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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

#11

Post by rayiner »

smoyer wrote: post #2

Describing 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?

You can agree with the precepts of the Constitution and justify certain kinds of surveillance. Even if you think the NSA surveillance is unconstitutional, you have to concede that "privacy" is not a well-defined constitutional value. The framers spent many pages in the Federalist talking about the ins and outs of various voting systems, but never articulated a broader concept of privacy. The 4th amendment is based fundamentally on a "property rights" view: intended to keep the government from searching your property.

A perfect example is the recent case in Jones. Is it unconstitutional because putting a GPS tracker in a car enables 24/7 surveillance, or because it requires the police to physically trespass on the car to place the tracker?

The protection of "privacy" in the constitution has been extended to reach things birth control and abortion based on the "penumbras" of the rights that are actually in the text. This is fuzzy ground! You can believe that those penumbras exist yet still not believe they cover recording information people put out into the public internet.

In short, its not so much that Obama is well-placed to know how to work around the Constitution, its that he knows that digital privacy is on unsure Constitutional footing in the first place and is positioned to take advantage of where the lines are drawn.

Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

#12

Post by Zigurd »

iamwithnail wrote: post #8
Zigurd wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

From the NSA to a "random" traffic stop: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/paral...

Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

#13

Post by throwawayaway »

netcan wrote: post #9

It'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 coun…

I think such a defeatist attitude will inevitably lead to a scenario where those in power are not subject to surveillance, and those without having every detail of their lives recorded. In so far as I can tell, if you use noscript, you don't show up on google analytics, encryption isn't broken and your analogy of disney with no money trying to shut down bittorrent is completely incorrect given that the cost of computing, communication and encryption is tending towards zero over time.

I can envisage a scenario where for the vast majority of low bandwidth communications, even the endpoints aren't known to be in contact to a third party.

Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

#14

Post by beerbajay »

smoyer wrote: post #2

Describing 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?

> agrees with our constitution's precepts

The problem is that not even the members of the Supreme Court can agree on what these are or how they should be interpreted.

The everyday understanding of constitutional law is not the same as the legal understanding, which is part of the problem. The commerce clause, as read by any normal individual would not allow the Federal government to have anything to do with (e.g.) pot, but that is how it has been interpreted by the supreme court. No normal person would say that corporations are people, but according to the court they are. etc etc etc.

Reading the constitution, I get a clear picture of a federation of independent states. But this idea died after the Civil War, if not before.

Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

#15

Post by rayiner »

beerbajay wrote: post #14
smoyer wrote: post #2

Describing 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?

> agrees with our constitution's precepts The problem is that not even the members of the Supreme Court can agree on what these are or how they should be interpreted. The everyday understanding of constitutional law is not the same as the legal understanding, which is part of the problem. The commerce clause, as read by any normal individual would not allow the Federal government to have anything to do with (e.g.) po…

Commerce clause says that the federal government shall be able to regulate interstate commerce. Pot is something traded in intestate commerce. Its not as ridiculous as you make it seem. The framers might have used narrower language if they could foresee that one day, everything would be a part of interstate commerce. That certainly wasn't true during the time of the framing, when goods were produced locally or even primarily by the individuals using them on family farms. But they used broad language with the intent of giving the federal government the power to regulate large scale commerce as it existed then.

The Supreme Court didn't say that corporations are people. It said that people don't lose their first amendment rights because they assemble themselves into a corporation. Falls naturally out of the first amendments rights to free speech and assembly.

You can't ignore the civil war. The 13, 14, and 15 amendments were a renegotiation of the Constitution at the point of a sword. The idea of a federation of independent states is called into doubt by the supremacy clause and commerce clause, which was in the original, and the 14 amendment, which allows Congress to legislate directly against the states to enforce the amendment. Moreover, looking at original intent, the federalist faction of framers wanted a strong central government. They didn't give states autonomy because they wanted to, they did it because they had to, and they set the stage for states becoming secondary powers.

Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

#17

Post by nraynaud »

netcan wrote: post #9

It'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 coun…

The worst part is that they collect everything to make a case against you, but you still have to wait one hour in line at Boston airport to cross the border. They don't do anything to streamline your interactions with the governement or to defend you when you're accused.

Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

#18

Post by beerbajay »

rayiner wrote: post #15
beerbajay wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> agrees with our constitution's precepts The problem is that not even the members of the Supreme Court can agree on what these are or how they should be interpreted. The everyday understanding of constitutional law is not the same as the legal understanding, which is part of the problem. The commerce clause, as read by any normal individual would not allow the Federal government to have anything to do with (e.g.) po…

Commerce clause says that the federal government shall be able to regulate interstate commerce. Pot is something traded in intestate commerce. Its not as ridiculous as you make it seem. The framers might have used narrower language if they could foresee that one day, everything would be a part of interstate commerce. That certainly wasn't true during the time of the framing, when goods were produced locally or even p…

> Pot is something traded in intestate commerce

Sorry, I should have specified that I meant "grown for private consumption". Obviously if it crosses state borders it fits with what the commerce clause was designed to regulate.

Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

#19

Post by e40 »

netcan wrote: post #9

It'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 coun…

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

To put it into perspective, more people die walking across roads in the US every year than died from terrorism in 2001. Most years other than 2001, the difference between them is staggering. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that we should take drastic measures to curtail the freedom of car drivers because of the pedestrian deaths.

How little people care about the deaths of 4000+ people a year: most drivers that kill a pedestrian are not punished at all. The Freakonomics guys even did a podcast on how to commit the perfect murder, where the method was killing the person with a car.

Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

#20

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I'm not a Chomsky fan, but I agree with at least the premise and the beginning of this essay. As usual, he wanders far afield in trying to find the roots of the problem, digging up what probably was a huge moment for him personally -- the academic opposition to Reagan -- but wasn't really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. (It worries me that people seem to understand why the surveillance state is bad, but immediately after acknowledging it, go back to their usual boogey men and political arguments they had before they figured this out, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public to everybody. I don't see a middle ground.

On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The NSA is the good guys. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google, Amazon, or Facebook.

So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we need to be laser clear on what "it" means.

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