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Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

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Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#71

Post by ThomPete »

hermannj314 wrote: post #66

I have an aquaintance that was falsely accused of vehicular homicide because he had a car whose description was close enough for the police and he had to spend a decade in the legal system fighting for his freedom. And all of this is made possible because the police have access to records of which cars are owned and by whom and they can look at it. Should we not let the police use this information since this one indi…

Problem is that errors are always going to occur. the stronger the data sets the harder it can be to prove your innocence. We have rights and the law not to prevent the bad guys from doing bad things, but to protect the citizens from the potential misuse of the governmental system.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#72

Post by barking »

jlgreco wrote: post #64
barking wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what you mean by the reverse?

Domestic terrorists may very likely have exhibited juvenile anti-social behavior. How likely is the reverse? That is, how likely is it that someone who exhibits juvenile anti-social behavior will eventually be a domestic terrorist? My money is on "it is very unlikely", and that is a problem.

That's analagous to saying it's a problem that Health screenings are often targeted at high-risk groups when the vast majority of those groups won't get the disease in any case.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#73

Post by eliasmacpherson »

barking wrote: post #59
alan_cx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Brit, I have a huge problem with all this. In the old days of US funded IRA attacks against amongst other things, our government, we never let the terrorists win. We didn't budge our principles or give up core freedoms. Sure our side did some very iffy things to combat the terror, but it was still illegal. We didn't try to legitimise it by tearing up principles that applied to normal people. But once 9/11 happen…

Is indefinite detention without trial ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment ) of members of a particular 'native' ethnic group in your country a sign of a free society? This happened during the 1970's in Northern ireland Just last week david cameron had to apologise for the UK security forces' actions in passing information to terrorist groups to enable the murder of, amongst others, a lawyer. He also had to apol…

I disagree, the US haven't faced a real threat since 2001. I agree with you that the UK cannot have a position of moral superiority. Perhaps the UK has learned the error of their ways, and in recent times has sought to mend them. A apology more than twenty years after the incident isn't much solace though.

This article about an incident in Northern Ireland may be interesting to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Showband_killings

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#74

Post by paganel »

> The aim of the TIA initiative was essentially to create a kind of ubiquitous pre-crime surveillance regime monitoring public and private databases.

I Ctrl+F-ed for Philip K. Dick's name, didn't find anything, I'll be the first one to copy-paste this:

> Paradoxes and alternate realities are created by the precognition of crimes when the chief of police intercepts a precognition that he is about to murder a man he has never met. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minority_Report)

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#75

Post by jlgreco »

barking wrote: post #72
jlgreco wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domestic terrorists may very likely have exhibited juvenile anti-social behavior. How likely is the reverse? That is, how likely is it that someone who exhibits juvenile anti-social behavior will eventually be a domestic terrorist? My money is on "it is very unlikely", and that is a problem.

That's analagous to saying it's a problem that Health screenings are often targeted at high-risk groups when the vast majority of those groups won't get the disease in any case.

.....and, where the cost of false positives is sufficiently high and the rate of false positives is sufficiently high, that is a very relevant consideration that is in fact made by the medical community. That is just a basic of modern medicine.

The world is not black and white. These are things that must be weighed and considered rationally with real data, not emotionally with fabricated absolutes. You don't get to discard half of your equation because when you include it the results don't make you feel warm and fuzzy.

P(A|B) = \frac{P(B | A)\, P(A)}{P(B)}

Not a hard concept.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#76

Post by chrisbennet »

Create wrote: post #31
barking wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?". What interpretation should they have taken from it?

For example, that since Clinton also answered fraudulently when challenged, he shouldn't be allowed to fly either. Nixon got caught too -- I presume he also did fly afterwards. But obviously some are more equal; 1984 Was Not Supposed To Be An Instruction Manual.

