Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
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Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#2Describing Obama: "the constitutional lawyer in the White House"
The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#3Has already been.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#4> A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created
There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract.
This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#5Describing Obama: "the constitutional lawyer in the White House" The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?
In 2005 he did, but he's pretty duplicitous in retrospect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ylVOdriEyA
So he's no longer the perfect person to do so.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#6Has already been.
I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling.
What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that.
The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions between different components of those assemblages. The increasing normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security' grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#7Has already been.
I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling. What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances…
Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent manufacturing bother.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling. What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances…
Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent manufacturing bother.
There's no evidence of that, quite the opposite. In fact, there's been significant pushes in both countries for intelligence-collected information to be made available to routine law enforcement. This is sort of my point about overlapping but not necessarily connected assemblages of surveillance. Although it seems believable, the mechanisms just aren't there (again, yet.) - police CAN request information from the NSA/GCHQ, but it's a torturous and slow process at the moment, and is largely paper based. The forthcoming surveillance state WILL make that available, but it's not happened yet.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#9It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent."
From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.
The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by democracy.
A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping, intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM. This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis.
Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world, especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation.
We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it.
The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall, walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan drone.
The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy.
As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital.
Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get "power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants.
In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay.
That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't have any money.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent manufacturing bother.
There's no evidence of that, quite the opposite. In fact, there's been significant pushes in both countries for intelligence-collected information to be made available to routine law enforcement. This is sort of my point about overlapping but not necessarily connected assemblages of surveillance. Although it seems believable, the mechanisms just aren't there (again, yet.) - police CAN request information from the NSA…
GCHQ is quite strongly against allowing some evidence to be used in court cases because it would need to be tested in open court.
They haven't said anything about intelligence provided to law enforcement.