and to use it. Also keep in mind that net neutrality would be an <i>automatic byproduct</i> of an internet that prevents automatic surveillance.<p>&gt; “The standard operating procedure for the Domestic Surveillance Directorate is to ‘collect all available information from all available sources all the time, every time, always.’”<p>This will never change, and I would go so far as to suggest it&#x27;s even a reasonable position to take, from someone who&#x27;s job it is to collect information for the government. What we need to do is make our internet usage <i>unavailable</i> to onlookers.

The article cites the NSA&#x27;s data collection methods by linking to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info</a> This site describes itself as &quot;a parody of nsa.gov&quot; in the footer of every page. Don&#x27;t believe everything you read.

Once again, why do we need to store these files &quot;in the cloud&quot;? Why do signals need to go to California so that two people in an Indian village can talk to each other? Email, IRC, the Web, Git, IPFS and many others don&#x27;t have to work that way. The world of always-on broadband ruined what was a great software ecosystem that didn&#x27;t assume you were either &quot;online&quot; or &quot;offline&quot;, but cared whether one machine was reachable from another machine. Broadband led to centralized platforms like facebook.<p><i>Now that the bulk of our most valuable “papers and effects” are online, they are vulnerable to being tracked and searched by the NSA without the agency ever securing a warrant, asking our permission, or leaving a trace.</i><p>That can to a great extent be mitigated if there was software for communities to host their own private networks, and only send signals out when necessary. The way the original telephone switching worked.<p>Communities would be more resilient, too, and could help each other in the event of a disaster. We should decentralize cellphone signals and power generation eventually too.<p>Our platform is an attempt to make a standard platform for such decentralized social networks: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbix.com&#x2F;platform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbix.com&#x2F;platform</a>

I think &quot;presumption of privacy&quot; is going away. The next generation will see bubbles of privacy as something you can create, by force, not something guaranteed by societal norms.<p>Frankly, I am a little surprised when I see other technologists advocating for governmental&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;societal reform of privacy-respecting practices. It seems like a losing battle to me. We are headed toward a time when you can buy a $100 vial of drone dust at Best Buy, dump it into the air, and 30 minutes later have a live 3D video feed in every window within a 5 mile radius. Maybe it will take 100 years, but every year between now and then will be a shade closer to that reality.<p>Even if we could get strongly worded laws from Congress, I just don&#x27;t see that stopping bad actors, inside government or out. It feels a little bit like bow-and-arrow culture trying to legislate that government agents shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to use these new &quot;gun&quot; things. You can to legislate, but bigger forces are afoot. The physics of information is changing very fast.

<p><pre><code> One reason that leaders as diametrically opposed as Obama and Trump can be aligned on surveillance is simple: The majority of Americans don’t care. </code></pre> The reason why this keeps getting worse and worse.

When Obama says that Snowden created serious security implications, do you think that&#x27;s from a point of privilege, or simply placing ideology over practicality? Based on everything I know, both Obama and Snowden appear to be fairly authentic characters. It seems weird that they would have opposing view points. If we&#x27;re to assume the best ideals are forged though intelligent reasoning and debate, shouldn&#x27;t they have both concluded the same? Glenn Greenwald has proven himself to be less than authentic at times. If I could pass a criticism Snowden&#x27;s way, it was <i>who</i> he went to, not <i>what</i> he did. Am I wrong to feel this way?

These articles are just wishful fantasy. Our history has shown that people are perfectly willing and happy to tolerate any form of govt abuse as long as they get their dose of reality tv and &#x27;justifications&#x27; from mass media, all you need to do is mention the T word and &#x27;keep America great&#x27; and you can do whatever you want.<p>Even if people cared, which they don&#x27;t, the govt has zero incentive to actually do anything, because increased surveillance gives them more power and more power to abuse the system.

It is basically impossible to hide yourself if you want to take part of society. Just standing there, you send out information about yourself body posture, dandruff, IR signature, ...)<p>Therefore, it is much more important to make sure we have full insight into those who have power. Sunlight is an effective disinfectant!

Trumps stance on the intelligence community might be a good thing, as they all leave leaving the government with a desire but no experienced people to do the work. Of course that also leaves us wide open to be attacked. So maybe this causes a reset of sorts.

For any constitutional law experts: have there been any efforts to amend the 4th amendment to explicitly take into consideration private information held by third parties (ie abrogate FISA)?

The average citizen doesnt know or care, and in this day and age many would trade &quot;freedom&quot; for what they think will give them &quot;security&quot;. This story is already over.

The article cites data collection methods by linking to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsa.gov1.info</a> That site describes itself in its footer as &quot;a parody of nsa.gov&quot; Don&#x27;t believe everything you read.

This is a thinly-veiled &quot;Bash Trump&quot; article. It is purely speculative what the Trump administration will do at this point. Obama was shitty on civil liberties, Bush was the one who caused us so much harm to begin with. But if we want privacy then we have to fight to get it back the same way Americans are fighting to get back their full 2nd Amendment rights. It can be done, but this stupid, petty, left vs. right false dichotomy has to end--there are only statists and individualists, that&#x27;s all there is. You have those want to coerce and those who want to be free.