Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by curt » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:20 PM UTC

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…

The Commerce Clause was put in place to stop States from taxing each other, not what it's currently being used for.

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

#22

Post by alexeisadeski3 » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:22 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #11

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 fu…

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

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

#23

Post by hga » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:28 PM UTC

curt wrote: post #21

rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Commerce Clause was put in place to stop States from taxing each other, not what it's currently being used for.

Expanding on this, the utterly vile 1942 Wickard v. Filburn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn) held about someone growing wheat for his own consumption, quoting Wikipedia:

The Court decided that Filburn's wheat growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for chicken feed on the open market, and because wheat was traded nationally, Filburn's production of more wheat than he was allotted was affecting interstate commerce. Thus, Filburn's production could be regulated by the federal government.

So growing and consuming just about anything locally falls under this interpretation, because otherwise you'd buy it in a market that crosses state lines.

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

#24

Post by monochr » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:33 PM UTC

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 will to dominate others is as old as human kind. The idea that computers have changed anything is just historical blindness of the part of people who fail to realize how totalitarian all states were until the French revolution, where you had a literal thought police going after you and huge parts of the population spying on everyone else.

Like it has always been the case any algorithm good enough to catch even a minority of people with behaviour X the government of the time doesn't like will have so many false positives that it will be useless.

The fact that after 7 million years of human evolution people can still lie to others when the cost for this was often survival makes me skeptical anyone will ever be able to make sense of the mess of ideas in someones head by the very limited number of actions they can observe in the real world.

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

#25

Post by hga » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

ianstallings wrote: post #16

I wouldn't say it's beyond imagination. Science-fiction authors have been predicting this for years.

Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking Nineteen Eighty Four, was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 Men and Machines, edited by Robert Silverberg).

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

#26

Post by kokey » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

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 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.

Yet the UK government still doesn't have anything in place to know a thing about the vast majority of people leaving the country. I'm personally considerably more worried about incompetence, ill conceived reactionary policies and unintended consequences than the potential control technology would have if it was optimally exploited by those in power.

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

#27

Post by atmosx » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:45 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #25

ianstallings wrote: post #16

I wouldn't say it's beyond imagination. Science-fiction authors have been predicting this for years.

Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking Nineteen Eighty Four , was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 Men and Machines , edited by Robert Silverberg).

I've read 'Darkness at noon'[1] at year ago or two. It's one of the books Orwell was heavily influenced by. It's about Stalin's Russia and it's amazing. Same topic, total gov control.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon

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

#28

Post by mikeash » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:52 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #20

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,…

I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to defend this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household possessions to deter burglars.

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

#29

Post by igravious » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 3:58 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #27

hga wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking Nineteen Eighty Four , was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 Men and Machines , edited by Robert Silverberg).

I've read 'Darkness at noon'[1] at year ago or two. It's one of the books Orwell was heavily influenced by. It's about Stalin's Russia and it's amazing. Same topic, total gov control. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon

Second 'Darkness at Noon'. A very powerful read. By Arthur Koestler 1940. Orwell's 1984 was published in 1948, wasn't it?

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

#30

Post by EGreg » Sun, Jun 08, 2014, 4:03 PM UTC

Guys I would invite you to read my perspective on what we can do about this:

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

And please, put the new video camera technology to good use and sign this petition:

http://wh.gov/lsuFw

Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints -- sometimes by 80%!

http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_tha...

http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-po...

"The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment."

All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people. Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police officer who landed them in the hospital.

You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.