I do not like the title, but the central point is good.
The real problem with PRISM is not that you, individually, are going to be targeted. It is that the tools have been put in place to subvert the political process by personally targeting anyone with views that are inconvenient for those of influence. These tools may be being used fairly now, but based on past history, we cannot assume that they will continue to be so.
And the past history to look at is not even that of distant times and places. Take a look at how the FBI under Hoover tried to affect the political process in the USA with COINTELPRO.
Very good point. I lived in Cuba for a few months. I was surprised to find that people were very open and vocal about their discontent with the economic situation.
I eventually figured it out. Those people didn't matter. They weren't doing anything. Just venting steam.
As soon as someone tried to actually change things, that's when they get bopped on the head.
Most of us aren't activists. But we depend on them to drive change. If they get stifled, we get stifled.
> I guess many would suggest that is exactly what we have right now. Just more subtle, opaque, and deniable.
I can't see how anyone who has studied American history could think that what we have now even approaches what existed at the time of McCarthyism. McCarthyism required a level of public acquiescence and homogeneity of thought that could only exist under the threat of Soviet domination and nuclear holocaust. The bogeyman of terrorism doesn't have nearly that kind of grip on the public consciousness.
Heck, just look at the wars that were justified by the two fears: Korea (36,516 Americans dead) and Vietnam (58,209) versus Afghanistan (2,229) and Iraq (4,488). Not to minimize the causalities of those wars, but if you can measure the power of a scary idea by the number of U.S. soldiers that die before the public puts a stop to the war, then there is no comparison between the specter of communism versus the specter of terrorism.
But communism was a made-up threat, just like terrorism is. They can ramp up the fear factor any time they want and now they have all that infra in place to support it.
An aggressive, expansionist power with nuclear weapons pointed at us was not a "made-up" threat. Neither is international terrorist organizations conspiring to attack us. Both are factually verifiable threats.
Reasonable people can disagree about the appropriate responses to those threats, but it's factually incorrect to say they are "made up."
As an aside, for those claiming that terrorism poses no threat because it kills so few people, I'll offer the example of the Beltway Sniper attacks. More people probably died in traffic accidents in the D.C. metro area than were killed by the Beltway Sniper. But the chilling effect on everyday life was so much greater. It's hard do convey to someone the feeling of putting gas in your car on a sunny weekend day with the hair on your neck standing up because even though you know that there is a negligible chance of your being the victim of a sniper attack, the possibility scares you in a way that the possibility of death through heart disease, or hell the certainty of death through old age, cannot.
>expansionist power with nuclear weapons pointed at us was not a "made-up" threat
At the time of McCarthyism this wasn't really what was going on. What was going on was that capitalists were afraid communism would work. They saw rich and powerful people getting killed or displaced and the "plebs" running things and they were going to make sure it couldn't happen here.
>Neither is international terrorist organizations conspiring to attack us
International terrorist threat conspiracy theories. Nice. You mean the global terrorist group with all kinds of secret cells hidden under ever rock? Yea, that was all made up bullshit. Al Quaeda is a name we made up to be able to apply our own RICO laws after the first WTC bombing. And you may not realize it, but terrorist groups tend to hate each other as much as they hate anyone else. They are religious extremists after all.
>but it's factually incorrect to say they are "made up."
They are either utterly non-existent or so small as to be ignorable.
>putting gas in your car on a sunny weekend day with the hair on your neck standing up because even though you know that there is a negligible chance of your being the victim of a sniper attack, the possibility scares you in a way that the possibility of death through heart disease, or hell the certainty of death through old age, cannot.
What you are describing is irrational, emotional response. None the less, we can't make policy decisions about how you feel. And the media is largely to blame about this. The reported news should be proportional to the effect. The Boston marathon bomb should have been a byline on the local Boston news if it was mentioned at all.
I'll bet you haven't lived through or studied much 20th century history, because it appears you've not heard of:
- the brutal North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam, and its invasions of Laos and Cambodia in the process, to say nothing of the violent Communist takeovers in the latter two countries;
- the Cuban attempts to export armed revolution to Central- and Latin America, and then even Africa (viz., Angola);
- the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950;
- the Soviet Union's savage crushing of would-be democratic governments in post-war Eastern and Central Europe in 1945-48;
- Stalin's 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler, widely thought to have been intended to let the Germans and the West fight each other to exhaustion, after which Stalin could have his way with Europe.
Sure, maybe deep down the motives were just nationalism dressed up in communist ideological clothing; poTAYto poTAHto.
Some of these examples are good, others not so much.
Consider the first one. The conquest, while brutal, was merely the finale of a horrible civil war that was going on before we got there. And a military dictatorship that was only able to maintain power because we supported it really wasn't a legitimate government no matter how you slice it.
