Comment by brown9-2
12 years ago
This presumes that those developers are building these systems to go after "our basic rights", instead of believing that they are helping to target terrorists and enemy states.
What gets lost in a lot of the (justifiable) NSA outrage is the fact that they want all of this technology to enable surveillance of terrorists who use the Internet just like ordinary Americans do. There is really no evidence so far that this massive surveillance apparatus is being used in a widespread way to abusively target Americans.
Being able to intercept online communication between terrorists and foreign governments in a way that collects zero communications of Americans seems like a really, really hard task.
> There is really no evidence so far that this massive surveillance apparatus is being used in a widespread way to abusively target Americans.
Widespread? Maybe not strictly widespread, but it is being abused. There was that guy recently, I forget the beef the government had with him, they couldn't justify a warrant to search his laptop, so they just waited for him to travel. They put a flag on him, and when he came up registered to fly out of the country they seized and searched his laptop when he crossed back in through the no rights zone, AKA the border.
Everything accelerates, and if it isn't yet "widespread," it will be. It's certainly being done more than zero times.
The terrorism threat is simply a convenient bogeyman. The probabilities of dying in a random terrorist attack are so infinitesimally small that it is not even worth considering. Ordinary Americans are simply too stupid to really comprehend exactly what is happening here and subscribe to the "well, I don't have anything to hide" type logic. The fact is that the terrorists have won. The American public, due to indifference, is so irrationally afraid of dying in a terrorist attack that our own government is watching our every move under the guise of protecting us from that threat.
So, what types of widespread abusive things is the government doing to American citizens with all this surveillance?
When you say "convenient bogeyman" it implies that all of this surveillance was built with the express purpose of spying on Americans. I personally believe that to be false, and instead that the massive and overbearing surveillance was built because public officials are so afraid of another massive terrorist attack because the voters are so afraid.
In other words I agree with your basic observations but not the malicious motives.
It's a nice thought to believe there isn't malice in the government, but the facts say otherwise. Intelligence laundering to bypass our basic legal rights is a malicious motive[1]. Russ Tice's (NSA whistlerblower) interview talking about all the people the NSA targeted (including our president in 2004) is also not only malicious, but terrifying.[2] And as Bill Binney (another NSA whisteblower) has said, we're a "turn key totalitarian state", I'm not sure how one could think a totalitarian state could not be malicious.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice
Does erosion of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution count as widespread abuse? It does to me. Continuing down the slippery slope leads to things like parallel construction, as the previous poster mentioned.
As for public officials and voters and terrorism, I give you this:
> Representative Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., has received $526,600 from defense contractors and other defense industry interests, more than any other member of the House. He voted to continue the programs.
Source: http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/07/29/316197/pronsa-congr...
I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about what that article is saying. I take it to mean that it costs $526,000 to get what I want from that guy.