Mass Surveillance in the United States

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_States

by akeck • 7 years ago

82 76 7 years ago

sambull• 7 years ago

"By 2020, about 30,000 unmanned drones are expected to be deployed in the United States for the purpose of surveillance and law enforcement"

Barrin92• 7 years ago

https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...

I read this article a few days ago about WAMI technology, and I wasn't remotely aware of how advanced drone surveillance tech is.

ASalazarMX3• 7 years ago

Given the direction it's going, USA will likely want face recognition in the streets in the near future. I wonder how will the government convince their citizens it's for their own good. Maybe it will start in troublesome neighborhoods, show some benefits, and slowly expand everywhere.

tachyonbeam2• 7 years ago

The same way they used 9/11 to sell mass surveillance: using fear. Home invasions, muggings, child predators, think of the children. Maybe have news networks report more about certain type of crimes. Make sure to report on the few instances that installed cameras did help solve. If street cameras do stop some crimes, it will be difficult to argue against them, because you can't really have an expectation of privacy in the street.

stebann• 7 years ago

Dictatorship

sbhn• 7 years ago

Its for your security for gods sake, stop complaining. If it saves just one life, n all that

pstuart• 7 years ago

Let's not forget: "Think of the children!"

devoply• 7 years ago

Is a rapist or predator lurking in your neighbourhood? Now we have a drone watching him 24/7! Also it's watching you and your children to make sure everyone is safe. Coming to an Amazon delivery near you!

OrgNet8• 7 years ago

The police kills more people in the USA then all terrorists combined (about 1000/year).

JustSomeNobody4• 7 years ago

More people die from choking on food every year in the USA than die from terrorism AND police.

mmaunder• 7 years ago

Allowing home searches without warrant, mass surveillance without limitation, limits on free speech with criminal penalties, arresting reporters and torturing them to reveal sources - these are all things that may save just one life.

stanski2• 7 years ago

I think you needed the /s

dang• 7 years ago

Please don't post flamebait to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OrgNet8• 7 years ago

I'm surprised that Apple is mentioned only once in this article...

jakelazaroff• 7 years ago

Why?

OrgNet8• 7 years ago

I guess that I was wrong, because they also mention IPhones in a different paragraph... but they talk about IPhones 3 & 4, so we're due for a new leak that includes the latest versions...

For Comparison, Google is mentioned 3 times and they probably are part of all the same programs.

quaquaqua13• 7 years ago

"a communication can be retained by CIA for longer than 5 years if it is enciphered"

nice, so basically all communications through popular chat apps these days.

no wonder they are asking for "backdoors" :)

what happens when quantum computing decrypts these all? if it's 15 years from now, do they just throw us all in prison retroactively for something we said 15 years ago?

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

what happens when quantum computing decrypts these all? if it's 15 years from now, do they just throw us all in prison retroactively for something we said 15 years ago?

They're only gonna decrypt your messages if they want to throw you in prison. Welcome to arbitrary enforcement.

quaquaqua13• 7 years ago

I have a sneaking suspicion you are right.

They will decrypt all communications, maybe, but go after the average citizen and not the senator or large donor.

isoprophlex• 7 years ago

Everyone will be guilty of some arbitrary crime. But, as per the linked article, there's already a mechanism for prosecution without a just trial in place:

According to documents seen by the news agency Reuters, information obtained in this way is subsequently funnelled to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.[168] Federal agents are then instructed to "recreate" the investigative trail in order to "cover up" where the information originated,[168] known as parallel construction.

We're all fucked and we're already in William Gibson's cyberpunk dystopia. Minus the cool drugs.

stanski2• 7 years ago

If things go bad, they'll go bad real quick.

Maybe that's the handmaid's tale talking but sometimes things aren't as inconceivable as we'd think.

educationdata5• 7 years ago

How many are arrested because of mass surveillance captures the person criticizing Trump / Obama, Or the Republican / Democratic party?

UI_at_80x24• 7 years ago

That's not how the way the US Government behaves. Publicly criticizing is OK.

If you want clues to who they really are insidious look at Cointelpro and how the police will incite peaceful gatherings into mobs to justify shutting them down and killing people.

You can stand on a soapbox and criticize until you are blue in the face, but try to make an active difference and you will be murdered like the Black Panthers.

sroussey3• 7 years ago

Trump has wanted to change that. Like his friends in Russia, China, and North Korea.

