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[Helgoland]

Wait - you mean that a two foot folder on him existed back then, right? My point is that that two foot folder already contained all relevant details, and that the additional details in today's twenty foot 'folder' are not all that relevant.

Ninja: lijacote's example demonstrates rather elegantly what I am trying to say: Modern electronic surveillance does not enable qualitatively new ways of political interference.

[DJ]

I think a bigger problem for a would-be charismatic leader are the people. With all the information overload and everybody and their grandma trying to sell you something, most people have become too jaded to follow such a leader. MLK, on the other hand, had the zeitgeist on his side, because the world was changing in a lot of way so people were more willing to believe that they can change things. These days movements just peter out without accomplishing much, and every one that does that makes people a bit more jaded.

[SalmonGod]

Wait - you mean that a two foot folder on him existed back then, right? My point is that that two foot folder already contained all relevant details, and that the additional details in today's twenty foot 'folder' are not all that relevant.

Ninja: lijacote's example demonstrates rather elegantly what I am trying to say: Modern electronic surveillance does not enable qualitatively new ways of political interference.

What I'm saying is that twenty foot folder contains all the information necessary to determine whether that person poses any threat of becoming relevant, and that determination can be made before any human attention is involved in the process.  And once that person is determined to be relevant, the two-foot folder with all the information about that person the authorities need to actually work with can be easily filtered out. 

You guys understand what Big Data means, right?  It's an emerging field where huge amounts of data are used to algorithmically process huge sets of correlations into accurate predictions that a human observer never could.  It's already being put into very effective use in places like predicting stock market trends and voting patterns.  It's how Nate Silver works his magic.  And it's really big in the surveillance world.

I think that brief exchange in Captain America: Winter Soldier described it best.  May sound silly to reference a Disney film in this discussion, but the directors have admitted it was designed to be a critique of the way the surveillance state is headed, inspired by the revelations from Wikileaks and Snowden.

Spoiler: Major Spoiler if you haven't seen the film (click to show/hide)

Jasper Sitwell: Zola'a algorithm is a program for choosing Insight's targets.
Steve Rogers: What targets?
Jasper Sitwell: You! A TV anchor in Cairo, the Under Secretary of Defense, a high school valedictorian in Iowa City, Bruce Banner, Stephen Strange, anyone who's a threat to HYDRA. Now, or in the future.
Steve Rogers: In the future? How could it know?
Jasper Sitwell: How could it not? The 21st century is a digital book. Zola told HYDRA how to read it. Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, emails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores! Zola's algorithm evaluates people's past to predict their future.

I'm sure they're nowhere near as omniscient as they would like us to believe and base our inaction on.

If you use the internet without taking extensive precautions, drive a vehicle with a license plate, use a cell phone, or make electronic financial transactions, then any of those things is a window into huge amounts of data about you.  I should be heading back to work from my lunch break right now, so the following examples are all off the top of my head.  I'll dig up citations over the weekend if requested.

If you don't think they collect data in internet behavior of random people:  there was a blogger who was curious after the Boston Marathon Bombing about how the heck such an effective bomb could be made from a simple pressure cooker.  So he did some google searching on the topic.  Authorities were knocking on his door a few hours later.  He handled it well, and got some conversation out of them.  One of the officers said they make somewhere around 40 such visits a week on average.

When phone metadata collection was a big topic of controversy (seems to have died out lately), one of the bits of information that was confirmed was NSA's collection methodology.  They collect complete metadata from the electronic devices of anyone, IIRC I could be wrong on the number, 7 steps out from any person of interest.  In other words, if you've been in contact with someone who's been in contact with someone who's been in contact with someone who's been in contact with someone who's been in contact with someone who's been in contact with someone who's been in contact with someone who's been in contact with a person that is marked by them as a person of interest, then they've collected, stored, and analyzed your data.  And there's been a lot of information leaked about the huge amounts of stuff they can determine based on just a person's metadata.

One of the major surveillance trends that's very recent but has been firmly established by now throughout most heavily populated areas in the U.S. is law enforcement vehicles are being outfitted with devices that automatically take pictures of the license plates of other passing vehicles as they're going about their normal on-duty business.  These pictures (hundreds of thousands every day) are automatically uploaded to a central database that compiles them into a tool that can be used basically to request a location timeline of any vehicle they want.

*sigh...* I have to run.

