America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance
wsj.com
wsj.com
[^1] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...
If you do not like surveillance capitalism (which enables government surveillance), get a compatible phone and install GrapheneOS now. Help family and friends get set up tomorrow. Make it a force too large to reckon with before the legislation is there (legislation is somewhat slow, so there is a window of opportunity).
The cool kids are doing it.
Even if you walk by a FLOCK camera you are catalogued.
Sickening bravado of these privacy stealing folk.
>> I could care less about surveillance
I believe the parent is splitting hairs over your wording; if you didn't care at all, then you couldn't care less.
It's confusing and clarification is necessary in order to work out how to engage with the comment.
Until they aren't.
In the EU there's the PSD2 SCA that requires 2 out of 3 factors from something the user knows/has/is for online banking. The "has" has been essentially chosen by most banks as a closed source app that can only be run on locked down surveillance-prone unrooted phones running Android or iOS, and you can only get it from the Google or Apple repositories. Your phone nor being under your control is seen as good here, because it forces the "has" factor.
So in the EU you can't bank (a necessity) with most banks on Kali.
The US maybe doesn't have such regulations or banks don't follow them, but I think you'll agree a lot of things require apps now. Maybe not the necessities, but we have to fight for the right to use whatever device we want. Fuck phones and fuck mandatory MFA.
The alternative to a banking app I experienced a few years ago was a hardware token which costs money, but not a lot of banks offer it. It was made by a useless company that issues overpriced certificates and tokens for mandatory MFA in the banking sector and some government programs, among other things. A company whose business is sustained by the regulations. I expected a TOTP token or something, but it was something ridiculous like I had plug into a USB port and connect it to the browser with some proprietary app. It worked only on Debian-based distros. Virtualizing it was a pain as it was before LLMs were good and I had to sift through long logs with information about USB-specifics I didn't want to know.
"But it's not phishable" is the usual reply when discussing these "stronger" types of MFA. It's my money, let me get phished - is my reply.
The regulators, Google and Apple with their device attestation APIs, the useless token companies - they all benefit one way or another. They have no honor.
Consent never mattered btw.
Every single person in the US's future, safety, rights and freedom is currently at stake. There is no more time left to wait and see how things play out.
The time to resist the next crop of policies and technologies is today.
And I disagree the ground was more fertile for action in Covid. The silver lining to the AI companies’ PR and political ineptitude is that there is widespread, bipartisan pushback against tech in all stripes.
And over the domestic surveillance, that had some complaints back in that time, there is the point of foreign surveillance and intervention, that had no slowdown back then, so you can figure out where that should be today. At least Americans have some saying on their government and policies, but for the rest of the world is just the new normal.
Yeah, obama was president at the time.
A lot of fanfare and then nothing happened.
People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.
It’s always “weird” when the same action get different a connotation depending on who’s president…
And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.
Regarding the fanfare… yeah sure big deal… and yet, here we are, with ubiquitous surveillance whose ground work was laid out during the obama administration.
And you think it is reasonable, generally speaking?
1) Many were upset, especially here and in the general tech media, with the Snowden information. Is "a lot of fanfare and then nothing happened" worse to you than "no fanfare and nothing happened"? The fanfare regardless of who was in office on that info is telling, there, no?
2) Many of those policies went back well before Obama
Not sure why you're trying to deflect "we should be fighting this" into "Obama bad, actually!" when the evidence is very clear that it crosses parties, has crossed parties for decades, and will almost certainly continue to if the status quo is maintained.
Possibly because you don't want to fight it?
It's very intentionally NOT the same action, because they're looking for more red meat for the base to distract from any number of other failed promises on affordability, jobs, etc. They've really been unable to do much there other than, at best, "stay on or close to the trend line from 2023-onward as the covid-induced supply chain bullwhips and demand whiplash effects started to recede."
Have you considered that one can protest against those changes independently of doing math on how many happened in 2013? Or that they might also take into account certain notable other actions on immigration taken by the Obama administration as a balancing factor?
If anything, doesn't that suggest that the Trump admin's moves to bypass legal safeguards are unnecessary and are just increasing the militarization of the federal government for nothing?
That's because most news are (or were) partisan with a liberal bias.
