Same deal in the UK with the national ANPR system (Automatic Number Plate Recognition).
Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads.
Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have:
Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few years)
Unless of course you're a criminal, in which case you can handily avoid a lot of this!
I used to think we could escape surveillance using technology. Fool's errand. We'd need an entire culture change. It's gone.
If blanket video coverage of public areas is fine, why not blanket audio coverage? Add in facial and audio recognition. Now consider you're running about with a microphone webcam combo in your pocket, the power and battery life of which will only increase.
I hate it with every ounce of my being, but I can't see a way out here. I can't see the 'line', any more.
There is no way to reverse this. Trying to cage this with paperwork will just lead to more of the same creative interpretations à la NSA. So the rulers don't feel the rules apply to them, big surprise. With that in mind, the futility of fighting the tide, what is the next step? As the ideal solution of reversal is unavailable, we need to go with harm reduction - but what is the harm that we would reduce? Most would say the harm is the loss of privacy, but I disagree. I believe the harm is further consolidation of power by those with the means to abuse it. So I would advocate for a democratization of all these spy programs. If the DEA can spy on us, we should be able to spy on the DEA. Any funding request for government programs should include a documented method of direct public access (not FOIA, operator level).
It is no mystery why the Constitution included the provision allowing citizens to arm themselves with the same class of weapons that the government possessed. The memory of tyrannical governance was fresh. Information is no different, if the government posses this information - so should the citizens.
Well, there is a way actually. But first you need to restore the power of the vote so that legislators are accountable to the people and the people alone.
This means dismantling the five main pillars that are used to nullify, misdirect, or otherwise diminish the power of the vote - both a a signaling mechanism that members of the electorate can use to unify themselves, and as a reliably severe punitive tool that the electorate can use to avenge themselves when their "representatives" betray their interests. Listed in no particular order, they are
1. Gerrymandering (aka partisan redistricting)
2. Closed primaries
3. Private campaign finance
4. The "revolving door" that allows private industry to offer well-paid sinecures to public "servants" who have systematically betrayed the public's trust.
5. Myriad restrictions on ballot access.
It's important to recognize that while each of these pillars diminishes the power of the vote, the really insidious effect comes from their interaction. But those knock-on effects can all be stopped by addressing the fundamental - and fundamental anti-democratic - structures at their roots.
Eliminating any one of these abominations tilts the balance back in favor of the good guys. All of them together can be lethal to the ambitions of people who's own ambitions are anathema to a self-governing republic.
This kind of defeatism is not helpful. Through history people were able to eventually overthrow much more brutal oppressors. The kind coercion used in western societies might appear to be more effective, but there is no reason to think that direct political action could not work. When it happens, like in the case of the occupy movement, you can see by the media reaction, how uncomfortable it is for the powerful.
Your suggestion of a democratization of spy programs is actually one of the premises of "The Circle", the book is meant to paint a dystopian future.
I was thinking recently that the best thing that could happen to Internet privacy would be for someone to build a Palantir clone with an open API, such that anyone could dox anyone else for $0.10 a pop. Being able to dox yourself (like Googling yourself, but PRISM-er) in real time would basically give you an OPSEC REPL, perfect for figuring out how to reduce your exposure.
It's easy to reverse some of this. If they're recording license plates and they or someone else will do it regardless, then stop having license plates. The justification for having them doesn't really apply to self-driving cars anyway.
Your argument seems to be that you can't effectively prohibit something that technology makes practical. That clearly isn't the case -- the constitution has been preventing police from searching your home without a warrant since 1789, even though they absolutely do have the operational capability to do that.
More to the point, even if they're not prohibited from spying, as long as we're not prohibited from defending against that spying we haven't lost. Encryption works. Tor works. In many cases the lack of prohibition on spying would be irrelevant if not for the existing prohibitions and impediments to strong anonymity, as with regulations on digital money transfers.
What's interesting is that your conclusion is still mostly right. Government secrecy is the cancer of democracy. But governments being transparent to their people in no way requires people to be transparent to their governments.
Much like the Constitution you mentioned, I feel we need some sort of document that explains the intentions behind surveillance and the limitations by which it can be legally used. We have no problem upholding the bill of rights, so why would it be hard to create a set of guidelines for future regulation of surveillance? Making it open is not a complete solution (though it's still a good idea), because we're still not setting any limitations as to how this information can be legally used. We need to do more to protect the rights of the citizens involved.
People like Edward Snowden have said surveillance can be used for good purposes. For example, fast forward and imagine auto insurance companies using this traffic monitoring data: Instead of structuring their prices based around age/gender/racial/class discrimination, they can use actual statistics to determine a little more about how safe someone is driving. Or instead of civil engineers having to waste time, money and other resources doing traffic studies...what if they could see the effects of their work in real-time? I think this technology could be used for very good purposes if there was just some transparency and rules surrounding it.
The only way within the system is I guess the Supreme Court. They have already laid a framework establishing that tracking requires a warrant, even if it's just making the police's job more efficient and it's data they can get from a tail.
If the license plate tracking gets to that point within metropolitan areas (presumably where cameras are most dense) or they start doing it from blimps or whatever, at least there is precedence for striking it.
It's not going to stop the collection but it should at least prevent the data being used against you in court. Of course, parallel construction. Sigh...
Some things the public should not be able to spy on. Using the example of the DEA, we can't have cartels knowing the identities of the DEA's informers, or when and where they're planning to make a bust. We can't have our citizens' tax records getting out of the IRS. And public relations would break down if we can't keep our allies secrets, either. Our military's plans shouldn't be made known to the enemy, of course. Many secrets are kept for good reason—letting it all out indiscriminately just doesn't make sense.
You are wrong. As citizens we can grant and revoke government powers at will. Cutting off or significantly curtailing their revenue would have a similar effect.
EDIT: There would need to be a concomitant cultural change as well. As it stands folks are not aware of or engaged with what their government is doing.
Even if we replaced every government official today, it could quickly devolve back to its current state.
There was an lapd officer(s) that were murdered within the last few days and the murderer used the waze app that shows the reported locations of speed traps and the government is already asking google to prohibit that information in some form. Knee jerk reactions to current events are never going to end well for openness of data.
> It is no mystery why the Constitution included the provision allowing citizens to arm themselves with the same class of weapons that the government possessed.
It's worth noting that no longer do citizens have the ability to arm themselves with "the same class of weapons" as the government. Unless you're willing to sell APCs and cruise missiles to private parties, there's no way a rebellion can outgun country's military.
Thought experiment: if gov programs were forced to be transparent, would they be any less brazen?
