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Don't Look Now but Big Brother is Watching

753C said:
I don't think freedom is what we are talking about. It is more about Privacy wouldn't you say? I mean freedom isn't being reduced here. Just privacy, right? Or am I missing something?
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I don't think you are missing anything, it's a case of taking the case of surveillance and adding on a lot of other stuff that hasn't happened. I find all the reams of quotations garnered from different sources are just tiresome and a way for some people to continue to lecture to those who obviously are not of the same mindset. It might be different if in all these exchanges there was some possibility of helpful activity or even sensible advice but so far I haven't seen that happening.
 
Well when one's actions are observed it curtails your freedom because you are unsure how your actions are going to be interpreted. You don't speak freely in an email because it is being recorded. You don't give your opinion openly. etc etc. ie surveillance in and of itself curtails your freedom once you are aware of it.
 
What do I mean by personal freedom? Let's see:

1. Expectation of privacy when I make phone calls from my residence.

2. My travel routes not be monitored or recorded without my consent.

For starters. Of course, if they have probable cause and obtain a warrant then they can do what they want.
 
Again though, freedom of speech or action are not being impaired unless we choose to impair it ourselves. We can still speak out against anything we want, or do anything we want within the realm of legality.
This thread got me thinking yesterday for a long time. I am a very private person, and I do not like the idea of my words and actions being monitored, but there is absolutely another side to the coin. I think if people can look at it objectively they will understand that there is a lot of good that can come of this sort of thing. Surveillance is a hugely valuable tool in most criminal investigations.
Like I said, I don't like the idea, but....
I think this will be the discussion material of a lot of college ethics classes to come.
 
Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas have co-written a book called The New Digital Age and they said:

"We say this in the book, that you need to fight for your privacy or you're going to lose it. "
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and go on to give a specific example of why they are concerned:

We were in Britain last week; there was a terrible terrorist act -- one soldier was killed by one apparently lone Muslim extremist in the entire country. And the whole country's excited about this, it's obviously a terrible thing, one person's dead. The home secretary calls for broad regulations and surveillance of the Internet. Not a good thing. So it's easy for governments to overreact and take away your privacy, your security, and so forth in the name of the security.
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This is my point exactly. It is very easy for governments to overreact and take away freedoms in the name of safety. It is easy for people to overreact and let them. It is hard to regain something that is already lost. Better to prevent it with a little foresight and learning a lesson from history.

I don't think it is a question of security vs privacy. The two can co-exist. It is more about having controls in place about the collection and more importantly the use or re-use of the data collected and a culture of transparency and accountability. With great power comes great responsibility, but when a Government does something in secret and then lies about it and vilifies the person who exposes it, that power is not being accompanied by responsibility but by corruption and an abuse of power. Government is FOR the people, not OVER the people and every one, especially the Government, would do well to remember that.
 
I don't think it is a question of security vs privacy. The two can co-exist. It is more about having controls in place about the collection and more importantly the use or re-use of the data collected and a culture of transparency and accountability. With great power comes great responsibility, but when a Government does something in secret and then lies about it and vilifies the person who exposes it, that power is not being accompanied by responsibility but by corruption and an abuse of power. Government is FOR the people, not OVER the people and every one, especially the Government, would do well to remember that.
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I Agree with this. I don't know enough yet about exactly what happened, and I don't think anyone does yet. The officials in the know are denying and downplaying the whole thing, and outside of Snowden there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of credible information to the contrary. This is obviously because they did it in secret.
There certainly needs to be some serious oversight on these types of information gathering ventures.
 
Interesting.... but, anyone requiring me to "Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed.", in order to make their point... well.... that's a little bit of a reach for me.
There are some good points in there though.
 
I think that they have the same or similar issues as I do - the only way to effectively make your point about why you are concerned about the whole thing is to draw these analogies.

I think the bottom line is that if we don't want the worst case scenarios to happen, we need to stand up now before anything happens.

I just discovered in another article last night that in fact surveillance in my own country is far more intrusive than what the US is doing with far less regard for any legal or democratic process. (Not that this came as a huge surprise but ...)

The difficulty is that when you stand up and say "Hey we need to be worried here' you start sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Thanks guys for making it hard to be taken seriously when there is finally something real to be worried about.
 
The Justice Department said it was "disappointed" in the decision by Hong Kong authorities to allow Snowden to leave the semi-autonomous Chinese territory, ...... "In light of this, we find their decision to be particularly troubling."
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Yes because the world MUST do what the US says right?

