Not that I have either the time or the interest to debate this with you, but has it ever crossed your mind that maybe, just maybe, Catholic Workers and Greenpeace aren’t quite as innocuous as you imagine them to be?
:dubious: What are you doing here?
:rolleyes: No. Although I did run a thread (see above) touching on that and other questions, and seriously evaluated everything every poster brought to the table. Greenpeace, as a group, never even dabbles in the more harmless forms of monkeywrenching. (FBI’s interest in them appears to be more a matter of guilt-by-association with more extreme environmentalists who do such things; at least, that’s the most charitable way to account for it.) As for Catholic Workers – who are historically devoted to “distributism” as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism (see this thread – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=344179), they have never been the slightest threat to anybody anywhere since Dorothy Day founded the organization in 1933 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Worker_Movement). As social revolutionaries go, they’re total milksops.
Those left wing groups were mentioned because they are the ones being spied upon; last I heard, the government was largely ignoring right wingers, no matter how extreme.
A preface: I am against the use of government resources to eavesdrop on or intercept the communications of individual citizens, or to violate their Fourth Amendment rights in any way whatsoever. But electronic invasions of the public’s privacy both on a very large scale and in a way that impacts on individual liberties seems far down the list of things to worry about.
One thing to remember about McNealy’s comment is that it was not the conclusion of a dispassionate survey of technology and politics: it was a riposte by the ceo of Sun Microsystems at a press conference as he was being hassled by reporters about privacy issues when he wanted to talk about their launch of a new product called Jini. The comment was not calculated, and given the response, incredibly counterproductive. Sun was being sued for privacy violation at the time, in a wholly unrelated matter, and various competitors were busily making hay of their own efforts at privacy protection. Here’s the Wired article which puts the comment in its proper context: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,17538,00.html
It is important to realize that very few of us require secrecy in order to have privacy. Secrecy is hiring a messenger to disguise himself as a squirrel and hide your coded letter in a hollow tree next to the recipient’s house. Privacy is sealing the envelope and mailing it, knowing that your plainly-worded letter is overwhelmingly likely to get to its destination with no incentive nor opportunity for interception. It is hard work, time-consuming and very expensive to keep track of someone else’s life. I own every electronic device in my house, and the house itself, but if I were to attempt to know of every person my kids know, and know every program my kids watch on television or every word they communicate to anyone or every item they purchase, I would soon be hopelessly lost in the sheer mass of mostly trivial data, not to mention that my spying would inevitably become known and I would have to deal not only with the unpleasant personal consequences but with the countermeasures the objects of my concern would begin to employ in their own defense. And I’ve only got three kids, and the oldest one is twelve.
A government might have the resources to harass individual targets, but that’s hardly dependent on information technology, and no government has the resources to care about even a tiny fraction of the data it may have the resources to collect, much less use it in any way, harmful or benign. A government that wishes to oppress its citizenry will not find spying necessary or cost-effective: East Germany had the most comprehensive network of informants, spies and other means of amassing data on each and every citizen that the world has ever seen, and all it generated was reams of unread files and layers of leaden bureaucracy. Here’s a review of a good and fun to read book on the subject: http://books.guardian.co.uk/firstbook2003/story/0,13840,1031819,00.html East Germany’s dictatorship was effective (and not for all that long) because of its sheer brutality and because it inherited an already brutalized, defeated, and exhausted people on which to force itself, not because of any mastery of information. The comprehensive collection of minutiae was merely an act, a prop to help portray an all-powerful state that was actually just slightly less weak and frightened than the demoralized citizenry it ultimately failed to dominate.
As for private, corporate data marauders, same-same. Anyone who wants to might find out what I bought on credit over the past year, or ten, but who’s going to pay someone to go through the data? What likely return is there on that expenditure, for me or any other randomly-chosen person? Even in this golden age of marketing’s triumph over product (which I feel, but cannot prove, is almost over), no evil capitalist is going to spend more money to violate my privacy than it expects, without knowing me, to recoup from the investment. I can calculate, roughly, how much money in today’s dollars I’m going to spend the rest of my life, and I can’t see that it’s remotely worth it for anyone to pay that much attention to me to influence the small portion of my spending that is entirely discretionary.
I don’t have many secrets. But I do have privacy. Somebody knows most of what there is to know about my external life. But nobody knows a large fraction of the whole, and even if it were to be somehow collected in book form, I would still feel safe because where would my enemies (supposing I have some) find the time to read it?
Is the administration monitoring such groups? If they are, then I am interested, and if they have as little justification for it as they seem to have for monitoring various peace activist groups, then I do indeed disaprove of it as strongly as their monitoring of lefty groups.