Not at this rate. I think officials see the Snowden-fallout and say, "hey, that wasn't so bad. the public barely cares. Yo Comey, hit the press & equate encryption to child abuse; we can win this narrative." Lack of transparency is certainly an issue, but i'd say the bigger one how to make sense of this information to the public.
That said, I feel like the right to bare arms was included specifically for overthrowing oppressive governments (and in case the British came back?).
At what point does a government become sufficiently oppressive as to be overthrown by the people? Without defining that, I feel like government can just keep employing the "but terrorists" excuse and the overton window to keep stripping us of more and more of our privacy and rights.
I sometimes feel the Hacker News crowd are a bit out of touch with the rest of the population.
Here in the UK most people I know feel safer with surveillance, it's used primarily to keep law and order.
We don't live in some authoritarian state where it's used for nefarious means, it's used to keep the public safe.
And seriously, why would you care if you're sitting on a database? What difference does it make to anything?
And I want to know when this mythical time was when we all had total privacy? I don't understand what bothers people so much about a person in a CCTV monitoring station looking at them sitting on a bus, or a spook reading the emails I send to my parents. Honestly, no-one cares.
The key point is interpretation and use of the data.
I don't particularly mind CCTV coverage of cities, if we still live in 1970 and technology limits it to essentially manual viewing of feeds to follow criminal suspects. In that world, ordinary citizens walking around a city centre are items of data that are discarded forever as soon as the tape reels run out. Even if they're kept, the volumes of data involved are so huge that they're effectively lost in time anyway.
The world we live in today is not that world. We are not far from being able to use facial recognition to track the whereabouts of every single citizen and save it forever, indexed along with the video recording of them at the time. We already have the capability to do that using cellphones. We can save the entire life history of individuals using these records and collate them into a viewable form near-instantly.
As I alluded to in my earlier post, the way we're going it's not a huge leap to imagine voice recognition allowing for phone calls to follow suit. Why is voice recognition important? Because it turns weeks and weeks of trawling through transcripts into a search query with instant results.
It's a completely different ball game. It's permanent, searchable, indexable super-fast memory. 'Forgetting' becomes obsolete.
In the old world of tape CCTV cameras, my neighbours knew more about me than the Government. Now, it's almost certainly the other way around, and if not, only because they've decided not to type 'stegosaurus' into the Big Database of Everything.
Except when it's not. No one disagrees the advantages afforded to us with access to data. However with great power comes great responsibility and our leaders, including the institutional powers behind them, invariably show a lack of the latter.
"Honestly, no-one cares."
That is patently untrue. People who understand the disadvantages and pitfalls of unfettered access to data care very much and fight for our rights even if we are too busy to make it a priority in our lives. The EFF have made it their job to care for example.
It doesn't make a difference until someone trawls the databases and can reconstruct much of your life. Also even if it doesn't matter to you don't you want journalists and lawyers free from communication (and who they contact) surveilance?
I'm actually fine with a CCTV operator in a monitoring station viewing the feeds. I'm also OK with the recordings being kept a short time in case they are needed to investigate something not spotted at the time. What I'm not comfortable with is them being kept more than a month or so. CCTV footage kept long term may be linked with Face recognition for detailed and personal tracking.
Likewise with the ANPR, I would be OK with it kept and accessible for a month or so (although I think a judge should approve searches both on a particular event (time and location) and for searches on a particular number plate.
We may not yet live in a authoritarian state but can you rule out one occuring in the next 50 years? What if legal and reasonable things today are outlawed, gay rights roled back and they search the ANPR for people who may have frequented gay bars or the archived communications data for anyone who used Grindr.
In my view the collected knowledge is more dangerous than the terrorists to a free society and oversight and limits on retention are required.
You are right though that the majority of the public do not feel this way yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose the surveilance where not fully justified and try to educate them.
I would also note precisely what you said "people I know feel safer with surveilance" and while I think you may be right I'm really not sure how much safer they actually are.
I'm from the UK and I absolutely, utterly disagree with what you are saying, most of which is baseless.
There have been abuses, there are corrupt intentions at work and there most certainly are people who do not think this level of surveillance is a good thing.
I am less worried about the government agencies as a whole having my data, I am more worried about so random person who works there taking a dislike to an individual, and making their life hell with the access they have.
> I used to think we could escape surveillance using technology. Fool's errand. We'd need an entire culture change. It's gone.
I seem to remember one of the Pirate Bay founders said something along those lines. Not even because it's "already lost" but because we need to start treating the cause and not the symptom. Yeah it's great that we can use encryption to avoid government snooping for now, but how long will that be feasible? The long-term solution would be to stop them from doing it in the first place.
I think making access to records of you, paper, video etc could be made a legal right. If somebody is filming in an area, they are required to provide you access to the footage. If somebody has accounts of yours, same deal.
If someone is logging your access to a something, they are required to provide you with the logs on request.
I think Europe at least would go for it. In Japan telephone cameras are required to make a clicking sound. This is an extension of the concept.
A direct attack on this surveillance technology might be a losing battle. But what about passing laws to mitigate its effect, and possibly in the long run help fight it? Two examples:
1. A law requiring the government to delete this data after a certain amount of time.
2. Legal penalties for abusing this data. Perhaps standards for how the data must be protected.
The problem is even prescribed penalties against authority figures are rarely enforced. There are a few low-level people in jail for torture of prisoners, but not one administrator. Bush and Cheney should have been hauled before The Hague, much as they would have demanded of any leader of any other country that had unilaterally broken the Geneva Convention, but Obama wanted to "look forward," not backward.
There is/was almost zero prosecution of individuals involved in the global financial collapse of 2008. Occupy Wall Street protestors, on the other hand, were beaten, arrested, maced, and so on.
Rules against authority figures in this country are for show at best. Didn't used to be that way, but here we are.
"Unless of course you're a criminal, in which case you can handily avoid a lot of this!"
Actually it's even more serious. If you try to avoid it it's a criminal act and your labeled as a criminal. To be very honest I'd rather move to a remote place getting away of this evolution.
To be very honest I'd rather move to a remote place getting away of this evolution.
Honest question: What's stopping you?
A huge number of people say they'd readily give up life in a nation that infringes their privacy for a different life away from prying eyes, but very, very few people actually bother to do it. There are plenty of nations where surveillance is still at the 'none' level, beyond a few paper records for things like passports and car registration. And generally they're quite cheap to live in and have nice weather. So why are you still living in the apparently awful conditions where you are now?
Could it be that privacy is actually much less important to you than ready access to, say, a good internet connection?