Just like a republican bias makes you miss the fact that whether Obama was deporting more in larger quantities, Trump has moved the Overton window about what ICE is allowed to do, how blatantly they can do it, and what they get away with even if it's still illegal.
For example, I never hear about how hard librarians* fought against "National Security Letters" after 9/11. How quaint it is now to imagine that people thought that there should be a fundamental right to be able to read freely and without disclosing what you read to anyone, especially governments?
Technology has only made this cheap to do at scale.
For people who may not be familiar, the government insisted on the right to go into libraries and get a list of the books you've read. Hell, it's basically just a "pen register**," and the culture not only gave up on resisting that this data be considered private, but forgot why anyone would have ever thought that way.
Now we're arguing about forced digital attestation, but we're barely arguing about digital ID anymore ("of course" we need that), or even remember that most people were against federal identification in the US. Federal identification failed at every point to gain any support; it was pushed hard and failed during the Clinton admin, finally passed with everything else of this nature after 9/11, and then it was resisted and ignored enough to force deadlines to be pushed farther and farther back - it's been 30 years of RealID at this point.
There's no evidence that the population ever supported federal ID. The idea was forced upon them, and they just waited a generation for people to forget that the government once didn't even know or care that many people existed. 30 years from now, it will probably be weird trivia that the census was done anonymously: "You mean you didn't have to sign it under penalty of perjury? What would be the point of the data if you didn't know who it belonged to?"
In 5 days, May 27, 2026, you'll have to pay a fee of $45 in order to get on a plane for not having Real ID.
It's so obvious that these claims of necessity are always just excuses for a power grab. British Labour, who spent decades supporting huge amounts of immigration and then calling everyone racist who thought it was too much, now like Trump uses the prevention of illegal immigration as a reason to impose digital ID on everyone. They're xenophobes when it comes to tracking everyone's movements, but xenophiles when they needed to lower wages. Vote Tory, then! Nope, they supported and oversaw every element of all of this. None of this stuff ever sees a ballot.
[*] https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2024/10/07/15-years-of-...
how does one politically organize against a billion dollar industry which is friends with, and donates to, the ruling class?
they do whatever they want and we just post about it online and click 'like' or post emojis.
You're mixing the places of horse and cart here - the ruling class is ruling because it's organized. Organization comes first, the presence of other organizations, be them ruling or not, has little bearing on the process.
> we just post about it online and click 'like' or post emojis.
That's what you do without organization. It still helps though, getting to the truth isn't easy these days.
At a deeper level, I think people would need to care more about the outcomes and higher order effects of political decisions and not just the emotional weight of political slogans. The fundamental problem is that is not the society we live in.
Secret courts still exist but the phenomenon of random Flock employees spying on children in locker rooms at gyms is so much harder to get away with in a system with a modicum of decency.
Chat control was actually shot down, and that was the UK not Europe (anymore).
Laws are different in different places. The world is not composed of America and other-Americas.
It got vociferous support from the highest levels of government even though the deception ("protect kids!") was so blatant and transparent, and it wasn't until a legion of privacy and in particular tech-literate advocates raised concerns in mass media together with an awareness campaign about the dangers of unchecked surveillance structures that it was finally... shot down.
We have seen the same, or substantially similar, bills come up over and over. Most of the time, they are shot down, in the same manner you describe.
But sometimes, there is a 9/11 and the Patriot act gets passed.
Lei Dongbao, party secretary of a small village, is courting the owner of a restaurant in a nearby city. He persuades her to let him care for her young son over the weekend.
As he's heading back to his village on his motorcycle with the boy seated behind him, he drives by some women resting in the shade by the side of the road. One of them remarks to another, "Why does the secretary have a child?"
By the time he arrives at his office, all of his subordinates - and one of their wives - have turned out to meet him and say hello to the child.
https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2019/9/...
> Citizens, on the other hand, don’t like red light cameras because they don’t want to be fined. They complain that the cameras are an invasion of their privacy. I don’t buy that because I grew up in a small town, and as such I understand that privacy is a myth.
"Resistance is futile" is an old slogan of them Borgs.
Revolutions in most countries have generally replaced one faction of the ruling class with a competing faction of the ruling class, with little actual change for the people.
Sure Flock, we buy your safety pitch. We just don’t trust you.
