The dark side of big data

You're saying that the government is still using the data to enforce political domination, and the only reason they're not murdering people is that it's more efficient and sustainable to use other tactics. That may be so. I'd regard it as kind of orthogonal to the point I was making; nevertheless, let's see...

I would argue that the COINTELPRO approach is less bad than the gulag approach, in a few ways. (a) Less damage is inflicted on individuals' lives. (b) It seems chancy; there will be some "politically inconvenient" leaders who just happen to be squeaky clean, and maybe all available methods of discrediting them would look highly suspicious and reveal the FBI's hand, and they just have to let it through. (c) One aspect of the approach is that the fact that anything is happening is hidden from the general public. This necessarily means that (most) people are not being intimidated away from the politically undesirable view; whereas with purges, people learn to shut up for fear of their lives. If some ideas or arguments are intrinsically appealing to the people, it seems they will spread inevitably, even if public proponents of them mysteriously keep ending their careers in scandal; and eventually there will be enough proponents that the FBI can't take them all down.

It feels like there are fundamental limits to this kind of repression; it's less scary and final than the domination backed by purges. The NSA do have a scary amount of power, probably more than any branch of government--e.g. they could probably decide the presidential election by revealing some choice secrets and discrediting the undesired candidates--but it seems limited. If they use it too much, they'll lose it, which they don't want and will act to avoid.

I am interested in knowing about what they get up to--and part of my assumption is that the NSA's operations are limited by their need to maintain a mostly-plausible public pretense of no significant political manipulation of their own country, lest a public backlash destroy them; which requires that there be suspicious and watchful citizens like you, ready to get angry at the NSA.

I simply object to the notion that there is no significant difference between the FBI's operations and killing hundreds of thousands of political undesirables. We are better than that, and it is important that we remain that way.

> (ideally in the early stages)

That's an important part of the original COINTELPRO in the 60s. While many people know the FBI targeted MLK, a lot of the FBI's counter intelligence goals were about preventing any leader from even forming in the first place, or allowing any critical mass of black people to associate, because association is power.

> rape of possession of child pornography

Note that parallel construction probably doesn't use anything so heavy handed in most cases. "Laundering" intelligence information is easy when the target is carrying a real-time tracking device. Most of the time they probably just inform the local police when/where you are driving. Then they simply need to tail you until they see you do something they can call a traffic violation. At that point they have probable cause which is good enough to get a warrant that can be used to "find" whatever they want.

> perhaps they first send disruptive internet commenters,

We have documents from GCHQ's "JTRIG" department that explicitly state[1] that's one of their primary methods.

> JTRIG Wiki

I suggest reading Greenwald's original reports[2][3] (which contain the source documents from Snowden's archive).

> only if the target is still a threat

That's the problem - it depends on how you define "threat".

> how much do they actually do, and what effect do they have?

I doubt we will ever know for certain, but if you're seriously interested in that question, then you should listen to former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg's answers. He talked[4] at 32c3 about just how far we've fallen.

Also, it's important to remember that rights are about protecting the people that society hates. When a group of people is liked by society so they aren't a target of oppression, there isn't any need for rights. It's the people that most people see as not deserving of rights that need their protection.

[1] (from [3]) https://firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/06/jtrig-540x5...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

[3] https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-...

[4] https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7443-the_price_of_dissent

TL;DR - Watch [4]!

edit: I know [4] largely talks about the UK. While the UK is slight ahead of this slide towards dystopia compared to the US, the US has it's own problems.

One was a Personal finance tracker and manager, that claimed to provide useful insights with minimal input. I ended up thinking that they would harvest my data to sell to credit-rating agencies and I decided not to install it.

Another app would analyze my call records, including duration, costs (by reading SMS,) - basically my complete messaging and communicating behaviour, and it would suggest plans and providers that would be the most cost-effective for me. Again i ended up turning down.

Everyday, I end up turning down these requests. It doesn't help that the Android ecosystem is so eager to pimp out my personal info at every opportunity (the only reason i would prefer an Apple device). Most of my peers don't care in the least and just agree to every intrusion.

My experience in the startup ecosystem in India (which probably doesn't have the basic data privacy laws other countries might have) only serves to heighten my unease. Not too long ago we were in talks with people about developing an app for the healthcare space. We had trouble seeing how the app could bring much value to the end-users, but they didn't seem to care much about that side of things. The impression I walked away with was that they were looking for any excuse to harvest health-related info to sell to insurance companies.

People are calling data the new oil. And we are living in the new oil rush. All startups (and also companies like Facebook and Google) talk about how their mission is to make the world a better place, but really we are all ultimately contributing to an Orwellian future, where every action we take is captured, stored, analysed and used to control, manipulate, and exploit us.

Sobering thought for all those people that say "I have nothing to hide"