Reading this gave me a wry chuckle:
all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.
What about the Fourth Amendment, you ask? That’s long since been discarded under the “expectation of privacy” exception. In other words, if you don’t expect privacy because the government has taken it away, then you don’t get privacy. (Something I doubt even Lewis Carroll would be able to explain….)
And what about the “right” to privacy? Sorry, no deal. That only applies to things like abortion. No reasonable person would ever think it allows people to talk on the phone without the government recording every word.
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10 responses to “Privacy, anyone?”
Wired(dot)com made the claim as well
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/
Forbes covered something of a denial
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/20/nsa-chief-denies-wireds-domestic-spying-story-fourteen-times-in-congressional-hearing/
I can’t help thinking that if a data base does exist of every form of electronic communication; our nation’s leaders won’t be happy until they can mine it for terrorism, treason, insurrection, criminal, and just incorrect thinking. How to start? They could start with recordings of successful legal wiretaps (and wiretaps that would have been successful if they had only been legal.) Throw in recordings of interrogations, trials, confessions and prison interviews, and you have a nice base to start building and testing machine learning algorithms. The results might be successful at catching terrorists and violent criminals; but couple it with legislatures that each year label more and more things as felony crimes and what do you think we will get?
And the available big data bases just keep growing, NSA’s Google’s, Facebook’s, Twitter’s and more.
Good morning officers. This is Agatha, a thought crime has been detected.
No such agency was recording all the phone calls that passed through satellites as early as the seventies. The only saving grace was no one had the time to listen to them all. Improvements in search software must have made that database much more usable.
The government has only a tenuous hold on this information stream. They can have the information only so long as they use it sparingly. Abuse the power, and people will adopt strong-encrypted comms, so fast it’ll make your head spin!
Heck, I’m already considering encrypted voice comms for business usage–I don’t want to be a test case for an “expectation of privacy” loophole in the IP laws…
TMI – too much information. They can’t handle it. Maybe someday, but right now it’s just paranoia.
If you were standing in a crowded mall, yelling across the concourse your plans to go to the food court, would you expect that information to be private? Then why would you expect a conversation converted to radio waves and broadcast on and open frequency all over the neighborhood to be any more private? Any lawyer worth his salt will tell you there is almost never any expectation of privacy. Add in the ever present “National Security” considerations and how can any educated person be surprised by anything to do with government (or private for that matter) surveillance?
P.S. Quit with getting snarky about abortion. There is another choice, taken often (I was there and almost took it, until it turned out to be a false alarm) before Roe vs Wade. Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes, and I can take or leave it if I please.
1. baby dies. 2. momma and baby die. 3. mom and baby live and baby is abandoned to strangers with even less chance of finding ancestors than black slaves.
(oh – and dad has no voice in it all -even if he wants the child).
Adoption, as it exists now, SUCKS. STOP IT. Change it. YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
Oh hell, just kill me. I wasn’t meant to live anyway. And that’s what every adoptee knows. And that’s because that’s what we were told. By left and right. The right wants us to know how we were rescued from the dumpster. And now owe our adoptive parents our slavery for life (no thanks – but we MUST be grateftul). (And they caught me – I’m doing elder care – yes, turning myself into a slave – seriously.)
The left would just be happier if we were dead. I agree.
Not a nice choice, but that WAS what was going on pre (OMG) Roe vs Wade. Slavery or death.
“And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free”
Oh freedom, oh freedom…
Beautiful rendition there…
Kathy the reason I sound snarky is not because I believe in criminalizing abortion, but because I don’t understand how the right to privacy embraces a right to an abortion, but not a right to take drugs, sell one’s body, or not be under total government surveillance. I believe in privacy but I can’t understand the logic.
(I have discussed the slavery analogy too, as you may remember.)
Kathy, I’m sorry to hear you have had such bad experiences. My children were adopted privately and as they graduated high school we helped them contact their birth mothers. Neither has a very close relationship with their birth mother but there is no resentment on the girls’ part. My oldest did develop a very close bond with one of her brothers and friendships with her other siblings Unfortunately the brother drowned in a boating accident a few years ago. My youngest has developed a strong relationship with her birth father, his wife,children, and parents. I like them too. As you say, he had no voice in the decision and in fact had no knowledge until it was too late.
That they were adopted and know their birth parents doesn’t seem to cause my daughters, their husbands and my grandchildren to feel less family ties. They love attending the big annual reunion and the Sisters Retreats
My wife and daughters came up with the Sisters Retreat when we encouraged them to create their own family customs and traditions. It is an over 16, all female, weekend get together that (unfortunately) often includes a shopping spree. It is held twice a year (while the males keep the youngest kids.) They pitched it at a family reunion of about 70 and it became a BIG hit. Sisters, sister in laws, the sisters of sister in laws, daughters, granddaughters and even friends as close as a sister are invited to them.
They even did a cruise once.
I don’t know if hearing that some others have had a better experience is helpful or not but I hope that you are not actually considering suicide at this time. Elder care is a tough burden and it takes a decent size family to shoulder it all on their own. Your adoptive parents should know that, unless they are senile. There is no shame for the child that is unable to care for aged and ailing parents. The shame belongs on the parents.
[…] Privacy, anyone? […]
@Will. Thank you for being what my parents were not – you as adoptive parents are what all adoptees hope for – and rarely get.