This is the worst of all worlds. Actual criminal investigations get thwarted or the reporting requirement gets diluted to the point of being useless (“someone looked for something today!”). And a burden of vigilance shifted onto the public.
Funding the police is the burden of vigilance already on tax-payers. We’re already approach the worst of worlds. Your perspective just points to human organizations being unsustainable, not this concept in particular.
What would be made public? If it isn’t verbose, it’s useless for accountability. If it’s too verbose, it’s a privacy issue per se and burden to legitimate investigations.
Though. Now that I think about it. Maybe a delayed notice requirement for anyone whose records are queried. That’s personally hitting in a way a public record is not.
Or the other guy's community network idea but it would have to also publish the realtime activities and whereabouts of all politicians who voted against making this illegal.
Much like the law that stopped video rental companies from telling what their customers were renting, that passed after some politicians had their video rental histories leaked.
They’re above the rules for a political cycle because we’re shifting to a system of spoils. That doesn’t change that everything they’re doing right now is legal. (Outside ICE. They’re a warren of criminality right now.)
As the founding fathers intended.
We don't have public consensus on major questions, in my opinion, to make this a fruitful endeavour.
One thing we need is a political movement to push for Constitutional amendments. My five are, in decreasing order of priority, (1) multi-member Congressional districts, (2) striking the pardon power, (3) abolishing the electoral college and creating a referendum requirement for major legislation, (4) changing the first sentence of Article II to "the President shall execute the laws of the United States," and (5) permitting the Congress to charter independent agencies for up to 20 years.
It's about the amount of data. It's about what it can be used for from military adjacent organizations under a fascist regime. Whether you think the us is headed toward fascism or not, what if it did? That's the point.
One is a clear and present danger. The other is a hypothetical danger. Both deserve being addressed. But if only one is going to get political capital, it should be the first.
(I've worked on technology privacy issues. My takeaway is the public is broadly fine with the tradeoff. Folks in tech are not. But folks in tech with strong views on privacy are politically useless due to a combination of self-defeating laziness and nihilism.)
You cannot change the rules to fix this. You can only change your personal habits. I wish it wasn't like this, but none of those agencies can be held accountable by design.
This. The lesson of the past decades is: if some organization has the data, eventually it becomes too attractive not to (ab)use it. Even Apple, which sold itself as a privacy-first company is slowly adding more and more ads. Squeezing out more profits is just too attractive with the pile of data that they are sitting on. Similarly, bad governments will require access to the data if they can.
Employees inside companies should push back collection of data as much as possible (the GDPR helps a lot in Europe). If you do not have the data, you cannot use it in a user hostile-way in the future and governments cannot request data that you do not have. If you have to store data, go for end-to-end encryption.
Citizens should try to escape the Apple/Google duopoly (e.g. by installing GrapheneOS), block trackers, and only install the necessary apps (no app = no easy tracking). For apps that you do need, revoke as many sandbox privileges as possible.
That this culture shift would need time to trickle down into positive bans on surveillance performed by the government (eg Flock), or requiring audit trails for government use of commercial data that still gets collected, shows how far we're behind.
(I use the word "port" to indicate that we need to avoid letting lobbyists stuff it full of loopholes and regulatory capture the way everything else is. Heck I think we could do worse than copying the text verbatim and letting the courts sort it out)
This means that I, as the owner of my data, can refuse to provide it for some use cases, request its deletion, etc. It’s my data after all.
>We can turn that conventional wisdom on its head, by reframing it as a question: is it possible to do surveillance and consequent policing in a way that is (a) compatible with or enhances liberal values, i.e., improving the welfare of all, except those undermining the common good; and also (b) sufficient to prevent catastrophic threats to society? I call this possibility Provably Beneficial Surveillance. It's a concept expanding on an old tradition of ideas, including search warrants, due process, habeas corpus, and Madisonian separation of powers, all of which help improve the balance of power between institutions and individuals. In particular, all those ideas help enable surveillance in service of safety, while also taking steps to prevent abuses of that power.
This is a utopian idea of the same kind as the idea of theoretical communism.
The communist theory argued that because the owners of assets can use their power in nefarious ways against the others this can be easily solved by dispossessing them of their assets and transforming all such private assets into assets that belong to the common property owned by all people. Then all assets will be used for the welfare of the entire society.