"The WikiLeaks legal team and I are interested in preserving Mr. Snowden's rights and protecting him as a person," Garzon said. "What is being done to Mr. Snowden and to Mr. Julian Assange -- for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest -- is an assault against the people."
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I quite agree. The right to reveal information about wrong doing should be protected under the law not a cause for prosecution to silence them.

Snowden "betrayed the trust and confidence we had in him" and is "not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent."

"This was an individual with top-secret clearance, whose duty it was to administer these networks," Alexander said. "He betrayed that confidence and stole some of our secrets."

He said the super-secret communications intelligence agency has changed passwords and procedures since Snowden's disclosures -- "But at the end of the day, we have to trust that our people are going to do the right thing."
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And can we consider that Snowden IS in fact doing the right thing? Certainly in my book he is. Revelation of wrong doing is always the right thing and the only people who could object to that are the people who are doing the wrong thing.
 
Big Brother is STILL watching more than it should!

From the NY TIMES

Apparently no espionage tool that Congress gives the National Security Agency is big enough or intrusive enough to satisfy the agency’s inexhaustible appetite for delving into the communications of Americans. Time and again, the N.S.A. has pushed past the limits that lawmakers thought they had imposed to prevent it from invading basic privacy, as guaranteed by the Constitution.


It was bad enough in 2008 when Congress allowed the agency to spy without a warrant on e-mails and text messages between Americans and foreign targets of an investigation. That already strained the Fourth Amendment’s protections against illegal searches, but lawmakers decided it was justified as part of a terror investigation.

It turns out, as Charlie Savage revealed in The Times on Thursday, that the N.S.A. went far beyond those boundaries. Instead, it copies virtually all overseas messages that Americans send or receive, then scans them to see if they contain any references to people or subjects the agency thinks might have a link to terrorists.

That could very well include innocent communications between family members expressing fears of a terror attack. Or messages between an editor and a reporter who is covering international security issues. Or the privileged conversation between a lawyer and a client who is being investigated.

Data collection on this scale goes far beyond what Congress authorized, and it clearly shreds a common-sense understanding of the Fourth Amendment. It’s as if the government were telling its citizens not to even talk about security issues in private messages or else they will come to the attention of the nation’s spies. “By injecting the N.S.A. into virtually every crossborder interaction, the U.S. government will forever alter what has always been an open exchange of ideas,” said Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Obama administration officials justified this unwarranted expansion of surveillance powers with the usual hairsplitting arguments over semantics. It’s not “bulk collection” of messages if the messages aren’t stored, they said (even if every message is analyzed by supercomputers as it is sent). It’s legitimate to search through conversations “about” a target, even if the target isn’t part of the conversation. Naturally, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved these half-baked assertions with a secret opinion.

The disclosure of this practice makes it more urgent than ever that Congress clamp down on what is unquestionably the bulk collection of American communications and restrict it to clear targets of an investigation. Despite President Obama’s claim this week that “there is no spying on Americans,” the evidence shows that such spying is greater than the public ever knew.
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Why is it the "Obama" or "Bush" Administration when the President is powerless? Why not point a finger at the real culprits? A political system with no accountability and too many powers behind the scenes.
 
Presumably, the president is able to somewhat sway the general direction of the government's policies, putting their own mark on it. Though radical change might be more difficult to obtain, if not impossible.
 
Ai I'm not American, but it seems to me that whatever the actual powers of the President are assumed to be, when it comes down to it, they appear to be window dressing. Certainly the left hand doesn't appear to have clue what the right hand is doing hence all the 'embarrassing' revelations for this or that Administration and its always the President who carries the can, but when he stands up and says "I'm going to change this or change that" his powerlessness is revealed.
 
Meadow337 said:
Why is it the "Obama" or "Bush" Administration when the President is powerless? Why not point a finger at the real culprits? A political system with no accountability and too many powers behind the scenes.
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He said there was accountability and denied certain actions were taking place, it turns out, that was false. That is why he gets blame. Enough to make you throw a vote away by voting third party.
 
SFG75 said:
He said there was accountability and denied certain actions were taking place, it turns out, that was false. That is why he gets blame. Enough to make you throw a vote away by voting third party.
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Yes but it is perfectly clear that there is no accountability, and given the recent revelations (again) it is clear there are elements in the government over whom there is little or no oversight who operate with impunity out of sight. Blaming the figurehead is a. what they want you to do b. pointless. Point fingers at the ones doing the stuff, demand accountability from the ENTIRE government, ignore the poor sap they conned into thinking being President is a role with any importance other than PR and taking the blame for stuff he didn't know about and has no control over (and that goes for any of them not just the current one)
 
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