[AntwaneB]

After reading the post, I fail to see any connection between 9/11 and the fact that mass surveillance is not the way forward.

The article is also empty of any reason WHY mass surveillance would not be the way forward, or even why it should not be.

This is a particularly useless article.

[owl_troupe]

OK I'll bite. From this article:

>The public learned about the NSA’s “PRISM” and “Upstream” programs, which involve [...] warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications on a massive scale.

The US executive branch engineered an automated, massive breach of the constitutional rights of US citizens and the rights of people abroad.

> The executive branch’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ call records had produced “little unique value”[.]

These programs have yielded almost no positive results in actually increasing security, which was their stated purpose. How much does this cost? What do we get in return? What is the chilling effect on society?

>The human toll of government surveillance is undeniable. It can have far-reaching consequences for people’s lives — particularly for communities of color, who are wrongly and disproportionately subject to surveillance.

Mass surveillance programs have been adapted to routine policing matters and have served to dramatically enhance existing biases in policing against marginalized communities. Over 75% of warrantless searches conducted by US police under the auspices of the Patriot Act were for drug related offenses [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/04/surveillance-s...

[slibhb]

The article provides no principle by which we can say that mass surveillance is wrong. It does observe (per your quote) that mass surveillance has not worked very well. This raises an obvious question: if mass survillance did work well, would it be acceptable?

The broader point here is that there are arguments against mass surveillance on principle, the ACLU just doesn't find them convincing.

[AnimalMuppet]

We don't actually need to worry about your obvious question, because it doesn't work. Yours is hypothetical. (And hypothetical questions can be interesting. Also, it can be good to have answers while they're still hypothetical, because sometimes they quit being hypothetical, sometimes very abruptly. But for the current discussion, we can reject mass surveillance on pragmatic grounds without worrying about the theoretical.)

[slibhb]

It's not obvious that mass surveillance doesn't work. It seems to work pretty well for the Chinese.

Anyway, we have a mass surveillance program because people thought it would work. Perhaps we could have avoided the program if we had more people in that room who had effectively argued that, even if it worked, it was not to be pursued for reasons that have nothing to do with its efficacy. Sometimes principles come in handy.

[pintxo]

Not sure the efficacy of mass surveillance can be determined within timespans of less than several decades. As there seem to be two major effects at play, one is the direct usage of information learned from mass surveillance which can be used by the surveyors. I can only assume this is the "works pretty well" you refer to. On the other hand, there are the (indirect) effects of mass surveillance on the surveyed population. Maybe the best example here is the GDR, which had a massive surveillance operations run by the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit). They might have well delayed the ultimate dissolution of the GDR, but ultimately they could not stop it.

[dTal]

While you're not wrong, it seems very clear that these measures are not being pushed for their stated purpose. The fact that they are ineffective at that purpose is powerful and important supporting evidence that we should not ignore.

Here's an example: Article 20 of The French Military Programming Law, which entered into force on 1 January 2015 against heavy criticism from civil liberties groups, gave the state full access to all unencrypted telecommunications, including SMS.

11 months later, Paris was attacked by a wave of terrorism, coordinated by... unencrypted SMS.

In response, the government... pushed through even more intrusive surveillance legislation, and coordinated a public relations push to implicate encrypted messaging providers as "complicit".

[owl_troupe]

By "work[ing] well", what is the metric you see as success?

A broad society that has rendered itself completely nonthreatening to its ruling class?

A place where certain forms free expression can result in imprisonment, torture, or execution? [1]

Mass surveillance serving as the infrastructure of religious, ethnic, and political persecution, including genocide? [2]

[1] https://organharvestinvestigation.net/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide#Use_of_biometr...

[AnimalMuppet]

Both your points are fair.

[actually_a_dog]

I'm confused. At the top of the second paragraph, it explicitly mentions the erosion of privacy rights. Isn't that a valid principle upon which to oppose mass surveillance without cause?

Then there's this entire paragraph:

> The human toll of government surveillance is undeniable. It can have far-reaching consequences for people’s lives — particularly for communities of color, who are wrongly and disproportionately subject to surveillance. The people who feel the impact the most are Muslims, Black and Brown people, people of Asian descent, and others who have long been subject to wrongful profiling and discrimination in the name of national security. Routine surveillance is corrosive, making us feel like we are always being watched, and it chills the very kind of speech and association on which democracy depends. This spying is especially harmful because it is often feeds into a national security apparatus that puts people on watchlists, subjects them to unwarranted scrutiny by law enforcement, and allows the government to upend lives on the basis of vague, secret claims.

They don't actually come out an explicitly state it, but the idea they're getting at is that we shouldn't oppress people, particularly people who are already disadvantaged, without cause for suspicion. That would seem to be a second principle we can apply here. You can also combine this with the general ineffectiveness of said mass surveillance and use utilitarian principles to reach the same conclusion.

[slibhb]

> I'm confused. At the top of the second paragraph, it explicitly mentions the erosion of privacy rights. Isn't that a valid principle upon which to oppose mass surveillance without cause?

"We should oppose surveillance because we have privacy rights". Sounds like a tautology. It raises the question: why should we have privacy rights?

The long passage you quoted enumerates negative consequences of surveillance. We should have privacy because democracy depends on it, we should have privacy because surveillance doesn't work, surveillance is racist (how trendy), etc. What's missing, in my opinion, is an assertion that people have a fundamental right to privacy solely based on their being human. That's a natural rights perspective, I think it's indispensible, and I think it's unfortunate that we (not just the ACLU) no longer find it convincing.