[Bauglir]

I guess the Snowden Effect has worn off; people seem to be back to considering this an implausible conspiracy theory. I mean, there's no malevolent cabal or anything, and the analysis is definitely not Disney-level, but you don't really need either of those for a bunch of smart people with tons of funding, little oversight, access to at-this-point straightforward technology, and an earnest desire to keep people safe to wind up overstepping into this sort of thing. "Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it" has sounded pretty good in security since basically forever.

[Zangi]

Big Business already does the whole collecting metadata and analyzing it for reasons of profits.  One example is they can tell if a person/family has a pregnancy.  Then market at em all them baby products.

Now consider this sort of data collection and analysis in the hands of the government, who's motive is not for profits, but for 'security'.  And the scope is on a more national scale of state secrecy.  Where they fight against the evil terrorists and protecting the children.   Its operating definition for terrorists is not limited to actual terrorism.
Obviously, true patriots have nothing to hide from big brother.

[wierd]

You are forgetting a number of important things there Salmon God--

If you are savvy enough, you realize several things.

1) You need to not only secure your communications against unauthorized activity, but you must also obfuscate them in such a way that they are not attributable to you in any way- You must ALSO create internally consistent, but false, information that you dispense publicly.

This is because

2) If you DONT do the above, your use of encryption of obfuscation makes you an INSTANT target for inquiry, because you stand out in the crowd of "Oh, sure-- take all my data and datamine the shit out of it-- I want to share cute pictures of babies, kittens, and puppies with grandma on Facebook!" out there.

This means that if you take your privacy seriously, you have to invest considerable energy into creating a false alter-ego, and maintaining it, as well as considerable energy into effective data obfuscation and attribution dodging tactics.

[NullForceOmega]

Second amendment.

[Bauglir]

Second amendment.

No, I really don't think we want a world in which encryption is classified as munitions again. That goes weird places. Unless you're getting at something else? I admit, I'm not 100% on what you're getting at, here.

[NullForceOmega]

I'll admit, it's not a very good point, but frankly the US is sitting awfully close to the kind of historical event-horizon that brought about the Revolutionary War.

[wierd]

2nd amendment:

Ineffective.  Intended in an era when guns were an over-reaching equalizer of force. These days, govts have things much deadlier than guns, and effective countermeasures against guns.

Couple that with political rhetoric about guns being used in violent crimes, some basic lack of understanding statistics, and some misguided views about human nature-- and you end up with gun control laws that are as absurd as they are ineffective.

So, you end up with a neutered second amendment, which even at full strength would be ineffectual.

Does not work.

The solution? Stop buying into the PR, and change your consumption habits.  Stop using facebook. Stop using Myspace, stop using Tumblr, etc.  Blanket adopt hard, community created encryption. When confronted by people who are complacent about security, bust their chops about it until they act more socially responsible.

Spooks like this have limited budgets, even if those budgets are expansive.  Make it not worth their while to hoover up all the data and sort it out later. Make them WORK for their pay. That's the only way to stuff them back down where they belong. Dont listen to their little pig squeals about terrorists and badguys getting away.  THEY ARE THE BAD GUYS.

Listen to information security professionals. They tell you that what the government wants (back doors in security that only the government can exploit) is impossible. LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE.  Take that to heart-- Dont even budge on that issue. These days, the rank and file identity theives have tools that are able to rival 3 letter agencies. That means provisions for law enforcement are equally vulnerable to rank and file crook groups.  NO BACK DOORS. WE ARE PAST THAT AGE. NO BACK DOORS.  Keep that hard line.

When you make the intelligence people work for their money, they have to prioritize targets, which means they stop focusing on everyone as would-be criminals, and have to actually focus on ACTUAL threats.

"But that lets bad guys get away!" is bullshit.  Call them on it, and dont let them get away with that shit. When you see people eating that candy coated turd, point out how shitty that really is, and dont relent until they see it for what it is.

You want a real war on terror? Start by making people stop reacting based on emotions and adrenaline, because that's how terrorism works, and our government is just using the same tactics.  Instead of actual bombings, they use the threat of possible, "It could totally happen!" bombings, to get what they want.

Call them out on it.

[NullForceOmega]

Edit: Ehh, probably comes off as more confrontational than necessary, sorry about that.

weird, I am active on exactly one forum, for all the various things I've had to sign up for to use many amenities of modern life I have an exceptionally low network presence, there is almost no data that anyone can get from me online that I have not made available myself.  The 'information age' itself is bullshit.  It blinds people to reality.  Are people who are free with what might be called 'private information' easy to profile online, yes.  Does that make the world a more dangerous place?  No, not by half, it is simply another expression of survival of the fittest.  As for the second amendment being outdated, you probably don't live a lifestyle where internet is an extraneous luxury.