The fallacy of this theory was that when something belongs to all people it is impossible for all people to manage it directly. So there must be a layer of relatively few middlemen who manage the assets directly.
In all the communist societies, instead of managing the assets for the common good, those middlemen have succeeded to become the de facto owners of the assets, despite not being de jure their owners. And then they managed the assets according to their personal interests, like any capitalist billionaire.
The only difference was that the communist elite was much less secure in their positions than rich capitalists, because not being the legal owners of a company or of other such valuable assets meant that they could lose their privileges at any time if their boss in the communist party hierarchy no longer liked them and sent them to an inferior position.
This hierarchical dependence ensured that the communist elite had to obey more or less whatever the supreme leader ordered. Except for this obedience, there was no real difference between a communist economy and the extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, despite what the naive theory of communism hoped to achieve by nationalizing everything of value.
Similarly, I see no hope for a theory of "beneficial surveillance". Such beneficial surveillance could exist only if it were controlled by good-willing people. But this will never happen, like in practical communism, some of the worst people will be those who would succeed to control it.
I'll quote his notes on using cryptography to maintain a balance of privacy and safety:
>To help address such concerns, it's been proposed that synthesis screening should use cryptographic ideas to help preserve customer privacy, while still ensuring safety. Let me mention three such ideas, some of which have already been implemented in a prototype system built by the SecureDNA collaboration. The first idea is that the screening itself should be done with an encrypted version of the sequence data, to help preserve customer privacy. The synthesis step would still require the raw sequence data, but such encryption would at least prevent centralized screening services from learning the sequence being synthesized. Second, as mentioned above, screening for exact matches and homologous sequences won't catch everything, especially as de novo design becomes possible. So it's also been proposed that an encrypted form of the sequence data should be logged and kept after synthesis. That data could not routinely be read by the synthesis company or screening service. However, suppose some later event occurs – say, some new pandemic agent is found in the wild. Then it should be possible to check whether that agent matches anything in the encrypted synthesis records. In the event such a check was needed, a third party authority could provide a kind of "search warrant" (a private key of some sort) to decrypt the data, and identify the responsible party. The third idea is to use cryptography to ensure the screening list remains private, and can even be updated privately by trusted third parties, without anyone else learning the contents of the update. Taken together, these three ideas would help preserve the balance of power between customers and the synthesis companies, while contributing to public safety and enabling imaginative new synthesis work to be done.
>Indeed, cryptographers are so clever that they've devised many techniques you might a priori deem impossible, or not even consider at all. Ideas like zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and secret sharing are remarkable. As software (and AI) eats the world, cryptography will increasingly define the boundaries of law.
It doesn't work, because A) the reason you said: government officials favor themselves, and B) the knowledge problem: the economy is far too complex for a small group of officials to plan what everyone else should be doing.
An interesting idea that emerges now is an AI-moderated socialism. If A) AI can be trusted to not favor itself, and B) AI has perfect knowledge of each human (our needs, what we're good at, etc.), I can imagine an AI-moderated socialism to work.
An ideal future I can imagine is a world with many AI-moderated polities, and humans have freedom to move between them. AI-moderated polities share some global standards on safety, trade, and conflict resolution but otherwise have differing policies so humans have the freedom to find the one that they most prefer.
I point to Michael Nielsen's commentary on Vulnerable World Hypothesis [1] again:
>do you think inexpensive, easy-to-follow recipes for building catastrophic technologies will one day be found, given sufficient understanding of science and technology?
With every increase in technology and science, the probability increases, and as a result, society will necessitate ever more surveillance. The reason provably beneficial surveillance is important to discuss is that we need a careful middle path between totalitarianism and outright catastrophe. It is the opposite of "sleeping our way" into technofascism.
There's no need for mass surveillance and there never will be.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.", spoken by someone who knew better and just so happened to help found this country.