As long as we justify our rights based on contingent circumstances they will always be up for debate.

[lenkite]

Without the right to privacy, the other rights frankly don't matter much.

[actually_a_dog]

Well, you've got a problem, then. You don't get rights just for being born. You only get rights within the context of a society that has agreed to respect those rights.

Consider this: if you have rights simply because you are human, then there must be something different about humans that gives them those rights, which chimps and bonobos don't have. What is that?

[slibhb]

You're proving my point. You don't find the idea of natural rights convincing. That's exactly what I wrote. The problem is that, in your framework, there will always be a good reason to violate people's rights. "If we don't spy on people, the terrorists will blow us up" sounds silly today but it convinced people after 9/11. As did "we have to torture these people to prevent a terrorist attack".

I agree with you that this is linked to a distinction between humans and animals. The fact that we no longer find that distinction convincing is linked to the fact that we no longer find natural rights convincing.

[oliv__]

> Consider this: if you have rights simply because you are human, then there must be something different about humans that gives them those rights, which chimps and bonobos don't have. What is that?

Uhm consciousness?

[throwawaysea]

Surveillance of public spaces with some controls (like needing just cause or warrants or a human in the loop) seems appropriate and obviously useful. This would allow police departments to more easily track and apprehend criminal suspects. I don’t believe the frequency of biased policing to be significant enough to offset the clear boost to pubic safety this would bring.

[Beldin]

I've encountered this statement before. Without reading the article, here's the argumentation I heard:

Basically, the perpetrators were already known - there basically was already (close to) enough information to foresee serious problems (in hindsight * ), just no one connecting the dots. Adding mass surveillance to this doesn't make things easier: signals were already swamped under, that's not going to improve just by getting more data. Rather the opposite.

I don't know how this argumentation squares with the facts. But if the intelligence problem was "failure to connect dots", getting more "dots" is not a solution.

* also, hindsight is 20/20.

[specialist]

I've read many scathing critiques of intel services preferring SIGINT over HUMINT. Hard to disagree.

[marcosdumay]

SIGINT doesn't imply on mass surveillance, and HUMINT doesn't imply in targeted actions.

[specialist]

And yet that's what happened.

[AndrewUnmuted]

The ACLU has been useless as a civil rights organization for quite some time.

If you haven't already, I'd say it's definitely time to find a new defender of these sorts of issues.

[gjsman-1000]

The ACLU has let the government increase surveillance, force mask usage, and now enforce vaccine usage across millions during the pandemic.

They're staying silent because they agree with the policies - and you may too - but there is no denying that in terms of invasion of personal freedom it's very great and they're turning a blind eye to it.

[Retric]

The ACLU is a finite organization that needs to chose which battles to fight. Suggesting their not doing enough because they don’t prioritize your issues generally means you should be funding some other organization.

https://www.eff.org/ for example may better fit your personal beliefs.

[mythrwy]

They are actively supporting civil non-liberties now though, in print.

They are not what they used to be.

[Retric]

The odd thing about civil liberties is they also curtail other freedoms. The right to own property means the right to exclude others from your property. Trial by a jury of your peers means jury duty etc.

If you have fundamental disagreements around these issues you really can’t blame the organization for not doing enough. Them doing more or less isn’t the problem, them having other priorities is.

[hitekker]

You might want to read this article and the HN comments around it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414920.

The GP is not arguing against your political positions, but pointing out that an organization which use to focus & care about one position no longer seems to.

[mindslight]

There are ways to address that conflict. I'm not trying to join the trope of criticizing the contemporary ACLU, but rather pointing out that rights aren't purely relative constructions. Negative liberty (prohibitions on government infringing rights) and tradition (eg property rights) are two ways of non-relatively reasoning about rights. And of course when rights are in balanced tension on a topic, it's possible to simply not advocate.

For example on the topic of employment discrimination, one could stay silent and thus not be advocating against the right to earn a living nor the right of free association. Furthermore, one can advocate for freedom from the employment treadmill that makes most everyone need continuous centralized-flow employment in the first place (this would be necessary for the negative rights construction to have good results).

[TeeMassive]

The ACLU chose its case mostly in terms of the impact they will have. This is why the ACLU used to defend the KKK's 1st amendment rights even as recently as 2012. Now many of its members, even high profile ones, are arguing for the suppression of speech; justified by the Marxist ideological thinking that it mostly benefits "those in power" (https://archive.is/tL7Rj)

[Retric]

All the way back in “the 1930s, the ACLU started to engage in work combating police misconduct and supporting Native American rights.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union So it’s been about far more than free speech for the vast majority of it’s history. And it still defends such causes, one example is even in the article:

“In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core. The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown.“

So while it’s scope has increased over time which has created increased internal tension, that’s always been the case. “The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s.”

Frankly the organization has never been filled 100% with defenders of free speech the Twitter age combined with a wider scope has brought this internal tension to the general public. The important work they do is generally in the courtroom which is far more focused.

[j0hns0n]

The ACLU is a non-profit organization. They aren't responsible for your "freedom". Go put mask on and take a civics course.

[lavabiopsy]

With the pandemic you have it exactly backwards, the goal of mask and vaccine mandates is actually to increase personal freedom and civil liberty, by preventing spread of the virus that has already claimed many lives.