I knew of the program you mentioned but not it’s name. Thanks for that!

Submitted it HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356021

ASalazarMX3• 7 years ago

This is not exclusive to USA. Since democracies can't indiscriminately arrest dissidents without appearing totalitarian, their workaround is disrupting those movements to criminalize them.

In Mexico, gasoline prices became unregulated in 2017. Historically, governments have made oil a very sensitive national issue, so strong nation-wide opposition was expected. Except it didn't happen. The strategy was simple:

1. Organized looting began almost immediately. Looters were organized by Whatsapp, being told the time and place of the next looting.

2. Police stayed put, and some even participated in looting.

3. The press equated the looters with gasoline price hike protestors. In their narrative, looters were protestors, and vice-versa.

4. Public opinion disapproved of looting, and consequently disapproved of protestors.

5. Profit!

apo• 7 years ago

Contemporary mass surveillance relies upon annual presidential executive orders declaring a continued State of National Emergency, first signed by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 and then continued on an annual basis by President Barack Obama,[3] and upon several subsequent national security Acts including the USA PATRIOT Act and FISA Amendment Act's PRISM surveillance program.

Mass surveillance is a bipartisan effort. Electing a Democrat to the White House is very unlikely to change this situation. The Obama administration went above and beyond any prior presidency in its aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers to these unconstitutional activities.

FWIW, the language in Fourth Amendment is pretty clear:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What's happening now is the very antithesis of probably cause. And everyone is the target.

The worst part of all is that zero credible evidence has been presented that a single terrorist attack has been prevented by mass surveillance.

marak830• 7 years ago

This is purely from an outside perspective btw, but from what myself and friends have conversed about, the us doesn't seem to have a left. At least not a particularly powerful political left.

tehjoker2• 7 years ago

As a US leftist, this is our analysis as well. Unfortunately, after Students for a Democratic Society broke up and the anti-war movement dissipated after the Vietnam War the Regan/Thacher revolution crushed what remained and we live in the aftermath of unchecked corporate and imperial power. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. While it was far from perfect, it ideologically at least forced the American system to at least make comparisons and perform token gestures towards a more just society. That's all gone now.

The current crop of leftists is a combination of older people who became politically conscious before the 1980s (i.e. 50+ years old like Bernie Sanders), people burned by 2008, and people who were deeply shocked by Trump's election and started reading about the economic and political underpinnings of it, and some representatives of minorities that consistently feel the boot of oppression. Fortunately, there is some rising consciousness, but who knows where everything will go. We're in for a wild ride...

mixmastamyk• 7 years ago

There’s little to no absolute left in the US, but there is always a left side of the right.

parliament32• 7 years ago

Regarding the national emergencies, here's the best part: You can't really declare a military national emergency without a declared war going on. But since the US wants to keep it's emergency-surveillance powers, and it can't choose random countries to go to war with constantly... they declared a "War on Terror", which (while sounding like a campaign slogan) satisfies the requirement for "the country is at war so we can take wartime measures". The best part is "Terror" isn't something that can legally ever lose/surrender (or win, for that matter), so this "war" (and the associated national emergencies) will go on for as long as the US government wants.

It's all very clever, really.

lisper2• 7 years ago

"Clever" is not exactly the word I would choose to describe the situation.

Der_Einzige• 7 years ago

Progressive Dems like Bernie Sanders are considerably less friendly to mass surveillance than centerist Dems like Obama. Bernie votes against the Patriot act every time. You can elect people who will fight it. Folks just don't want too because it might involve pot getting legalized and "socialism"

daniel-cussen• 7 years ago

How could digital data storage media not count as "effects"? It's not letters, sure, but it's definitely "effects."

Especially because the last word in a lawyerly list of items is usually a catch-all designed to future-proof the law. It was meant to catch things they couldn't conceive of at the time.

AlexandrB2• 7 years ago

We're heading into a world where privacy is obsolete. Slowly eroded "from the bottom" by the slow creep of the Overton window of what's acceptable by tech companies and "from the top" by advances in military surveillance tech and increasing willingness by western government to use this tech on their own citizens.

In this environment will meaningful[1] political action even be possible?

[1] Meaningful as in: outside of what the government deems "permissible".

lisper2• 7 years ago

In this environment will meaningful[1] political action even be possible?

No.

