Privacy, Government, Surveillance, and You.

@ joeyjojo:

No. BAOR only covered part of the front, and would have needed urgent reinforcement, if not from other forces in the area and in reserve, but from the US — which, of course, the Soviet Navy would have trying to sink.

I know that some employers ask to see a prospective employee's Facebook account (and I'm very much against that practice, even if I don't have an account myself), but are there any employers which request logs of every website you've ever visited? Or look at who you called in the last year? Or looked at your online purchases? What employer has the kind of time to comb through all that data?

They don't request it, they just pay someone to get that information for them.

Yep, they use data mining companies to conduct background checks on prospective employees. This is widespread among employers.

edited 7th Jul '14 1:58:40 PM by Fighteer

Well I'm not for that either. So I guess both are equally bad, but for different reasons.

Should point out that your consent or knowledge of their background checks and data mining isn't needed.

This works both ways though, you're right that there is a difference. One can be used to stop criminals from hurting people, the other is just about making money.

Depends on where you are — see the Data Protection Act 1998^note  This even applies to any employee in any business that deals with personal data. More than once, I have been reminded that we need to not give out personal data and to keep any details out of sight.

I've heard French privacy laws are even tighter.

edited 7th Jul '14 2:19:32 PM by Greenmantle

That kind of goes without saying. That said, in my experience, I've been hired fairly quickly after interviews. So if they did a background check, they sure were lightning fast about it.

Not real crazy about the way you worded that, since we've seen that the NSA tracks more than just terrorists.

edited 7th Jul '14 2:26:25 PM by speedyboris

The plural of anecdote is data. You may have worked for employers that didn't conduct those kinds of background checks and/or had a clean check. I know my employer does it, and they hired me, so... Of course, I'm almost painfully clean. I missed out on so many opportunities to go crazy in my youth...

Here's the actual text in question

This definition, as noted by the article I linked, hits one article in particular: Linux Distro: Tails - You Can Never Be Too Paranoid from the Linux Journal. The reasonable way to interpret this is that the NSA is watching that particular Linux distro (which is designed around security) because it's popular among extremists, not that Linux Journal itself is considered an "extremist forum".

edited 7th Jul '14 3:41:34 PM by NativeJovian

True, but "tracking" and "putting in jail" are two separate things. They are not synonymous with each other.

Government surveillance can't "put you in jail". Committing felonies is what puts you in jail.

Presumption of Innocence is not a social contract, nor is it an investigative technique. It is a courtroom procedural protocol. Crime prevention does not operate on the honor system.

edited 7th Jul '14 3:06:30 PM by TobiasDrake

@ Pykrete

But the point I originally raised is that, with drones around, evidence of lack of consent would be easy to find. All that has to be done is that the drone in question is disguised as a certain object. Record how the rape started, including what the perpetrator says, reveal it to the whole world, and bam, Rapist X is done for.

It's not even always as clear-cut as that, and do you really want drones spying on you having sex? I'm deeply uncomfortable with that even as I am not opposed to surveillance as a general principle.

Let's hope it never becomes a felony to criticize governmental policy then.

edited 7th Jul '14 4:03:31 PM by speedyboris

I'd like to add that not only is this not out of the question, but even has historical precedent.

edited 7th Jul '14 6:18:09 PM by Pykrete

While I am no fan of corporate surveillance or employer intrusions into our privacy, corporations cant arrest you. I dont want to be denied employment because I express liberal views in public, but I really really dont want to be arrested or "detained" because I protest something the administration of the day has done.

Note that historically, when corporations want to see someone suppressed, they will typically use their influence over government to achieve this. Although the wealthy elites are the ones who have the most incentive to want to suppress dissent, it's the government where coercive power is most concentrated. That's why we put protections in place, such as requiring a warrant before anyone can search you. When tried and traditional protections are being set aside in the name of "security", it's time to wonder where that's ultimately going to lead. Are the benefits worth the costs?

History says no. If you want to change my mind, when you will have to come up with a really good reason why we cant protect ourselves while maintaining our traditional restrictions on search and seizure.

It is not, at present, a felony to criticize governmental policy. If it ever becomes a felony to criticize governmental policy, there are much larger problems in play than just the possibility that the government might be spying on you. If no secret government surveillance existed, it would still be a bad thing for it to become a felony to criticize governmental policy. Surveillance is completely irrelevant to that matter.