If the administration isn’t monitoring right wing groups, though, then whats your point? Just that if they were you don’t think we’d be as outraged about it as we are about the monitoring of Greenpeace and the like? That seems a presumption based on top of a hypothetical, and thus not really worth debating.
But what lines are they tapping? Bush indicates that they’re monitoring phone calls of people who are suspected to be in contact with Al-Queda. But of course everyone agreest that he should be allowed to do that, and under the FISA law it ain’t hard for him to get premission (here’s a summary of applications vs rejections submitted to the FISA court, summary: 18733 requested, only 4 rejected). In cases where time is an issue, the gov’t can go ahead and order the tap as long as a judge is informed in 72hrs. So if he’s going after some guy in New York who’s getting phone calls from Osama every week, it shouldn’t be any sort of barrier at all to go about it leagally and get a judge to sign off.
So you don’t have a problem with him tapping these phones, but you don’t know who’s phones they are. Neither do I, but we can see that the people who did know didn’t think they could get a court, which seems to have a history of being quite premissive, to agree that it was justified. You see then the reason for concern.
As I thought, you have no actual point to make. (And if you think the government is ignoring the right wingers, you are sadly mistaken.)
Cite?
Your preface, quotation context-setting, distinction between secrecy and privacy, and level-headed views are appreciated (by me, at least). And I agree, as stated above, that the volumes of data are prohibitive. I would add the the qualifier as of this moment, in addition to as far as we know (yeeee-hah! I do loves me my tin-foil hat!).
What I think you’re giving short shrift is the fact that information analysis, once the data is put in suitable form, can be automated. All it takes is the proper infrastructure and linking unique identifiers (say, a social security number). Interesting that Intel and their chip IDs are mentioned in the linked Wired article. That’s exactly the fear – with the push for legislation by media conglomerates regarding copyright and the possibility of linking various acts specifically to a particular computer, we get a glimpse of the possibilities.
The wonderful (from the surveillance perspective) and frightening (from the surveilled perspective) thing about this type of data gathering/analysis is that it’s not implemented with the idea of applying it to a single person; that would indeed fail any cost/benefit analysis you wish to construct. Such data mining tools need only to take into account a limited set of “important” data (e.g., travel records, bank statements, phone calls, health records, etc.) that can be applied broadly. And I refer you to the (hopefully) dismantled Total Information Awareness program.
Privacy matters no matter who is getting investigated and harrassed. The right wingers have the same access to the Freedom Of Information Act as the left, and the absence of their outrage shows that such treatment is reserved for the political enemies of the White House.
You are confusing the folks at PETA (who I don’t support, but whose tactics are non-violent) with the more radical Animal Liberation Front, whose tactics include destruction of labs and fur farms. When the papers came back from the FOIA suit, they showed that the FBI knew there was no connection between PETA and the violent ALF. Nevertheless, they continued to dog 
PETA.
If they aren’t watching the JBS…they will be soon.
Digital Stimulus, hello and good to meet you. I think any conflict between us stems mostly from my clumsiness in expressing myself, rather than any real disagreement. At least, I think most of what you’ve said is completely right, and almost all of it is mostly right. Governments with sophisticated surveillance technology, or any other tool that might possibly be useful in extending their influence (see: money) are more apt to misuse it than to foreswear its use, and this is a problem. But the central issue is not the technology with which a government oppresses, it’s the will to actually do it, and the initial tolerance/indifference from the public which allows state terror to become institutionalized. This is awfully hard to do to a free people – mostly, the authoritarian states of the last 150 years could at least make a claim to being more progressive in some areas than the preceding regimes, and even so, the record of long-term success is grim. I maintain that high-tech surveillance and data collection can be a devastating weapon against selected individuals, but is not so useful a tool in dealing with large populations. For one thing, no matter how sophisticated the computer that sorts the data, it takes too long to act against a whole population on a case-by-case basis. For another, I firmly believe that the vast majority of us are just too damned boring to make ferreting out our private lives worthwhile. Better just to get on with the cheap, low-tech, and tried-and-true methods of crowd control: propaganda, external conflict, and denial of the rule of law. This is not a pleasing prospect – a government can do all the damage it needs to without the aid of a single electron – but it leads me to care more about the personal and political than the technological when it comes to worrying about my freedom.
You missed the big picture. While the subsequent posts have demonstrated that people will resist the technology at home it will still exist at the point-of-purchase. Every purchase you make, EVERY purchase you make will be on record somewhere. The function of the NSA leans more toward data mining than one-on-one investigation. The distinction between marketing data and government spying will eventually blur into a seamless gray area. What the camera’s of London don’t catch, the cash register of every store will.
Sound like fantasy? I wouldn’t believe you 20 years ago if you told me I could print up a map to someone’s house by accessing a worldwide computer network (from my house) and typing in their phone number. I can’t even guess what to expect over the next 20 years.