I agree with you that the fight for privacy seems insurmountable, and the sacrifices (that you mentioned) far too great. But I think the solution lies not in sacrificing the conveniences, but in creating enough isolation between each service to reduce/remove any correlating.
So the mailman remembers everyone you've ever sent or received mail with. The DOJ remembers every time your car pulls in front of a police vehicle with a LPR. The NSA is tracking what people you call, when, how long, and where you are when you call them.
For the life of me I do not understand why both major parties aren't having conniption fits right now. Are these the same parties that, on a bipartisan basis, told Nixon to get lost? Shut down some of the intelligence community's overreach in the 70s? Impeached a U.S. President for lying under oath?
Both parties over the previous 50 years have taken strong stands -- both separately and together -- in regards to strong oversight of privacy and freedom. Would Reagan have put up with this? Carter? Ike? JFK? It's inconceivable. During those times, yes, there was plenty of illegal mucking around -- but wholesale bulldozing of citizen's privacy? It's something from a dystopian sci-fi novel of just 15 years ago.
Surely this has to come up there somewhere near as important as all those other political scandals. Surely it would be a popular measure. But instead, what I'm seeing is somebody trying to introduce a bill to nibble around the edges, then others adding amendments so that the bill to reduce NSA spying actually increases it. It's like they're being incentivized to go in exactly the wrong direction.
It just doesn't make sense to me. There is some missing piece to this puzzle. When I see guys like Hayden, with his cocky attitude; there's something he knows that I don't know, and it's not that AQ is some kind of clear and present danger. It's something else. (Sorry to sound so mysterious. I'm truly at a loss.)
The "problem" is that it is increasingly easy to assemble these databases and to update them in real time. If a government agency isn't doing it, a corporation could be (and some are, for certain pieces of data), and soon (if not now) an individual or loose collection of individuals could achieve nearly the same results.
We might need to embrace it, make everything transparent and collaborative, and figure out how to make use of the information to create a state that is better than what currently exists.
Thank you. Just to clarify, even though I'm a libertarian, this isn't a "Big Gummit" problem. If DOJ wasn't doing this, Yellow Cab would. Or Uber. Or the guys who build traffic lights. The data is simply too valuable to ignore.
This is a tech problem. We created this, all while saying something like "Yeah, but all that ethical and philosophy stuff isn't really anything I need to worry about. What I need are eyeballs"
The government takes the blame in many cases because they hold all the trump cards -- they can take the data from anybody that's collecting it. They can also send you to jail, which commercial providers cannot directly do (yet). But the problem is with the tech. We have met the enemy and he is us.
I think it's a phenomenon worth examining. There isn't a simple answer. Part of it must be changes in American culture. What those changes are is debatable.
Can we please stop acting like the USA is somehow a "good guy" anymore? We have to realize that the authoritarian demons have the battering ram at the door and I really don't want to find out what happens when the USA turns into an authoritarian militaristic regime. We're way more than half way there already and people support it. Our very own government is a threat to us all, or at least those who will find themselves on the wrong site of the inner circle.
Do you read the news? Because here are some things that other states are up to that we aren't (at least, not in this decade):
- Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion
- Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine
- Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, disobeying their parents, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc. Or, more commonly in the "developed" world, failure to investigate or pursue family-based vigilante "justice" against same.
- Failure to acknowledge women as people and rape as a crime
- Committing violence against, or being complicit in violence against, children who dared to go to school
- Corruption to a degree that renders the public health infrastructure so dysfunctional that tens of thousands of people die needlessly
- Outright censorship of any reporting that paints the state in a negative light
---
"Knowing things about citizens" is dangerous because it enables the state to be far more effective in pursuing policies like the above. We ought to limit the government's knowledge of the lives of its citizens because that makes it much harder to effectively implement policies like these.
HOWEVER, HN sounds downright ridiculous when it declares that being listed in a database is comparable to being summarily executed for criticizing state religion.
Can somebody good with their logical fallacies let me know if this falls under "Fallacy of relative privation"?
This definition [1] even uses this very argument as an example:
"The counter to the relative privation argument when applied, for example, to compare America with other more tyrannous countries is to note that the proper comparison to make should not be between America and other tyrannies but between America and the ideal of freedom."
I find it a scary way to look at the world and to me it always comes off as less an honest argument and more like somebody who understands fallacy using it to persuade the reader for their own benefit.
Like the sort of thing they'll tell you as they are locking up your cage. "Hey, you're lucky it's dry unlike the cages the bad guys use!" the voice under the helmet said.
1. The War in Iraq killed over a million people. We have death robots that kill people from the sky.
2. Snowden, Manning, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond
3. Don't know about this one. I think it's worth mentioning Racism, Islamophobia and Islam or race related violence here.
4. #opDeathEaters
5. I don't know about this one either, but school seems mostly like a tool to incur debt. So not necessarily a plus.
6. You watched the Healthcare debate, right?
7. Surveilled reading is more dangerous than censoring books, full stop. But if you're looking for censorship, there's plenty to go around. Try finding a copy of the Sony leaks these days. Look at what is happening to social media.
>>HOWEVER, HN sounds downright ridiculous when it declares that being listed in a database is comparable to being summarily executed for criticizing state religion.
Here's the thing: countries can transition into totalitarianism quickly.
1930 Germany was very, very different than 1940 Germany. Hitler's rise to power happened in the blink of an eye, before most people understood what was happening.
This is why "oh, being listed in a database is nowhere as bad as being summarily executed" should be consolation. Such mindsets breed complacency, whereas what we need is constant vigilance and an extreme intolerance for policies that grant the government more power without any oversight.
Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine
Al-Awlaki? He was not accused of killing anyone himself, but got drone striked for writing terrorist propaganda. So did his son (for having Al-Awlaki as a father, no less). That seems like a pretty close fit.
Corruption to a degree that renders the public health infrastructure so dysfunctional that tens of thousands of people die needlessly
That's a funny example. Most people in western non-US countries would say the US meets this definition handily.
All that said, your point stands. There are worse governments than the US government. But lots better too.
You don't get to perpetrate your crimes because others are doing worse things. All crimes are reprehensible some more than others but no perpetrator of any crime gets off (or should get off) by pointing to others that do worse things.
> Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc.
This happens but you tolerate it because it's consistent with your arbitrary local culture. Consider pedophilia (having "wrong" sexual feelings) which comes with chemical castration and an attempt to "cure" it along with imprisonment of course. You don't even have to abuse anyone to suffer some of these consequences. Sound familiar? Have you ever met any self-confessed pedophile who hadn't been arrested for a related crime? Until they're outed, they're forced to keep their feelings secret from everyone because it's a kind of western thought crime. This leads us to imagine that all pedophiles rape children. They don't any more than 60 years ago all homosexuals raped children.