He was turned back because he lied (unknowingly) when the asked him if he'd been arrested.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#77

Post by acabal »

buro9 wrote: post #40
buro9 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has a law called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, within that is the notion of classes of criminal record being spent. I don't know the specifics, but you always have to declare the equivalent of felonies, but for misdemeanours you can lawfully not declare them after some period of time in which your debt is considered repaid and the record spent. The whole of the EU has such laws. I think most people with…

To reply to myself, the thing that I took away from his telling of this experience and watching his wife almost cry when they got to the part about boarding the plane back with the children... it's this: Every thing that you ever do is recorded somewhere. Every person has a file whether they think they do or not. This file will only ever be used against you. And Europe remembers such a thing... it was only 1990 that…

I think about this often too. I think the answer ultimately lies somewhere in the realm of "history is cyclical." A society's collective memory seems to fade after a few hundred years.

America today is an excellent example of that. The founders came from a time of tyranny and oppression, and worked hard to try to prevent that in their new country. And yet a lot of how our government today works is, I imagine, very much contrary to what the founding fathers envisioned.

You can be detained for seemingly no reason by police almost anywhere (see the ACLU's "constitution-free zone"), prisons and courts have become a means of revenge, not justice or rehabilitation, the president is increasingly seen as a king-like figure ("Something's wrong with the country? Must be the president's fault. What's he going to do to fix it?"), and--without much exaggeration--we're a small jump away from a total surveillance state, as this article emphasizes. In many ways we're already there, and that's just the stuff we know about.

In Europe, as you mentioned, the Stasi were around until just recently. There are still grandparents alive who remember what the continent went through during WW2. (My own is one of them.) European society's memory is still fresh, and they won't repeat mistakes they remember. I think that's why there are so many privacy-protecting laws enshrined in the EU.

We should pay attention to how countries recently emerging from oppression or war, like Romania, Serbia, or Bosnia, handle the internet. I'll bet they'll be the bastions of internet freedom in the coming decades.

But what of the US? Maybe we're trapped in cyclical history. Maybe in 50 years things will be bad enough for people to get up in arms, and we'll start over just like we did a few hundred years ago. Who knows.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#78

Post by mtgx »

paganel wrote: post #74

> The aim of the TIA initiative was essentially to create a kind of ubiquitous pre-crime surveillance regime monitoring public and private databases. I Ctrl+F-ed for Philip K. Dick's name, didn't find anything, I'll be the first one to copy-paste this: > Paradoxes and alternate realities are created by the precognition of crimes when the chief of police intercepts a precognition that he is about to murder a man he ha…

People have warned that this will happen eventually, but I don't think that many believed it. We're witnessing the first real steps towards making pre-crime recognition a reality in the country. Good bye "innocent until proven guilty".

Cory Doctorow has said in his "war against general computation" talk [1] that it's becoming cheaper and easier for authorities to just monitor everyone and store information about everyone, and then use algorithms to catch them, than focusing on who they they need to catch and following just that one. Now it's up to the people to stop this from becoming legal or from being done even illegally, not just in US, but in all countries, as I'm sure many others will try doing it, too. The ironic part is that the developed "democratic" countries may be the first to do it, because they are more advanced technologically.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#79

Post by betterunix »

mrgriscom wrote: post #42
mtgx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to fly to Latin America from Europe, I'd rather make the stop for the second plane in Europe, and then go straight to Latin America, than make the stop in US. I just don't want to deal with TSA in any way, especially after stories that now they even have data on what you tweeted and stuff like that, and they can take you aside or even arrest you for a while because of that. Will TSA consider me "suspicious"…

I really wish people would stop mixing up TSA and USCBP ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Customs_and_Border_Protect... )

It's not hard to understand the confusion. One agency takes a nude photo of you and punishes you for asserting your rights, the other demands that you let them explore your laptop and cites decades of precedent in ignoring civil rights, and both take pride in examining personal luggage and publicly embarrassing people.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#80

Post by altcognito »

Vivtek wrote: post #56
sliverstorm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that any kind of attempts to predict future criminal activities is always labeled "1984"? It seems to me that so long as you don't take it further than "being ready", done right it could be a good thing.

"Done right". There's your problem. Done right, Marxism is a good thing. Done right, a dictatorship is the most efficient form of government. But we are, in fact, dealing in sloppy reality, where many things - by their very nature - cannot be done right. No matter how hard we try, or how earnestly we believe in fairies, these things will not be done right. They will inevitably devolve into tyranny.

In fact, it's not even the point. Invasion of privacy is by definition, done wrong. Are we willing to give up all of our privacy to prevent a very, very small number of incidents.
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