The King of Soup – hiya! I don’t think there’s any particular conflict in our viewpoints; I approached my response more as a discussion than as a debate. (And rereading my previous post, I want to note how clumsy and pretentious that “at least, by me” parenthetical is. Sorry about that to everyone; I’m not sure why that got in there.) Effectively, I only want to make two points. The first concerns this:
While I agree that low-tech (personal and political) is often the easiest and most effective means to limit/restrict/violate our freedoms, it tends to be much more noticable and less insidious than technological means. Which is one of the reasons I feel that the techonological is worth hammering (or yammering?) on about. Technology is an enabler of other concerns, a mere tool to be used.
Second of all, limiting discussions of privacy and civil liberties to things such as the NSA wiretaps is missing the forest for a single tree; there are many steps along the way to “zero privacy”. Once in place, it becomes virtually impossible to remove such policies (e.g., making the USA PATRIOT Act permanent or even “trusted computing”). Yes, it’s a slippery slope, but one that I think is best not to even start down (or at least be very careful about what is allowed), as historical evidence shows that potential abuses almost always come to fruition. And even if it doesn’t achieve “abusive” standards, we end up with nuisances (e.g., 4 year old on TSA watch list).
Geez, when it rains, it pours. Another example of automatic data-mining: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. A How-to you can try yourself!
‘The genie is out of the bottle and there’s no way to put it back in.’ There are numerous examples of how anonymity is slipping away. As noted above, sometimes there are real benefits to the trade-offs of tracking and ubiquitous communication. It will be impossible to stop in the long run without dismantling technology, which we are unlikely to do.
The real issue is not how to keep our privacy, which becomes more and more impossible, but how to enable transparency to give us equal footing with others who have access to that information and to see how it is used. What happens if access to our information is going to be a one-way street away from us where we do not have ways to claim possession over it, nor a voice as to how it is used? If that happens, we are going to be living under informational tyranny, which will become real tyranny over time given human nature. OTOH the more that large groups of people have the means and responsibility to keep tabs on each other, the more difficult it is to take advantage of one another.
For instance, if someone is going to have access to my whereabouts and personal information, I should have a right (most of the time) to theirs as well. Why, if a company wants to see my financial information, shouldn’t I be able to see the same of that company’s officers or board of directors?
One of the most overlooked books IMO in the last decade or so is “The Transparent Society - Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?” by Science Fiction / Futurist Author David Brin. It’s out of print though I bought a new copy about a year ago on Amazon.com. While Brin argues that we must be able to retain some real privacy in our homes and personal affairs, he suggests that in the public sphere information should be reciprocal. He argues that in many cases privacy, or worse secrecy, allows those with more resources than us to gain power over us while transparency, which makes information a two way street, builds accountability into the system. Secrecy allows people to do things with information behind the backs of others; transparency allows us to see how information is being used. There is no accountability unless we have transparency that allows us to watch the watchers. Brin has more on his website. You can read Chapter One of ‘The Transparent Society’ there online to get the basic gist of what he suggests.
Here is a short excerpt:
I believe that 21st century technology is going to force us to make some initially difficult changes in a post-industrial world and our view of privacy and its function will be one of them.
The sense of privacy is a function of culture. There are many topics of conversation that are taboo in the US, but normal in India. Who’s to say that future generations will genuinely not mind zero privacy.
There is a much greater issue here.
When you commit crime you are subject to sanctions and supervision by the state.
It means you can be instructed what you must do, where you must go who you can meet.
Effectively you are not in your own custody.
What is being discussed here is the state and unamed bodies such as commercial interests having all that information about your lifestyle, in effect you are in their custody, because at some point they will try to modify your behaviour, with or without your consent and for their own unstated purposes.
You have lost your freedom, yes, its as dramatic as that.
I think the thing that bothers me the most in this debate is the idea that corporations or the government are “other people”. They aren’t other people, they are us. I run two corporations, and we operate in New York, Chicago, and Puerto Rico. I am “The corporation” as much as anyone else. It’s a matter of building resources and utilizing them. If I had more money, I already know which companies to go to if I want the appropriate data mined, and I’d even have an idea of how to go about it. Just watch documentaries about the watchers and you can learn how to do it too. There is a lot to be gained from an education into conspiratorial history and analysis. I feel I must give a caveat and say that I am not advocating that one believe all conspiracies, only that there are some real nuggets of truth there.