I think it's also naive to think of the government as the "bad guy" as well. Classifying the government as bad or good is basically trying to assign a singular attribute to the aggregate actions of thousands of people in politics and government agencies. The truth is neither black or white, and extremely complicated.
It depends on whether you're classifying based on intentions or on results. When you're using the word "bad guy", it implied the intentions to be bad/evil. However, it's easy to see that a complex system can't (normally) be assigned an intention. But even if every actors within the system is acting in good faith, the emergent behaviour can still have bad result.
In the case of government, it's definitely not complicated to classify the aggregate behaviour as unqualified bad (in term of result), regardless of the intention of the individuals working within the systems.
I always found it much more interesting to consider that smart stop light sensors could read the RFID tags that are required for tires [1]. You can change your plates but how often do you change your tires?
Doesn't that average consumer change their tires more frequently than their license plate over the lifespan of their car?
I ask as your question seemed a bit strange to me.
I am not sure if you are alluding to the fact that individuals trying to evade the law wouldn't know to change their tires, or if car licensing & insurance is much different than I imagined in the US (and individuals get a new license plate each year or something crazy).
Edit: also thanks for the link! I really had no idea RFID was hidden in tires! Makes me wonder what else they are hidden in...
> Doesn't that average consumer change their tires more
> frequently than their license plate over the lifespan
> of their car?
Yes, of course. And the RFID tag is really not helpful outside of inventory as far as I can tell. When they started this project I expected something like the microwave tags they glue inside a DVD case to detect shoplifting that you could remove from the tire innards before you mounted it. But nope, its embedded in the tire material.
You don't normally get new plates often, but you can if you want (report them lost or stolen and pay ~$20), and it is also rather easier to steal someone else's plates than their tires.
Tyres have RFID tags in them??! What an unusual thing to put RFID tags in. I wonder what other common items could have tags in them that people are generally unaware of.
I'm quite in to cars and I had NO IDEA this was a thing.
Yup, embedded right into the rubber. There are a couple of reasons for this, one is to provide serial numbers which allows you to 'age' the tire. Older tires are less reliable than fresh tires and there are laws in states like California that disallow selling "old" tires as new. You can read the tag and see when the tire was made. The sensors are not used to indicate inflation as far as I know that is a completely separate system. When they were first proposed, some folks showed they could be read from side of the road although that was unreliable. Reading them from the roadbed itself however was quite reliable as you ended up, worst case, with the tag being one wheel diameter away from the reader, and they were spec'd to be readable like that as folks doing inventory on a stack of tires did not want to rotate the tires in the stack. The last set of tires I 'read' (to show this off to a disbelieving friend) had a 18 digit serial number and a 6 digit date code. I'm sure there is some IEEE standard now for what your tire should report.
Owners of commercial vehicle fleet trying to manage the timely replacement of tires would welcome the ability to scan their vehicles and know the serial numbers of the tires. That would let them track age and make sure they're all replaced in a timely manner. Or switched to winter tires where it makes sense to do so (like Quebec, where it's the law to have winter tires after Nov 15.)
I was also unaware of this. That said, RFID chips are used for inventory systems. The inclusion in a tire is most likely innocuous and doesn't seem that unusual to me.
I dunno if I'm gonna change my tires but I imagine if I didn't want to be tracked it would be not too difficult to smash/electrocute/burn the tags into nonfunctionality.
It's happening in Australia too. I spoke to a CEO of a company here a few years ago which provides software and services to the government and RTA/RMS. There are cameras setup under overpasses which automatically take photos of each individual car and it's passengers.
In this particular incident their company was tasked with processing all of those photos to identify/track a guy who had murdered his wife and was on the run. Sure enough the system had snapped a pic of him driving, with his dead wife in the passenger seat.
A good use of the tech in that scenario, but I'm sure it's being used for mass surveillance as well.
A few years ago NSW Police had several cars fitted with Automatic number plate recognition and after a year of use they already had read more license plates than people living in that state.
I don't necessarily mind police using this for their benefit, but not long ago we didn't have all this technology and information so easily available. So there must be oversights and appropriate usage, or we are just giving them unfettered access. Warrants should have to be obtained to get this sort of information, I think.
No idea sorry. I was just chatting with this CEO at a networking event back sometime in 2011-2012. I'd been playing with the face.com api for facial recognition and he was interested in using it to automatically blur faces in these photos of car passengers. Being told that those cameras under overpasses were taking and storing photos of every car that passes by really stuck with me.
I first encountered these checkpoints in New Mexico and Texas this summer. They're really kind of interesting. It looks like a truck weigh station, except the interstate lanes are closed and everyone is forced to exit. They stop everyone at the checkpoint. They have some kind of terminal under a hood, but the officer (C&BP) looked at the terminal, asked me what country I'm from (USA) and sent me on my way (I'm white, and so were all of my passengers). The license reader cameras were obvious and about 4 car lengths from the terminal/stop sign. There's a separate line for trucks and busses. I was stunned the first time I saw one driving from Albuquerque to Las Cruces south on I-25/US-85. It was only on the northbound side, about 40 miles north of Las Cruces. It was obvious what it was. I encountered others on US-70 and I-10 in TX. Same drill at every one. I was never stopped by the officer for more than 15 seconds.
What you encountered was probably a C&BP interior checkpoint[0].
Whenever DHS apologists use the "air travel is a privilege, not a right" line, this is what I point them to. Between random C&BP highway checkpoints and TSA patrols on Amtrak, harassment-free travel of any form seems to be a privilege nowadays.
Basically anything you couldn't do in 1700s is a priveledge. Driving -- privelage, flying -- priveledge, getting on Amtrak -- they have TSA there too now.
"Arms" are hunting shotguns, pistols. Can't own fully automatic ones, or rocket launchers or fighter planes.
Drones will be illegal soon as well probably.
Basically you can get on your horse and start traveling through the country roads and woods, besides that you need to have "papers".
In your case I'm preaching to the choir, but this might help:
There is only one fundamental right, and it is to not have force initiated against you. (Why? Simply because that is in the self-interest of each rational adult human.)
Ergo, the government cannot properly stop you from air travel, moving about freely in the country, etc.
Thanks for that list. A family member was recently stopped at one of these; I'm amazed there are so many. (I was also stopped once on a Greyhound bus, I think by CBP; they asked each person "are you a citizen?" — on a bus ride that was entirely within the US, of course. This was a few years back.)