[lijacote]

- snip -
*sigh...* I have to run.

Just to make it clear, I do not dispute that there's a police state and massive intelligence agencies (states unto themselves, some might claim) looking out for perceived potential threats [not to security, but to the bourgeois state], and that there are dangers in communication. It's not qualitatively new, is what Helgoland wrote, and I am in agreement.

The task was performed by multiple methods, including covert operations, undercover agents, and "perlustration" — reading of private correspondence. Even the Foreign Agency served this purpose. The Okhrana is notorious for its agents provocateurs, including Dr. Jacob Zhitomirsky (a leading Bolshevik and close associate of Vladimir Lenin), Yevno Azef, Roman Malinovsky and Dmitry Bogrov.

The Okhrana tried to compromise the labour movement by creating police-run trade unions, a practice known as zubatovshchina. The agency was blamed by the Communists in part for the Bloody Sunday event, when imperial guards killed hundreds of unarmed protesters who were marching during a demonstration organized by Father Gapon, who was alleged by the Bolsheviks to have collaborated with the Okhrana (though in fact this was unproven), and Pyotr Rutenberg.

Other controversial activities included alleged fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax (many historians[who?] maintain that Matvei Golovinski, a writer and Okhrana agent, compiled the first edition on the instructions of Pyotr Rachkovsky) and fabrication of the antisemitic Beilis trial.

Certainly new technology has given them a certain edge, and certainly you shouldn't give them more than you have to... but much of revolutionary organising right now is perfectly legal. That wouldn't stop the police or intelligence agencies from inventing crimes, though.

[Bauglir]

I don't know about that. You say it's not qualitatively new; that's arguably the case. But consider the impact the same technology has had on records-keeping. The ability to cross-reference databases isn't, strictly speaking, new. It was always something you could pay people to do, and if you really wanted to, you could just pay a very large number of people to look up the information you wanted. But electronic implementations that automate the whole process enable qualitatively new programs, for example targeted advertising, simply by ratcheting up the efficiency of an existing method. It's as though you're saying that automatic weapons haven't really created a qualitative change in warfare, because they just do the same thing as earlier models, but faster. The line between qualitative and quantitative is a bit flimsier than academia sometimes makes it out to be; quantity has a quality all its own.

[SalmonGod]

lijacote, I still don't think you understand the meaning of Big Data, as Bauglir is sort of pointing out.  I'll say it more directly.  Big Data doesn't just mean collecting the same sorts of data we always have and doing the same stuff with it, but on a larger scale.  It means collecting astronomically huge amounts of data, including stuff that we never would have bothered with in the past because it seemed useless, and running intelligent automated processes on that data that is able to find correlations and come up with predictions that humans would never have been able to.  Even with an infinite number of people, the logistics of communicating the content of analysis between all the people necessary to match what Big Data represents is absurdity.

On everything else, I would accept the argument that it's the same stuff that's always been going on but made easier.  Tracking people's locations, infiltration and subversion, gathering dirt and inventing crimes... all of that, absolutely yes.  But Big Data is a new kind of beast.

Even if it weren't, though, you have to consider that major revolutionary figures are the ones that slipped through the cracks of those same apparatus as they existed decades past.  For every public figure that goes down in history as standing up to the establishment and making a difference, there are many more who were successfully shut down.  Even if there is nothing qualitatively new about applications of newer technologies, don't you wonder about just how neatly those cracks that created the opportunity for building political movements in the past have been sealed?

[Bauglir]

I suspect as time goes on people will find more and more ways to overcome the increasing abilities of secret services to gather data on them. It might become HARDER, but probably not impossible.

Hell, you can probably beat most of them in regards to the internet with a consistent online alter-ego and ghostery, noscript, adblock, TOR, VPNs and such. Make sure any payments or things trackable to you are under a different alter-ego...

Excluding them sticking a virus on your computer, there's not much they can do to find out who you are. No IP to trace you, no cookies... The only way they could get through would be to crack TOR or something.

About that...

EDIT: Here's the thing. Good encryption is wonderful. TOR is actually pretty damn good, if you know how to use it properly. But actually achieving thorough identity darkness on the Internet essentially requires being an information security professional with no friends, incredible impulse control, and no online purchasing history. Moreover, you still certainly exist in whatever government databases are absolutely necessary for them to do their jobs (IRS, Social Security, at least), and you haven't got shit for control over what other people do with things like photos you happen to get caught in by chance, traffic cams, etc.