In all honesty, I don't think the rise of the surveillance state in the US has all that much to do with 9/11 or fear per se. The response of most people to things like the NSA isn't fear, it's apathy. To the degree that there is fear, for example in the acceptance of ridiculous measures at US airports, fear of our own government, i.e., fear of getting arrested, having a lifelong arrest record, or just plain old fear of standing out and rocking the boat etc., is stronger than any real fear of terrorist attacks.
I think there's something generational going on also. People who constantly publish their current location, current mood and current thought on social media for all to see are going to have a completely different relation to privacy than the generations that came before.
I talk to a lot of people about privacy issues and the difference between us isn't how much they fear a possible attack, the difference is how little importance they place on the government intrusion.
This is a baldly political article that doesn't belong on HN, and I flagged it.
But I can't resist engaging with one part of it, because I really dislike its author:
This playbook of fear has not been limited to motivating military actions. Environmentalists, once ridiculed as “tree-huggers” are now often characterized as “environmental terrorists” — as individuals we should fear and neutralize. The hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, who exposed the nefarious dealings of the private intelligence corporation Stratfor and its clients, was characterized as someone seeking to cause “mayhem” by Federal District Judge Loretta Preska when she sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
Horse. Shit. Jeremy Hammond decided that he didn't like what a private organization and its supporters were saying. So, he coordinate a large-scale breakin of their computers, stole the credit card numbers of all its subscribers, and released them on the Internet. This is par for the course for Hammond, who a few years earlier stormed a restaurant in Skokie that had been hosting a holocaust denier; the resulting mayhem injured only innocent bystanders, one of whom was hit with a broken bottle wielded by one of the "protesters". Ludlow is quick to spend column inches painting a picture of an unjustly extreme sentence for Hammond, but not at all interested in informing readers of Hammond's history, which included a previous felony conviction for the same crime.
If Ludlow is the only person whose writing on Hammond you read, you could be excused for believing that Hammond is of a kind with Aaron Swartz. Which is, of course, his intent; he's made the comparison explicit elsewhere.
This is how Ludlow seems to argue, in piece after piece. He evokes political messages that many reasonable people, myself often included, would have a hard time arguing with. "Global War On Terror"? Fuck yes, that's a problem. It's so obviously a problem that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with then-SecDef Robert Gates, lobbied (unsuccessfully) to stop pretending that's what we're doing. It is an utterly banal observation. Orwellian surveillance of US citizens? How could opposition to that possibly be unreasonable?
But then he uses that accord to immunize actions reasonable people can't support. Using violence to make political statements isn't persuasion; it's thuggery. It's how you justify blowing up women's health clinics. Ludlow diminishes everyone who dissents from the conduct of the government by continuously supporting thuggery.
Couldn't agree more with the op ed's point: modern surveillance is about consolidating power. It's not about security, it's about control over the populace.
But the faceless enemy, once brown-skinned Al Qaeda terrorists in foreign lands, historically used to round up public support for national security measures is quickly morphing into domestic computer geeks and anyone who disagrees with the surveillance state.
Using privacy protecting tools like Tor in this modern environment isn't about whether you have something to hide. We live in a free society, and in a free society you have choices. You can choose to hand over all of your phone calls, text messages, emails, and Internet browsing activity to an above-the-law entity; or you can choose to obscure your data.
Answer me the following: does handing over all of your personal and private data to the NSA make the world any safer? If so, you must be a terrorist. Does handing over your family's private data make the world any safer? Then your family members must be terrorists. Because otherwise, your data would be meaningless, and so what benefit is there of letting the NSA have all of it? There is no upside, unless you're a terrorist.
And since you're not a turrurist, the NSA surely won't mind if you're using the Tor Browser Bundle.