> "air travel is a privilege, not a right"
Travel is a right. It's a constitutionally granted right.
I find the whole argument that interfering with the travel of every single person on a single _particular_ mode of travel is somehow constitutional a bit vacuous. What about that mode of travel is so special? (AFAICT, "safety"). That the government is also interfering with road travel is ridiculous.
Travel, within the United States, is a constitutional right, one that has been upheld by the Supreme Court (see [1] and [2]): "Since the Constitution guarantees the right of interstate movement…"; the decision in [2] cites even earlier [3] Supreme Court cases that asserted this right.
This Court long ago recognized that the nature of our Federal Union and our
constitutional concepts of personal liberty unite to require that all citizens
be free to travel throughout the length and breadth of our land uninhibited by
statutes, rules, or regulations which unreasonably burden or restrict this
movement. That [394 U.S. 618, 630] proposition was early stated by Chief
Justice Taney in the Passenger Cases, 7 How. 283, 492 (1849):
"For all the great purposes for which the Federal government was formed, we are
one people, with one common country. We are all citizens of the United States;
and, as members of the same community, must have the right to pass and repass
through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own States."
We have no occasion to ascribe the source of this right to travel interstate to
a particular constitutional provision. 8 It suffices that, as MR. JUSTICE
STEWART said for the Court in United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, 757 -758
(1966):
"The constitutional right to travel from one State to another . . . occupies a
position fundamental to the concept of our Federal Union. It is a right that
has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized.
". . . [T]he right finds no explicit mention in the Constitution. The reason,
it has been suggested, is [394 U.S. 618, 631] that a right so elementary was
conceived from the beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger
Union the Constitution created. In any event, freedom to travel throughout the
United States has long been recognized as a basic right under the
Constitution."
The USA is automatically photographing millions of cars and putting the data in a giant database used by all law-enforcement.
It reads like the premise of a dystopian science fiction novel.
I can't help but guess that the reaction is going to be a big shoulder shrug, because, to but it bluntly, things aren't that bad for most people. If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass if and when you come in contact with the police, life in the USA is rich, full; it's like heaven.
If I have heaven, am I going to risk it just because of some law enforcement techniques which are only questionable in the abstract?
You may be on to something there. I wonder, however, how people are going to reconcile what the government is doing now with all of those previous works of fiction? It's going to have to add up to something -- a narrative must be formed. Were those just the halcyon days of yore? And now we've somehow "grown up" to face the realities of a scary world?
Even more troubling, people are people, and when this is seriously abused -- and my money says it'll happen within the next 20 years -- how are people going to explain it all away?
I am left with the troubling thought that we are creating for ourselves a dystopian society never dreamed of even by sci-fi writers. Rome had nothing on this, nor does North Korea. The attention a known dissident would receive in former East Germany is a cakewalk compared to the kind of surveillance we're giving each citizen who's guilty of nothing. The only thing we're waiting for is the logical and natural corruption of large systems of people to take place.
Um, I really don't think it's at East German Stasi-levels. Known dissidents were gaslighted, had objects in their homes moved around, and had informants reporting on them in their apartment buildings/family/workplace.
It's bad, it's dystopian, but it doesn't seem to be THAT bad yet.
>how people are going to reconcile what the government is doing now with all of those previous works of fiction?
I don't think we should over-estimate how widely read those works of fiction actually are, so there may not be a reconciliation. This, reality, is literally the first time some people have thought about the implications of mass surveillance with modern technology. SF geeks are, once again, ahead of the curve. :)
Movies like Minority Report are good primers for the concept of a panopticon. But I must have read 10's of stories involving panopticons in Analog and F&SF on all sides of the issue, in all variants. I remember a particularly good one involving how to get away with murder in a panopticon society. Iain Banks' The Culture with it's benevolent, quite desirable panopticons (the Minds).
Oddly, I don't remember any stories that remind me of what's going on now, which is a battle between those who want to protect security at any cost, and those who simply don't trust the government, any government, with the kind of power necessary to even come close to the level of protection they seem to be aiming for, which is total.
> If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass if and when you come in contact with the police, life in the USA is rich, full; it's like heaven.
Sure, until any of the above changes. Or you piss off the wrong person with connections. Some of which you may have little control over.
And to be honest - to not be raked over the coals simply to exercise my right to freedom of movement is not exactly "heaven" to me, it's the basics of a free society based on laws.
Don't mistake my description for advocacy - heaven should not be for so few, nor should it be so judgmental and so brittle.
As for your comments about movement - try to keep some perspective! While the TSA is an icon of everything wrong with our security climate (security theater, irrational assessment of risk, irrational assignment of resources, and a banal humiliation meted out to those who can't afford to skip the lines) it is, at least theoretically, under our control. The next President could dismantle the whole thing (although I'm not sure what statutory restrictions there are - certainly the President and Congress could change things if they wanted).
No one wants to be the one to dismantle the TSA, because when the next attack happens (not if, when) they'll get the blame.
> If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass if and when you come in contact with the police, life in the USA is rich, full; it's like heaven.
How exactly does this sound like heaven? Sounds incredibly restrictive and authoritarian to me. Always make sure you're not saying or doing the wrong thing. What happened to 'land of the free; home of the brave'?
This is the sort of apparatus that, once installed, lies dormant until one day it is called into action and springs shut, clamping down on freedom.
Just because they're building the gallows slowly and using such wonderful rope doesn't make the eventual hanging any less troublesome.
EDIT:
You know, 70 years ago today the Red Army found out what could be done with good record keeping and decent surveillance, and at what scale.
Imagine, just imagine, if you could type your favorite demographic into a terminal, get a list of everyone fitting that and some other criteria, and then a list of addresses and doors to knock on.
Mankind and government has never done well with such power.
This would seem to be a great database for the police to watch for juicy civil forfeiture targets to stumble through their jurisdiction, to seize a car or its possible contents.
How would they know that you have good stuff inside the car? Other databases.
Readit News
Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads.
Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have:
Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few years)
Unless of course you're a criminal, in which case you can handily avoid a lot of this!
I used to think we could escape surveillance using technology. Fool's errand. We'd need an entire culture change. It's gone.
If blanket video coverage of public areas is fine, why not blanket audio coverage? Add in facial and audio recognition. Now consider you're running about with a microphone webcam combo in your pocket, the power and battery life of which will only increase.
I hate it with every ounce of my being, but I can't see a way out here. I can't see the 'line', any more.