If the government wanted to make a law saying that every single person in the entire nation was a criminal, they could do so. If the government wanted to make a law saying that Orange Julius is the devil's drink and anyone who has ever purchased one is now guilty of a felony, they can do so. If the government wanted to illegalize automobiles, they could do so. But they aren't, and basing decisions of separate policies on the possibility that it might tie into some potential future Orange Julius criminalizing act is ridiculous.

It's been 13 years since the government started bringing out the surveillance methods in response to 9/11 and there's still no sign of this mythical First Amendment-killing law that the government is supposedly just waiting until we let down our guards to bring out.

edited 7th Jul '14 7:28:48 PM by TobiasDrake

"The problem is that increased security is a good thing, but it comes at a cost. Give a bureaucrat the ability to track terrorists, and the very same capability gives them the ability to track anyone. There are two negative consequences from this: the cost of mistakes and the cost of political bias.

Mistakes are going to occur, and the nature of database technology is that the larger the DB, the harder it is to correct it. Remember the no-fly lists? People are still being stopped and detained due to having the "wrong" last name. What they are doing here is much more far-reaching than that. Plus, the consequences of a mistake are far higher now, because the same laws also give them the right to hold suspected terrorists and to kill US citizens overseas without trial.

This has a very low probability of happening to any one of us. The vast majority of us can go about our lives secure in the knowledge that we will probably never experience any negative consequences. But the probability that some innocent person will is actually very high. Should we care?

All this in addition to the cost of what will happen at some point in the future when an administration decides to push the envelope and justify using this to suppress some of their political opponents. Members of the Occupy Movement have close ties to members of the Arab Spring, who have close ties to Islamists (trust me, they know each other and communicate). How hard would it be for the FBI to create the impression that some member of Occupy is "providing assistance" to overseas Islamists? How hard would it be to tie a member of the Tea Part to some home-grown right-wing group? This is not at all unlikely, as we just saw with the IRS and the Tea Party.

The technology involved makes all this much more dangerous. Once you begin profiling people based on patterns in their internet or phone connections you are really creating a very ambiguous situation.

All this might be of less concern if we knew what standards they use to begin surveilling someone, but all that is being kept secret. Since we dont know how many people or what kind they keep under surveillance, there isnt any public accountability.

That's the concern."

The more things change.... This is becoming an annual post for me.

I like how that (re)post completely ignores the point that Tobias made immediately above it — that it's silly to condemn something based on some theoretical future development that you have no credible reason to believe will actually materialize.

Multiple cases of that theoretical future development have been cited throughout this thread as past development. Protest sabotage, unnecessary brutality, flagrant entrapment, false data positives leading to uprooted lives, abuse of data within the institutions collecting it, regular violation of internal standards by those institutions. Smugly calling it a theoretical future development is akin to climate change denial by now, and throughout the whole thing there's still every indication that its overreach doesn't even help catch actual bad guys.

edited 7th Jul '14 8:48:17 PM by Pykrete

Yes, because saying that we don't live in a authoritarian dictatorship where the gestapo can arrest you for thoughtcrime (and that we're not inexorably heading toward becoming one, either) is totally the same thing as climate change denial.

I'm really honestly not even sure where to start unpacking that.

Let's not make this too antagonistic. The fact is that abuses have occurred and will inevitably occur in any large government, but those abuses were made public, as one would hope they would in a society committed (on paper, at least) to freedom of information.

However we may feel about privacy as a human right, for that right to exist one must enshrine it in law and appoint dedicated guardians of that law; right now we seem to be failing badly at both of those thanks to certain elements of our political landscape.

The current situation is not ideal, but it is neither heading towards a totalitarian thought control state, nor likely to strike a blow for privacy rights any time soon. It is what it is, and unless you're prepared to break out the torches and pitchforks, the only way to change it is through voting. If you aren't active to at least this minimal degree, you lose the moral right to act offended when things don't go as you'd like.

edited 7th Jul '14 9:22:37 PM by Fighteer

Way ahead of you Broseph.

edited 7th Jul '14 9:33:05 PM by Pykrete

And many of those cases were refuted. Don't beg the question.