Now Laos I grant you. But the conquest of Cambodia put an end to one of the worst genocides since WW II. The Khmer Rouge killed 20% of the country. Unfortunately after they were evicted from power, the USA took the approach that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and supported their attempts to retake power for decades.
There is a lot of legitimate room for debate about that one.
Some of the others, of course, I'm in full agreement with you on. But you really should have just stuck to your best examples. (That would be the crushing of would-be democratic governments in post-war Eastern and Central Europe.)
They really just need something to remind us once a generation or so. Then we all rally against whatever new bogeyman is presented. A huge chunk of our money is spent 'neutralizing' this new 'threat', and things go back to some new 'normal' for a little while.
I agree with the author's point. I'd like to add that the problem right now isn't that you'll be individually targeted. But a mechanism has been created that depends on benevolent rule. The loss of civil liberties tends to be looked at myopically.
I think a key feature of privacy is empowerment or control. People generally want to feel that they are in control of their lives. By being selective about what information you make available to others or even generally available to all, is a very important way to express your sense of control over your own life. Even if you like to broadcast as many of your thoughts, photographs, likes, and geolocations as possible, you do that with a sense of control. You decided what to release. When the NSA sifts through your data, they decide what to collect, what to use, who to share it with. And they never tell you any of it. I think that loss of control is one of the factors that makes people uncomfortable with loss of privacy.
And now we find that the gummint is gathering information from all sorts of corporations. It's as if the ACLU's nightmare overview surveillance system was used as a blueprint by the government to design PRISM et al.
So your credit card, supermarket, gas card, library card, debit card, pharmacy card, prescriptions, public records (home and auto ownership, license tags, taxes, school records, etc.) are all Hoovered (as in "J. Edgar Hoover") up and ready for analysis. This is tied into your state's automobile licensing system: police cars have scanners that incessantly search for all license plates in the visible roadway and, for each, perform an automated search for outstanding warrants and criminal history in the state's database.
And if the driver is good-looking and has a clean record, the officer can _still_ force a search of state records to retrieve addresses, phone numbers, etc. so he can stop her, talk to her and then optionally, hit on her later at his convenience ("What a small world, what are the odds of us meeting again! Must be fate.").
You remind me of a true story from the 1990s. Woman, on her way back from Canada, is pulled over in NY for speeding. She's got a plate of home-made cookies in the seat next to her and offers the officer one.
About 200 miles later, not speeding, she's pulled over again. As the officer approaches she says, "What did I do wrong?" He replies, "Nothing, but I heard that you've got the most amazing cookies!"
"Absolute knowledge is absolute power and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
This is simply not true, rather a cobbled together bit of psychobabble.
Okay... I have absolute knowledge a freight train is coming towards me and I'm tied to the rail. I clearly do not therefore have absolute power to change the outcome.
The government could likewise know everything and not be able to stop a bad outcome ( say their overthrow ).
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Nicolae Ceaușescu had an impressive surveillance state... it didn't stop him being shot ( in the street? ) along with his wife
Oh please. This is childish pedantry, please refute the quote in it's context of government leadership and NOT create a lame scenario where the actual rules don't apply.
If I have absolute power I am NOT going to end up tied to a train track with the Secret Service strangely absent.
The point in this article is that if we are digitally dependent being off the grid, or using an encrypted grid, IS information that can be used to stop an overthrow. You can't be an unstoppable force if you can't coordinate and organize.
At the risk of increasing my flame-downvote surface...
> The point in this article is that if we are digitally dependent being off the grid, or using an encrypted grid, IS information that can be used to stop an overthrow. You can't be an unstoppable force if you can't coordinate and organize.
Well then why didn't the author just say that? Rather than padding his point with psycho-babble ?
Yes...after 40 years in power and needing a revolution to do it, where many people died.
The point is, you should never allow a president or a group of people, to get even close to that much power, if you're going to need a revolution to stop it later.
I think the context here is different than the strength of the quote. The context is about the government knowing everyone's petty mistakes in life, or Achilles heal. If they know this for everyone, then they can push or manipulate people as they see fit.
Yeah, that's pretty scary... I can only imagine what would happen if we were foolish enough to give a government even more dangerous stuff, like millions of small arms, heavy weaponry, or even nuclear weapons. Why, the sheer power would probably instantly turn them into a dystopia.
The real problem with PRISM is not that you, individually, are going to be targeted. It is that the tools have been put in place to subvert the political process by personally targeting anyone with views that are inconvenient for those of influence. These tools may be being used fairly now, but based on past history, we cannot assume that they will continue to be so.
And the past history to look at is not even that of distant times and places. Take a look at how the FBI under Hoover tried to affect the political process in the USA with COINTELPRO.