It is no mystery why the Constitution included the provision allowing citizens to arm themselves with the same class of weapons that the government possessed. The memory of tyrannical governance was fresh. Information is no different, if the government posses this information - so should the citizens.
This means dismantling the five main pillars that are used to nullify, misdirect, or otherwise diminish the power of the vote - both a a signaling mechanism that members of the electorate can use to unify themselves, and as a reliably severe punitive tool that the electorate can use to avenge themselves when their "representatives" betray their interests. Listed in no particular order, they are
1. Gerrymandering (aka partisan redistricting) 2. Closed primaries 3. Private campaign finance 4. The "revolving door" that allows private industry to offer well-paid sinecures to public "servants" who have systematically betrayed the public's trust. 5. Myriad restrictions on ballot access.
It's important to recognize that while each of these pillars diminishes the power of the vote, the really insidious effect comes from their interaction. But those knock-on effects can all be stopped by addressing the fundamental - and fundamental anti-democratic - structures at their roots.
Eliminating any one of these abominations tilts the balance back in favor of the good guys. All of them together can be lethal to the ambitions of people who's own ambitions are anathema to a self-governing republic.
That's pretty much when I understood what "oligarchy" meant and how very much there we were.
Snowden didn't help my mental picture of the country.
Your suggestion of a democratization of spy programs is actually one of the premises of "The Circle", the book is meant to paint a dystopian future.
It's easy to reverse some of this. If they're recording license plates and they or someone else will do it regardless, then stop having license plates. The justification for having them doesn't really apply to self-driving cars anyway.
Your argument seems to be that you can't effectively prohibit something that technology makes practical. That clearly isn't the case -- the constitution has been preventing police from searching your home without a warrant since 1789, even though they absolutely do have the operational capability to do that.
More to the point, even if they're not prohibited from spying, as long as we're not prohibited from defending against that spying we haven't lost. Encryption works. Tor works. In many cases the lack of prohibition on spying would be irrelevant if not for the existing prohibitions and impediments to strong anonymity, as with regulations on digital money transfers.
What's interesting is that your conclusion is still mostly right. Government secrecy is the cancer of democracy. But governments being transparent to their people in no way requires people to be transparent to their governments.
People like Edward Snowden have said surveillance can be used for good purposes. For example, fast forward and imagine auto insurance companies using this traffic monitoring data: Instead of structuring their prices based around age/gender/racial/class discrimination, they can use actual statistics to determine a little more about how safe someone is driving. Or instead of civil engineers having to waste time, money and other resources doing traffic studies...what if they could see the effects of their work in real-time? I think this technology could be used for very good purposes if there was just some transparency and rules surrounding it.
If the license plate tracking gets to that point within metropolitan areas (presumably where cameras are most dense) or they start doing it from blimps or whatever, at least there is precedence for striking it.
It's not going to stop the collection but it should at least prevent the data being used against you in court. Of course, parallel construction. Sigh...
EDIT: There would need to be a concomitant cultural change as well. As it stands folks are not aware of or engaged with what their government is doing.
Even if we replaced every government official today, it could quickly devolve back to its current state.
It's worth noting that no longer do citizens have the ability to arm themselves with "the same class of weapons" as the government. Unless you're willing to sell APCs and cruise missiles to private parties, there's no way a rebellion can outgun country's military.
Not at this rate. I think officials see the Snowden-fallout and say, "hey, that wasn't so bad. the public barely cares. Yo Comey, hit the press & equate encryption to child abuse; we can win this narrative." Lack of transparency is certainly an issue, but i'd say the bigger one how to make sense of this information to the public.
That said, I feel like the right to bare arms was included specifically for overthrowing oppressive governments (and in case the British came back?).
At what point does a government become sufficiently oppressive as to be overthrown by the people? Without defining that, I feel like government can just keep employing the "but terrorists" excuse and the overton window to keep stripping us of more and more of our privacy and rights.
Deleted Comment
Here in the UK most people I know feel safer with surveillance, it's used primarily to keep law and order.
We don't live in some authoritarian state where it's used for nefarious means, it's used to keep the public safe.
And seriously, why would you care if you're sitting on a database? What difference does it make to anything?
And I want to know when this mythical time was when we all had total privacy? I don't understand what bothers people so much about a person in a CCTV monitoring station looking at them sitting on a bus, or a spook reading the emails I send to my parents. Honestly, no-one cares.
I don't particularly mind CCTV coverage of cities, if we still live in 1970 and technology limits it to essentially manual viewing of feeds to follow criminal suspects. In that world, ordinary citizens walking around a city centre are items of data that are discarded forever as soon as the tape reels run out. Even if they're kept, the volumes of data involved are so huge that they're effectively lost in time anyway.
The world we live in today is not that world. We are not far from being able to use facial recognition to track the whereabouts of every single citizen and save it forever, indexed along with the video recording of them at the time. We already have the capability to do that using cellphones. We can save the entire life history of individuals using these records and collate them into a viewable form near-instantly.
As I alluded to in my earlier post, the way we're going it's not a huge leap to imagine voice recognition allowing for phone calls to follow suit. Why is voice recognition important? Because it turns weeks and weeks of trawling through transcripts into a search query with instant results.
It's a completely different ball game. It's permanent, searchable, indexable super-fast memory. 'Forgetting' becomes obsolete.
In the old world of tape CCTV cameras, my neighbours knew more about me than the Government. Now, it's almost certainly the other way around, and if not, only because they've decided not to type 'stegosaurus' into the Big Database of Everything.
Except when it's not. No one disagrees the advantages afforded to us with access to data. However with great power comes great responsibility and our leaders, including the institutional powers behind them, invariably show a lack of the latter.
"Honestly, no-one cares."
That is patently untrue. People who understand the disadvantages and pitfalls of unfettered access to data care very much and fight for our rights even if we are too busy to make it a priority in our lives. The EFF have made it their job to care for example.
I'm actually fine with a CCTV operator in a monitoring station viewing the feeds. I'm also OK with the recordings being kept a short time in case they are needed to investigate something not spotted at the time. What I'm not comfortable with is them being kept more than a month or so. CCTV footage kept long term may be linked with Face recognition for detailed and personal tracking.
Likewise with the ANPR, I would be OK with it kept and accessible for a month or so (although I think a judge should approve searches both on a particular event (time and location) and for searches on a particular number plate.
We may not yet live in a authoritarian state but can you rule out one occuring in the next 50 years? What if legal and reasonable things today are outlawed, gay rights roled back and they search the ANPR for people who may have frequented gay bars or the archived communications data for anyone who used Grindr.
