Edward Snowden has documented extensively what is NSA is doing with big data, same goes for British intelligence. But it always them(Russians, bad asians, stazi) but not us (democratic Americans, westerners etc etc). You get my point eh?
Another post then said it was a "PR" problem... this made me take offense (since I am from one country where US did deliberate evil actions, and I know people personally affected), and I decided to past a list of stuff US did (Condor, Gladio, MKUltra, a list of dictators, and so on... it was about 30 things).
One guy then replied that it was "legitimate war acts", after more arguing, I found out that US people think that when Nazi are evil, they are evil, but when US do evil stuff, sometimes even more evil than the Nazi, it is "legitimate war acts".
Seemly people honestly believe that the US government can do no wrong, and that whatever it do had a good reason.
Until recently, some people here believed that accusing USA of participating in the coup was "tinfoil hat crazy", then CIA recently declassified stuff due to its age, and revealed that USA participation went more than expected (originally people just believed that CIA funded protests, propaganda, and gave intelligence support... the declassified documents showed that CIA did all that, AND US also sent a aircraft carrier + several ships to our coast, and threatened to bomb the loyalist army, this is why when the loyal army and the coup army faced each other near Rio de Janeiro the president suddenly told them to stand down and left the country).
That's counterproductive, because it's very bad PR in the long run. The modern way to abuse data is through "parallel construction", which allows for very efficient COINTELPRO-style targeting of anyone that would bring people together. There's a reason modern mass-surveillance technology is mapping relationships.
Limiting our right to assemble has been happening for a long time (remember "free speech zones"?). Before any serious challenge to a power can happen, the people involved first have to realize other like-minded people exist, that they don't have to challenge power alone.
(if anybody things this is implausible, I suggest re-reading the documents about JTRIG)
"Parallel construction" would be orchestrating a scenario in which the secret gets revealed in a way that isn't obviously the work of the FBI. Let's say... arranging for a suspicious item of clothing belonging to a secret lover to be "accidentally" left behind for the spouse to find; staging some kind of mundane theft, getting the local police to get a warrant and search the target's residence and discover his recreational drug collection; perhaps even trumping up a crime entirely (ideally something like rape or possession of child pornography, the scandal of which would probably ruin the target's effectiveness as a leader even if a court acquits them sometime later). Exercise your imagination.
If the above ideas are stupid and outlandish, well, I thought of them while writing this post; a large agency that systematizes the approach and applies it routinely could probably do much better. Harassment of any sort is probably useful in reducing a target's effectiveness; perhaps they first send disruptive internet commenters, then do more advanced things only if the target is still a threat.
The question is, how much do they actually do, and what effect do they have? The JTRIG Wiki article gives some examples; I think I'd have to read more to evaluate their effectiveness.
> (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.
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.
The 3rd picture down @ http://www.aworldtowin.net/reviews/JohnPilgerphotos.html comes to mind:
"American officers in their air-conditioned headquarters in Saigon, with a computer that "proved" they were winning the war. A reliance on machines and unreality characterised the American presence in Vietnam." - Philip Jones Griffiths, 1970