And one more thing, if your system only works when you manipulate masses of people into using it, at gunpoint, or by fear mongering, or by lying to them or cheating them into using it, your system is doomed to fail. The individual has no incentive to opt into the NSA's dragnet surveillance program. Obviously terrorists have no incentive to let the NSA have all their data, and yet the system only benefits society if we catch terrorists. This results in the NSA sweeping up data from harmless individuals and companies, which should be deathly frightening to you because it means they'll need to make examples of harmless individuals and companies who they claim are "radicalized" to continue justifying their budget and their fusion centers and so on.
5 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] threadI think there's something generational going on also. People who constantly publish their current location, current mood and current thought on social media for all to see are going to have a completely different relation to privacy than the generations that came before.
I talk to a lot of people about privacy issues and the difference between us isn't how much they fear a possible attack, the difference is how little importance they place on the government intrusion.
But I can't resist engaging with one part of it, because I really dislike its author:
This playbook of fear has not been limited to motivating military actions. Environmentalists, once ridiculed as “tree-huggers” are now often characterized as “environmental terrorists” — as individuals we should fear and neutralize. The hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, who exposed the nefarious dealings of the private intelligence corporation Stratfor and its clients, was characterized as someone seeking to cause “mayhem” by Federal District Judge Loretta Preska when she sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
Horse. Shit. Jeremy Hammond decided that he didn't like what a private organization and its supporters were saying. So, he coordinate a large-scale breakin of their computers, stole the credit card numbers of all its subscribers, and released them on the Internet. This is par for the course for Hammond, who a few years earlier stormed a restaurant in Skokie that had been hosting a holocaust denier; the resulting mayhem injured only innocent bystanders, one of whom was hit with a broken bottle wielded by one of the "protesters". Ludlow is quick to spend column inches painting a picture of an unjustly extreme sentence for Hammond, but not at all interested in informing readers of Hammond's history, which included a previous felony conviction for the same crime.
If Ludlow is the only person whose writing on Hammond you read, you could be excused for believing that Hammond is of a kind with Aaron Swartz. Which is, of course, his intent; he's made the comparison explicit elsewhere.
This is how Ludlow seems to argue, in piece after piece. He evokes political messages that many reasonable people, myself often included, would have a hard time arguing with. "Global War On Terror"? Fuck yes, that's a problem. It's so obviously a problem that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with then-SecDef Robert Gates, lobbied (unsuccessfully) to stop pretending that's what we're doing. It is an utterly banal observation. Orwellian surveillance of US citizens? How could opposition to that possibly be unreasonable?
But then he uses that accord to immunize actions reasonable people can't support. Using violence to make political statements isn't persuasion; it's thuggery. It's how you justify blowing up women's health clinics. Ludlow diminishes everyone who dissents from the conduct of the government by continuously supporting thuggery.
But the faceless enemy, once brown-skinned Al Qaeda terrorists in foreign lands, historically used to round up public support for national security measures is quickly morphing into domestic computer geeks and anyone who disagrees with the surveillance state.
Using privacy protecting tools like Tor in this modern environment isn't about whether you have something to hide. We live in a free society, and in a free society you have choices. You can choose to hand over all of your phone calls, text messages, emails, and Internet browsing activity to an above-the-law entity; or you can choose to obscure your data.
Answer me the following: does handing over all of your personal and private data to the NSA make the world any safer? If so, you must be a terrorist. Does handing over your family's private data make the world any safer? Then your family members must be terrorists. Because otherwise, your data would be meaningless, and so what benefit is there of letting the NSA have all of it? There is no upside, unless you're a terrorist.
And since you're not a turrurist, the NSA surely won't mind if you're using the Tor Browser Bundle.
And one more thing, if your system only works when you manipulate masses of people into using it, at gunpoint, or by fear mongering, or by lying to them or cheating them into using it, your system is doomed to fail. The individual has no incentive to opt into the NSA's dragnet surveillance program. Obviously terrorists have no incentive to let the NSA have all their data, and yet the system only benefits society if we catch terrorists. This results in the NSA sweeping up data from harmless individuals and companies, which should be deathly frightening to you because it means they'll need to make examples of harmless individuals and companies who they claim are "radicalized" to continue justifying their budget and their fusion centers and so on.
The entire system is FUBAR.