In my view the collected knowledge is more dangerous than the terrorists to a free society and oversight and limits on retention are required.
You are right though that the majority of the public do not feel this way yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose the surveilance where not fully justified and try to educate them.
I would also note precisely what you said "people I know feel safer with surveilance" and while I think you may be right I'm really not sure how much safer they actually are.
I'm from the UK and I absolutely, utterly disagree with what you are saying, most of which is baseless.
There have been abuses, there are corrupt intentions at work and there most certainly are people who do not think this level of surveillance is a good thing.
I seem to remember one of the Pirate Bay founders said something along those lines. Not even because it's "already lost" but because we need to start treating the cause and not the symptom. Yeah it's great that we can use encryption to avoid government snooping for now, but how long will that be feasible? The long-term solution would be to stop them from doing it in the first place.
If someone is logging your access to a something, they are required to provide you with the logs on request.
I think Europe at least would go for it. In Japan telephone cameras are required to make a clicking sound. This is an extension of the concept.
1. A law requiring the government to delete this data after a certain amount of time.
2. Legal penalties for abusing this data. Perhaps standards for how the data must be protected.
There is/was almost zero prosecution of individuals involved in the global financial collapse of 2008. Occupy Wall Street protestors, on the other hand, were beaten, arrested, maced, and so on.
Rules against authority figures in this country are for show at best. Didn't used to be that way, but here we are.
Actually it's even more serious. If you try to avoid it it's a criminal act and your labeled as a criminal. To be very honest I'd rather move to a remote place getting away of this evolution.
Honest question: What's stopping you?
A huge number of people say they'd readily give up life in a nation that infringes their privacy for a different life away from prying eyes, but very, very few people actually bother to do it. There are plenty of nations where surveillance is still at the 'none' level, beyond a few paper records for things like passports and car registration. And generally they're quite cheap to live in and have nice weather. So why are you still living in the apparently awful conditions where you are now?
Could it be that privacy is actually much less important to you than ready access to, say, a good internet connection?
True. Network effects negate the advantages of encryption. You can't use TOR to hide when posting to FB, in other words.
For the life of me I do not understand why both major parties aren't having conniption fits right now. Are these the same parties that, on a bipartisan basis, told Nixon to get lost? Shut down some of the intelligence community's overreach in the 70s? Impeached a U.S. President for lying under oath?
Both parties over the previous 50 years have taken strong stands -- both separately and together -- in regards to strong oversight of privacy and freedom. Would Reagan have put up with this? Carter? Ike? JFK? It's inconceivable. During those times, yes, there was plenty of illegal mucking around -- but wholesale bulldozing of citizen's privacy? It's something from a dystopian sci-fi novel of just 15 years ago.
Surely this has to come up there somewhere near as important as all those other political scandals. Surely it would be a popular measure. But instead, what I'm seeing is somebody trying to introduce a bill to nibble around the edges, then others adding amendments so that the bill to reduce NSA spying actually increases it. It's like they're being incentivized to go in exactly the wrong direction.
It just doesn't make sense to me. There is some missing piece to this puzzle. When I see guys like Hayden, with his cocky attitude; there's something he knows that I don't know, and it's not that AQ is some kind of clear and present danger. It's something else. (Sorry to sound so mysterious. I'm truly at a loss.)
We might need to embrace it, make everything transparent and collaborative, and figure out how to make use of the information to create a state that is better than what currently exists.
This is a tech problem. We created this, all while saying something like "Yeah, but all that ethical and philosophy stuff isn't really anything I need to worry about. What I need are eyeballs"
The government takes the blame in many cases because they hold all the trump cards -- they can take the data from anybody that's collecting it. They can also send you to jail, which commercial providers cannot directly do (yet). But the problem is with the tech. We have met the enemy and he is us.
Deleted Comment
- Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion
- Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine
- Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, disobeying their parents, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc. Or, more commonly in the "developed" world, failure to investigate or pursue family-based vigilante "justice" against same.
- Failure to acknowledge women as people and rape as a crime
- Committing violence against, or being complicit in violence against, children who dared to go to school
- Corruption to a degree that renders the public health infrastructure so dysfunctional that tens of thousands of people die needlessly
- Outright censorship of any reporting that paints the state in a negative light
---
"Knowing things about citizens" is dangerous because it enables the state to be far more effective in pursuing policies like the above. We ought to limit the government's knowledge of the lives of its citizens because that makes it much harder to effectively implement policies like these.
HOWEVER, HN sounds downright ridiculous when it declares that being listed in a database is comparable to being summarily executed for criticizing state religion.
This definition [1] even uses this very argument as an example:
"The counter to the relative privation argument when applied, for example, to compare America with other more tyrannous countries is to note that the proper comparison to make should not be between America and other tyrannies but between America and the ideal of freedom."
I find it a scary way to look at the world and to me it always comes off as less an honest argument and more like somebody who understands fallacy using it to persuade the reader for their own benefit.
Like the sort of thing they'll tell you as they are locking up your cage. "Hey, you're lucky it's dry unlike the cages the bad guys use!" the voice under the helmet said.
[1] http://www.hevanet.com/kort/KING6.HTM
2. Snowden, Manning, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond
3. Don't know about this one. I think it's worth mentioning Racism, Islamophobia and Islam or race related violence here.
4. #opDeathEaters
5. I don't know about this one either, but school seems mostly like a tool to incur debt. So not necessarily a plus.
6. You watched the Healthcare debate, right?
7. Surveilled reading is more dangerous than censoring books, full stop. But if you're looking for censorship, there's plenty to go around. Try finding a copy of the Sony leaks these days. Look at what is happening to social media.
Here's the thing: countries can transition into totalitarianism quickly.
1930 Germany was very, very different than 1940 Germany. Hitler's rise to power happened in the blink of an eye, before most people understood what was happening.
This is why "oh, being listed in a database is nowhere as bad as being summarily executed" should be consolation. Such mindsets breed complacency, whereas what we need is constant vigilance and an extreme intolerance for policies that grant the government more power without any oversight.
The existence of worse does not make better good.
The state of things in the US is scary, and Saudi Arabia existing doesn't make it less so.
Edit: I'd argue that corruption of The State by lobbyists, special interest groups, and shadowy Super PACs cost thousands of lives a year in the USA.
Al-Awlaki? He was not accused of killing anyone himself, but got drone striked for writing terrorist propaganda. So did his son (for having Al-Awlaki as a father, no less). That seems like a pretty close fit.
