What about people that are good? People of interest that hear from God (Yes, Virginia there is a God). Do they qualify for personal interceptions of mail and data gathering?
Everyone in the US government doesn’t believe in God so I would presume anyone that could prove there is a God would be of special interest to the powers that be.
Speaking only for myself, Mr Quatro, I have no idea what you’re asking. Do you think that the government is wiretapping prayers? And where do you get that “everyone in the US government doesn’t believe in God”? The vast majority say they do, and even if a cynic might think that many of them are lying, there’d have to be some who aren’t.
My estimation: It is very unlikely the LEO community have a running dossier on me they can summon up on demand. At best maybe one agency would probably be checking in on me due to the nature of my work, but if nothing pings as irregular the information probably is just stored and never really looked at. But I’d believe they have the capability to very quickly aggregate a considerable amount of information gathered about me, and all the “tracks” I’ve left behind, at various locations such as businesses, public service agencies, social media, search engines, etc. were I to become a “Person of Interest”. They may not “know” right not, for instance, what sort of music I listen to, where do I use my travel miles credits, what sort of porn I search for online – but they’d be able to look it up by close of business since I do not make an extraordinary effort to go dark.
What does it mean for the government to know something? An analogy for this is prime number searches. Lots of people and organizations are running programs looking for the largest prime number. They all report back to the central organization when they think they have found a new prime number. The computers then check this. Eventually this number is reported to a real human being only when a person has acknowledged that they have seen the number is it accepted as the largest known prime number. The number was prime before this person saw it but only when it has been brought to the attention of a person is it now something more.
The intelligence community knowing about you is similar. There is a huge amount of data about you in various databases but until some process brings this to the attention of a person to implement a policy is this information known?
The information available to governments (and to Facebook, Google, etc.) is one of the most profound changes to the world.
When I was younger, it was common that nobody in the world would know where I was (except perhaps someone sleeping next to me who didn’t even know my name). In a way that was very lonely … but in a way it was exhilarating freedom. Some people would even cross borders illicitly and just get a new passport when the passport stamps became incriminating.
Now cameras are ubiquitous (there even seem to be government cameras where I live, in Thailand’s rural back-country), and NSA (and Google) have exabytes of data. Many young people are deliberately accessible at all times, with GPS leaving a trail. Does this give today’s young people a completely different mind-set?
On a practical note, how thoroughly are border stations wired together? Could my friend repeat his illicit border checkpoint evasions today?
When I applied a few years ago to become the Facility Security Officer for a company that wanted to do business with the US Department of Defense, I was contacted by a Federal investigator who needed to do an interview. The whole reason for the interview was that they knew I had briefly been a member of the SDS 41 years before. The only question they had for me was “So, can we assume that you no longer advocate the overthrow of the US government by any of the following means…?”
It would take an immense amount of time and manpower to search through everyone’s dreck to find info of use to intelligence services.
I suspect the depiction in movies of huge monitoring centers following our every move is fantasy.
*Just in case, I hereby swear unconditional fealty to our overlords, whoever they may be. :)
I think of it like the government is a guy in a tower with a pair of binoculars and I’m a guy in a crowd of people below.
If he wanted to he could probably see my every move. But generally I’m lost in the crowd, anonymous until I do something to catch his notice. So I have “privacy” in the sense that nobody will pay attention to whatever I’m doing.
In 1987 during the Sandinista era, I participated in a small protest outside the US Embassy in Managua. I’ve always wondered how much attention that may have garnered me from The Man. But nothing untoward has ever occurred to me, so I’m guessing not that much.
This is a decent analogy as far as it goes.
In the analogy, the guy in the tower’s attention will only be drawn to big obvious things. You having harsh words with somebody else in the crowd will almost certainly escape his notice completely. But if suddenly a section of the crowd scatters and in the empty space two guys start duking it out, he’ll probably notice that.
Now imagine instead of one guy in the tower there are hundreds of guys in the tower each watching a much smaller section of crowd. Much more minor stuff will be noticed by the tower as a whole. Even if the only thing the other watchers can do is say “Hey Boss, look at this!”, those other watchers greatly increase the total surveillance capability of the Boss vs. when he was the sole watcher.
Here in the real world, not the analogy, the watchers have a lot of low end not-so-smart helpers. That were all pretty much unimaginable 30 years ago. And there are more and smarter helpers all the time.
We are shading towards the situation where “can be seen” is *functionally *equivalent to “is being actively monitored”.