Anything else you want to know?

aaron-santos• 7 years ago

If facial identification tech becomes commoditized, someone is going to figure out that combination of realtime identification and block lists enable the boycotting of individuals based on political affiliation, their employer (think fossil fuel industry), or any other non-protected class. Guerilla surveillance could serve as a check against individuals deciding to work for a business if it hurts their ability to go about their daily lives. But let's face it, something like this would go down like modern day Muscadins.

insickness3• 7 years ago

This may be an unpopular opinion but I'm not against more surveillance cameras in public places. As a photographer, I have the right, and should continue to have the right, to film in any public place. Private businesses and the government should do it too. Put cameras on all police officers and as many public employees as possible. As long as fair access is maintained to the footage, the more the better.

sroussey3• 7 years ago

Police officers often go into private homes. Should the video be made public? What about freedom of information act?

insickness3• 7 years ago

No. I'm referring to public property. But the police should still be wearing body cameras if they go into a private home and the video should be available to the homeowner if he/she wants to contest something.

imglorp• 7 years ago

I feel like this is a popular misconception, a sort of strawman argument. It kind of goes like "you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, so taking some pictures in public is okay." It could even be extended to say the footage could be reviewed later if a crime were committed, that helps public safety.

But that's not what's happening here, it's not just a camera. It's a vast data aggregation network that ties together time series, high resolution photos of a large area, along with software that can follow an individual from source to destination, and then follow whoever that individual met, roll back in time and find out where they came from and went and met with, etc.

Of course this can be tied to cell, wifi, credit card purchases, face rec, internet activity and thousands of other inputs. Once that's done, it's a microscopically thin line from local cops solving crimes in the past to an oppressive government rounding up dissenters for re-education.

This is not sci fi, it's the road to global authoritarian surveillance state, and we're paving it here.

So I support police accountability body cams and people's rights to take pictures, but not the state or corporation using it for data ingest against us.

DanielBMarkham• 7 years ago

Yes. You are correct.

Taking a picture is fine. I can take pictures in public places constantly, pick out the top dozen or so every month and publish an art book.

The mass collection of data assigned to individuals is not. Putting a 10TB hi-res camera in a balloon and taking constant pictures of a city, tagging each person as they walk around? That is insanity.

We never had to worry about the second scenario because it was deemed impossible. It would be like a traffic cop who was able to remember every car that passed him, who was riding in it, for decades at a time. No laws had to be made for the same reason we don't outlaw flying while wearing a cape.

The collection and storage of data assigned to an individual should be under the total control of that individual, on a case-by-case, line-item individual approval process. This would allow public photography to continue the way it always has.

dTal• 7 years ago

To redraw the analogy - it's fine to take pictures in a public place. It's not fine to follow someone around all day, every day, constantly taking pictures of them. That's called stalking, and automating it on a mass scale doesn't make it right.

insickness3• 7 years ago

You made a jump from being able to trace every move someone makes to 'an oppressive government rounding up dissenters for re-education.' Keeping movement secret is not what keeps the government from rounding up dissenters for re-education. Governments were rounding up dissenters for re-education a long time ago. They could use passport and license photos for that if they wanted to. Should we prevent those technologies as well? No, what will keep governments from rounding up dissenters is stopping government from rounding up dissenters, not trying to turn back the time on technology.

carapace5• 7 years ago

Item: Auto-autos (self-driving cars) and the accompanying infrastructure will be a defacto ubiquitous surveillance system.

(Triangulation of gunshots in realtime, etc.)

On the one hand we eliminate privacy, on the other we can eliminate crime.

I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle.

- - - -

As a pulled-in-the-wool tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoiac the sad thing about Snowden was that the poor kid had to flush his life down the toilet to get people to understand what we (the tinfoil hat crowd) knew goddamned well was already going on. Of course the NSA is slurping up all available data everywhere because that's what I would do.

We are not going to rollback surveillance. The folks that want to roll it back are so naive that they must be monitored by the rest of us for their own safety and ours. I wish it weren't so but there it is.

The question is do we want to become a world of Morlocks and Eloi? Or do we want to go for some sort of Star Trek future, where the sensors and computers and world-destroying weapons are governed by a strict but flexible humane and open government?