Corruption to a degree that renders the public health infrastructure so dysfunctional that tens of thousands of people die needlessly
That's a funny example. Most people in western non-US countries would say the US meets this definition handily.
All that said, your point stands. There are worse governments than the US government. But lots better too.
This happens but you tolerate it because it's consistent with your arbitrary local culture. Consider pedophilia (having "wrong" sexual feelings) which comes with chemical castration and an attempt to "cure" it along with imprisonment of course. You don't even have to abuse anyone to suffer some of these consequences. Sound familiar? Have you ever met any self-confessed pedophile who hadn't been arrested for a related crime? Until they're outed, they're forced to keep their feelings secret from everyone because it's a kind of western thought crime. This leads us to imagine that all pedophiles rape children. They don't any more than 60 years ago all homosexuals raped children.
But when did the US and UK start comparing themselves to the most oppressive rather than the freest in the world?
In the case of government, it's definitely not complicated to classify the aggregate behaviour as unqualified bad (in term of result), regardless of the intention of the individuals working within the systems.
Dead Comment
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
https://www.google.com/#q=U.S.+Spies+on+Millions+of+Cars
Basically you can Google the title and click on first result to see it without limitations of a paywall
[1] http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?10880
I ask as your question seemed a bit strange to me.
I am not sure if you are alluding to the fact that individuals trying to evade the law wouldn't know to change their tires, or if car licensing & insurance is much different than I imagined in the US (and individuals get a new license plate each year or something crazy).
Edit: also thanks for the link! I really had no idea RFID was hidden in tires! Makes me wonder what else they are hidden in...
I'm quite in to cars and I had NO IDEA this was a thing.
a rfid label on the inside of the tire would work exactly the same and not compromise the tire structure.
In this particular incident their company was tasked with processing all of those photos to identify/track a guy who had murdered his wife and was on the run. Sure enough the system had snapped a pic of him driving, with his dead wife in the passenger seat.
A good use of the tech in that scenario, but I'm sure it's being used for mass surveillance as well.
I don't necessarily mind police using this for their benefit, but not long ago we didn't have all this technology and information so easily available. So there must be oversights and appropriate usage, or we are just giving them unfettered access. Warrants should have to be obtained to get this sort of information, I think.
Whenever DHS apologists use the "air travel is a privilege, not a right" line, this is what I point them to. Between random C&BP highway checkpoints and TSA patrols on Amtrak, harassment-free travel of any form seems to be a privilege nowadays.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Border_Patrol_int...
"Arms" are hunting shotguns, pistols. Can't own fully automatic ones, or rocket launchers or fighter planes.
Drones will be illegal soon as well probably.
Basically you can get on your horse and start traveling through the country roads and woods, besides that you need to have "papers".
There is only one fundamental right, and it is to not have force initiated against you. (Why? Simply because that is in the self-interest of each rational adult human.)
Ergo, the government cannot properly stop you from air travel, moving about freely in the country, etc.
> "air travel is a privilege, not a right"
Travel is a right. It's a constitutionally granted right.
I find the whole argument that interfering with the travel of every single person on a single _particular_ mode of travel is somehow constitutional a bit vacuous. What about that mode of travel is so special? (AFAICT, "safety"). That the government is also interfering with road travel is ridiculous.
Travel, within the United States, is a constitutional right, one that has been upheld by the Supreme Court (see [1] and [2]): "Since the Constitution guarantees the right of interstate movement…"; the decision in [2] cites even earlier [3] Supreme Court cases that asserted this right.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Guest[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_v._Thompson
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_v._Nevada
It reads like the premise of a dystopian science fiction novel.
I can't help but guess that the reaction is going to be a big shoulder shrug, because, to but it bluntly, things aren't that bad for most people. If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass if and when you come in contact with the police, life in the USA is rich, full; it's like heaven.
If I have heaven, am I going to risk it just because of some law enforcement techniques which are only questionable in the abstract?
Even more troubling, people are people, and when this is seriously abused -- and my money says it'll happen within the next 20 years -- how are people going to explain it all away?
I am left with the troubling thought that we are creating for ourselves a dystopian society never dreamed of even by sci-fi writers. Rome had nothing on this, nor does North Korea. The attention a known dissident would receive in former East Germany is a cakewalk compared to the kind of surveillance we're giving each citizen who's guilty of nothing. The only thing we're waiting for is the logical and natural corruption of large systems of people to take place.
It's bad, it's dystopian, but it doesn't seem to be THAT bad yet.
I don't think we should over-estimate how widely read those works of fiction actually are, so there may not be a reconciliation. This, reality, is literally the first time some people have thought about the implications of mass surveillance with modern technology. SF geeks are, once again, ahead of the curve. :)
Movies like Minority Report are good primers for the concept of a panopticon. But I must have read 10's of stories involving panopticons in Analog and F&SF on all sides of the issue, in all variants. I remember a particularly good one involving how to get away with murder in a panopticon society. Iain Banks' The Culture with it's benevolent, quite desirable panopticons (the Minds).
Oddly, I don't remember any stories that remind me of what's going on now, which is a battle between those who want to protect security at any cost, and those who simply don't trust the government, any government, with the kind of power necessary to even come close to the level of protection they seem to be aiming for, which is total.
Sure, until any of the above changes. Or you piss off the wrong person with connections. Some of which you may have little control over.
And to be honest - to not be raked over the coals simply to exercise my right to freedom of movement is not exactly "heaven" to me, it's the basics of a free society based on laws.
As for your comments about movement - try to keep some perspective! While the TSA is an icon of everything wrong with our security climate (security theater, irrational assessment of risk, irrational assignment of resources, and a banal humiliation meted out to those who can't afford to skip the lines) it is, at least theoretically, under our control. The next President could dismantle the whole thing (although I'm not sure what statutory restrictions there are - certainly the President and Congress could change things if they wanted).
No one wants to be the one to dismantle the TSA, because when the next attack happens (not if, when) they'll get the blame.
How exactly does this sound like heaven? Sounds incredibly restrictive and authoritarian to me. Always make sure you're not saying or doing the wrong thing. What happened to 'land of the free; home of the brave'?
Though I am open to examples to the contrary.
Just because they're building the gallows slowly and using such wonderful rope doesn't make the eventual hanging any less troublesome.
EDIT:
You know, 70 years ago today the Red Army found out what could be done with good record keeping and decent surveillance, and at what scale.
Imagine, just imagine, if you could type your favorite demographic into a terminal, get a list of everyone fitting that and some other criteria, and then a list of addresses and doors to knock on.
Mankind and government has never done well with such power.
How would they know that you have good stuff inside the car? Other databases.