What has become increasingly clear to me is the networked structure that our culture is. We have a global system of mutually beneficial relationships, and this is how we gain power. Our efficiency at using our resources will determine how much power we have. I have friends that work in politics and I run in social circles once in a while where I brush up against people doing some really high level work in their fields. I went to a dinner at the home of Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul and Mary, and met a guy who was going off to work at a firm that does conflict resolution on a global scale. It’s like a conglomerate of NGOs working on conflict management worldwide. He is specifically going to be working on Africa and the Middle East. At the same party, I met a guy who does really high level weather analysis for companies and governments. At another event at Peter Yarrow’s home, my friend who brought me to the first one met John Kerry who was in attendance, as well as Hillary Clinton. Peter Yarrow is John Kerry’s daughter’s godfather.
See here I gave you all information on people who you have heard of. A good friend of mine was investigated by the Secret Service when he had a nervous breakdown and called up the White House and said, “The Revolution has begun!”, and I know a lot of lefty “revolutionaries”, so it’s very possible that I could be investigated, though I don’t think I have been investigated up until this point. We’re going to be doing a spotlight focus on the Carlyle Group action at some point coming up here in January, trying to educate people about the Carlyle Group, it’ll be all information that can be found publically that we can find, which is pretty extensive information.
I know that the firm Acxiom is one of the main firms that political campaigns both Republican AND Democrat use to find relevant marketing data on the constituency they are targetting. For instance they can find the spending habits of a particular church congregation, and find out what their particular proclivities are in order to tailor a speech directly to that small demographic. If I had the money I could quite easily become an Acxiom client. With Google and Lexis-Nexis, I can find out ridiculous amounts of info on people. My business partner found out about one of our client’s campaign contributions on the internet, and showed it to him. This client worked for George Soros.
A good friend of mine worked on Fernando Ferrer’s campaign in New York City. He helped organize an event with Bill Clinton in the Bronx.
What I am using all these little anecdotes to illustrate is that there is no “Other” entity that you are not a part of, that you do not have access to. It’s all there. I mean, I am a crazy little hipster that likes to post rants on internet message boards and I am one degree of seperation from Presidential Candidates, Senators and Ex-Presidents. My Father knows Pete Dominici who is a Senator from New Mexico. When I needed surgery when I was little he actually got some help from a Congressman at the time who made some calls and helped get me the surgery that I needed. My Father is a small time lobbyist for pharmacists in the state of New Mexico. He runs his little association, but he’s been around, he’s met some of these people.
I know that my Metrocard allows me to be tracked. For instance, if I were to commit a murder, the police could analyze my metrocard and find out where I had been, and when. I buy lots of things with my credit and debit cards. Every time I use those, they know where I am. Did you know there are devices that can record the signature of your gait (The way you walk) and then identify you based upon your gait pattern?
I was watching some documentary, I think it was “The Corporation” and they had this guy on who does work in corporate espionage. He was talking about how there is no real distinction between corporate intelligence and government intelligence anymore. The Bush family prosecutes foreign policy extra-governmentally via the Carlyle Group and BCCI, and the fact that the Saudi Royal Family are friends of theirs.
So after this long rambling post, what I will say is not that you have zero privacy anyway, get over it. But that your privacy is about being signal lost in a sea of noise. They have to be willing to dedicate the resources to studying YOU in particular. Certainly they have a lot of data, but it’s like watching a drop in the ocean. They have to be aware of you and your identity, otherwise you are just a number floating in a mass of other data. At that level you are an entity, and not a person. This is privacy of a sort.
One last little anecdote. We got a piece of mail upset at a project that we did. He complained about the design. So I called it that this was someone who was a designer and who wasn’t that confident about his own career and was mad that someone who was not as good as him got a budget to do a design job. We looked up his e-mail address, and we found out he was a second year design student at an Oklahoma State University. We found out his name and everything, even found some message board postings that he had placed on some OSU message boards.
So who are these “Other” people that have some magical mystical ability to find out information that you cannot find out? There might be varying levels of skill, and power-structure, but there isn’t some intrinsic quality that they possess that you cannot come to learn if you so chose.
One time on the show “The Shield” Michael Chiklis character said something that stayed with me. He helped someone find a stolen ring. She asked how he did it. He told her, “The police department has the ability to solve any crime that occurs, it’s a matter of what we choose to devote our resources to.” The resources are out there, they are available for anyone that wants to seek them out. The police, the military, the politicians, the marketing execs, they are all your neighbors, they live in your city, they went to school at the same school you went to. They shop at the same supermarkets and eat at the same restaurants. There are groupings that people belong to, and some people are socially seperated from you, but the power structure is made up of people from all walks of life, and we are all interconnected.
Erek
Greenpeace and PETA are certainly fair targets if concerned about terrroist groups like the Animal Liberation Front or Earth Liberation Front.
But, Greenpeace and PETA are not the ALF or ELF. And neither ALF nor ELF are “terrorists.” They might be “monkeywrenchers,” but that’s a different thing entirely.