As a simple example: there are now camera systems that can watch large complicated roadway intersections recoding everything that goes on. And they can quickly learn to recognize what normal traffic looks like. And to alert whenever traffic looks abnormal, then permanently save the last couple minutes of video.
The outcome is that every accident or crazy-ass scofflaw bit of driving is fully recorded. And hence every violation fully enforceable after the fact. An ordinary police agency with ordinary manpower can see every incident in every one of their hundreds of intersections, all neatly and automatically compiled into a single 20 minute video from the thousands of hours of mind-numbing tedium recorded every single day.
As the song said: “Step out of line; the Man comes to take you away.” Nobody is watching until you step out of line. But, increasingly, stepping out will be noticed. Anonymity lasts only and exactly until you stand out a smidgen. Not like the old days where you had to stand waaay out and even then only rarely would you be noticed.
At some point the quantitative difference amounts to a qualitative one. Are we there yet? Perhaps not, but we’re going that way faster than most Americans realize. And IMO, faster than most would be comfortable with if they knew the whole truth.
The deeper meta-challenge is that once the capability exists, it can be used for good things, like detecting pickpockets in the crowd. It can also be used for bad things like detecting political activists of the unfavored party.
Humans control the use to which we put our tech. But the ones doing the deciding aren’t *necessarily *always going to be proceeding with the purest of motives. How we ensure that purity of motive is up to us.
And what if the guy in the tower has a whole crowd of helpers, each one of them saying “Hey, boss, look at this”?
I agree with this. But note that police and government intelligence are only part of the problem. Corporations like Facebook, Amazon and Google have huge databases that will grow hugely and eventually be monetized. And increasingly, decisions will be made by software without human supervision. (Even decades ago, bank loan applications were being accepted/rejected by “expert” software.)
Some creative people have very unusual (“abnormal”) behavior. Expect them to be automatically turned down for loans and for jobs, to be singled out for IRS audits, etc.
This is why China blocks them.
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Only a picky nit, but the FBI and several other agencies operate mostly domestically and are part of the Intelligence Community. FBI, DEA, essentially all of DHS, etc. The use of “real” intelligence, however, is rather limited and not legally allowed (in most cases) to be used for criminal enforcement activity. There are a lot of dynamics at play.
This is not correct. Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows this. The NSA has minimization rules which limit their use of data on US persons as part of their foreign intelligence mission, but this doesn’t prevent the NSA from sharing this data with FBI or DEA for use in criminal cases.
The FBI can search NSA PRISM databases for US-person information during routine criminal investigations. It can also initiate such investigations without any suspicion of wrongdoing.
Isn’t it plausible that sleeper cells from any country (pick one) could and probably have used social media (perhaps even SD) to make themselves look like normal citizens for or against anything except the true nature of their being in our country in the first place. The investigation of this particular sleeper cell would only reveal a normal person or persons belonging to normal clubs and activities.
No red flags, no bells or whistles here to the investigating authorities … pass on by till they get the order to cause mayhem.
Plausible, right?
I’m sure they try, but unless you’re really good at it, inconsistencies are going to crop up eventually.
When exactly do you give the order to “cause mayhem”? I guess if you’re a sleeper agent for the Soviet Union, you get the order the same day the Soviet armored divisions get the order to advance through the Fulda Gap.
No country has sleeper agents in place ready to carry out terrorist attacks “just in case”. It’s a silly idea. If you wanted to carry out a terrorist attack in France you wouldn’t have to lay low for years in France pretending to be a normal everyday Frenchman, you’d just get a plane ticket to Paris, rent a car, and drive through a marketplace.
The limiting factor for terrorist networks is not that they’re waiting for the exact right time. The limiting factor is that there just aren’t that many murderous terrorists who don’t care if they live or die. The way they work is not to send murderous terrorists to western countries to lay low and then attack years later, instead they inspire people already living in western countries to carry out lone wolf attacks.
Real Soviet agents weren’t sleeper guerrillas or terrorists, they were expected to gather intelligence. The most successful of these agents mostly sent their handlers stuff they read in the local newspapers.
Likewise for organized crime. They don’t tend to send deep cover mafia guys through the police academy. Instead they just talk to existing cops and find out which ones could use a little extra cash. Once you get really organized, it’s just the way the cops do business, and it’s plata o plomo.
I read once of a particularly enterprising Soviet spy who got a wealth of information by asking for a guided tour of his local military base.
That doesn’t follow. Failure to monitor an actual threat doesn’t preclude monitoring ordinary citizens – it’s entirely possible that the agencies could be (bad) inept at identifying threats or (worse) abusing their surveillance powers to the point of neglecting their actual job.