If you are a citizen of the US you have an awesome government that is open to participation at all levels, g'wan and get involved! Happy Fourth of July!

kragen2• 7 years ago

My friend was raped by the police, in the police station. Giving all the power to the police does not eliminate crime; it just changes who commits the crimes.

geggam• 7 years ago

This, congress and the entire us political infrastructure is morally bankrupt. If the leaders of the community are corrupt the community is corrupt.

carapace5• 7 years ago

Dude that's horrible.

Let me try to be delicate.

Those "police" should fear ubiquitous surveillance, not you.

We have to exercise our democratic power to make sure that e.g. Internal Affairs can find and deal with criminals who have infiltrated police.

iamnothere2• 7 years ago

We are not going to rollback surveillance. The folks that want to roll it back are so naive that they must be monitored by the rest of us for their own safety and ours. I wish it weren't so but there it is.

Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not? I suspect that it is.

Either way, those of us against surveillance will eventually resort to more active measures as surveillance continues to increase, which we're already seeing with things like AdNauseum. Surveillance won't "win"; it will be a constant battle that becomes more and more expensive for the watchers in terms of development time, infrastructure maintenance, replacement of damaged and outdated equipment, lost employee morale, and lost public trust. In a world of 7 billion people, we simply can't afford to feed everyone, solve the issue of climate change, manage the global economy in a way that avoids war, and maintain an effective global surveillance state in the face of active resistance. Sure, there will be pockets that are highly monitored (London/NYC/etc), but you don't have to enter those areas.

To be clear, anti-surveillance won't "win" either. This is a back-and-forth game that never ends, that of control and order versus freedom and chaos. Human nature ensures that it remains a frozen conflict.

carapace5• 7 years ago

> The folks that want to roll it back are so naive that they must be monitored by the rest of us for their own safety and ours.
Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not? I suspect that it is.

No, it's not. Not even a little. I am "as serious as a heart attack".

Someone is going to occupy the "God Room". It can be good(-ish) guys or bad(-ish) guys but it can't be nobody.

The NSA are doing their (difficult and necessary) jobs.

those of us against surveillance

...only have to fuck up once. Make one mistake and you're nicked mate.

People trying to avoid surveillance leave holes in the dataflow that pinpoint them.

it will be a constant battle that becomes more and more expensive for the watchers

Hardly. We see it becoming exponentially cheaper in front of our eyes. Given two exponential processes in a race, the one that's faster pulls ahead exponentially. (And whole new technologies open up new methods, e.g. terahertz scanners that can read mail without touching it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation )

Nevermind that the vast majority of people simply do not care.

You really think "Anonymous" is getting better at what they do? Maybe that's why we don't hear about them much anymore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) Forgive the sarcasm, but I hope I'm making my point?

Thinking that the "Goonies" are going to beat the NSA is so foolish that anyone who believes it is dangerously naive. Especially because the NSA is on your side. The NSA are the good guys! (By Earth standards.)

Let me ask you this: would you give up your right to privacy to prevent e.g. kragen's friend's rape by the police? I don't know about you but I would live on live webcam the rest of my life gladly if it could prevent even half of e.g. Amber Alerts (child kidnapping.)

That's the trade-off: Privacy for massively reduced crime.

My point is that the Ubiquitous Surveillance system must be recursive to prevent it's own abuses (or we will wind up with techno-dictatorship.) That's all.

Cf. Peelian principles

In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

In a world of 7 billion people, we simply can't afford to feed everyone, solve the issue of climate change, manage the global economy in a way that avoids war, and maintain an effective global surveillance state in the face of active resistance.

Actually we can. Bucky Fuller calculated that we could fix all our problems for about 25 billion dollars. We literally had all the answers by the mid-70's but no one fucking listens.

Anyhow, the flow of information increases wealth, ubiquitous surveillance is a net gain. We will get the "UbiSurv" capabilities as a side effect of economic development.

oil252• 7 years ago

One way we can begin to address, or at least help recognize, mass surveillance is to use the same tools of surveillance the oppressors use on us. A recent phenomenon I have observed on YouTube is the rise in "First Amendment audit" videos, where somebody stands in the public space and awkwardly films police, politicians and other elected officials (our servants) going about their day and duties. The videos often escalate into a ridiculous display of ego and threat of force, even though no crime is being committed, which I think is a healthy reminder of how uncomfortable it is to be "watched" by someone. It may already be too late - we may be seriously "out-gunned" by state and corporate surveillance for meaningful resistance - but these video reminders may be a gateway into awakening collective consciousness on some level to bring about actual change.

Mass Surveillance in the United States

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