Examples listed in the article [1]: >easily constructed nuclear weapons, perhaps inspired by one of the Taylor-Zimmerman-Phillips designs; easily-constructed antimatter bombs; destructive self-replicating nanobots – while the notion of "grey goo" is sometimes ridiculed, something like grey goo has happened at least twice on earth (the origin of life, and the great oxygenation event); large-scale computer security compromise, leading to failures or takeover of crucial systems (electric grid, banking, the supply chain, the nuclear strike capability, and so on). And then there's the risk many see as most imminent: biorisk, small groups deliberately or accidentally creating or discovering pathogens far more devastating than COVID-19. Unfortunately, this gets easier every year.
Most threats on this scale ex grey goo or inviting aliens to come destroy the planet are going to happen if they can happen. No amount of cameras or monitoring will fix it. Not without unlawful and indefinite detainment if pretty much every person anyways.
Now let's say someone is doing something less apocalyptic. Same problem. We have had school shooters be investigated by the FBI before they did what they did. Guess what! Nothing changed. Why? Because you can't predict the future.
If car companies had no laws around safety we wouldn't just accept it right? No we would be pissed off and make our representatives represent us.
What you're trying to say is that the harms of surveillance are diminished when the underlying power is distributed enough that cops have to justify themselves in order to access the surveillance powers. That's why we have a 4th Amendment that demands cops get warrants before doing searches and seizures. Think of the difference between a store with a security camera that records to a local network DVR, and the same store but they bought some Ring cameras and send it to Amazon's servers. The former is the necessary amount of surveillance to prove a crime happened, the latter is just enabling abuse.
Example case is the school shooter in Canada that OpenAI knew about but chose not to warn authorities of (presumably because OpenAI wants to balance safety and privacy).
OpenAI (or any other big tech) has extreme concentration of power and knows more about its users than any government authority.
At what point should OpenAI alert authorities?
I would much rather have "provably beneficial surveillance" than OpenAI having an arbitrary black box policy or for government authority to have direct backdoor to all OpenAI data.
Try a little harder. You got this
Let America be the canary in this particularly toxic coal mine, and refuse similar systems wherever you are locally.
https://reclaimthenet.org/senate-panel-backs-guard-act-ai-ag...
And the ever increasing desire to break encryption.
And the increase in technology companies who have metadata about us citizens becoming offense and defense contractors.
And... The list is so long.
Dividing people to vilify each other over race, religion, gender, ethnicity and even politics is incredibly profitable. Once they're afraid of their neighbors, they'll happily pay someone to protect them at every turn.
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA22egkH...
I would literally buy you a bicycle to change your mind. Or sit down and review countries where theft is minimal so we could brainstorm real solutions.
The 20% of the country that thinks that shoplifting is the real problem are a problem. They will always vote for the biggest liar.
I'm right now imagining a counterfactual world where there is no property crime or physical assault, and petty reactionaries are demanding surveillance in order to keep people from swearing.
Wage theft (minimum wage violations, forced off the clock work, withheld pay, etc) dwarfs robbery, burglary, and auto theft alone in dollar value. And that's just one kind of white collar crime.
We also have market manipulators, embezzlers, cons selling "wellness" bullshit, companies like Flock and Palantir conspiring to break constitutional amendments, Polymarket grifters, what have you.
I'd be happy with unlimited bike theft if those fucks all ended up in prison, but realistically it would lower the bike theft.
I'm dead serious.
- Addendum: People generally don't resort to petty crime for no good reason. They do it because some need is not being met, or they have become socially outcast due to some systemic failure. When people feel they have little autonomy to exist in a meaningful way, and even being poor is expensive and criminalised, of course you'll see petty crime everywhere. Cracking down on the "undesirables" won't make them go away, it'll just make the issue more pronounced.
Well duh. Anyone with half a brain knows that the root causes of crime lie in poverty, systemic exclusion, and the erosion of social safety nets, rather than in inherent criminality or a lack of "moral character."
For individuals left without access to stable, decently paid jobs or a viable social safety net, black markets—eg the drug trade or sex work—become the "employers of last resort".
To truly reduce youth offending and petty crime, the formula is simple: jobs, jobs, and jobs. Most people would gladly choose a stable, decent-paying job over participation in the illicit economy if given the opportunity.
As it turns out, society is a lot more fun when there is just a bit of risk of crime. I'll 1000000000% take the additional freedom to do "stupid shit" in the USA over living in one of these boring dystopias.
This is a vanishingly-rare hypothetical in America. (Stealing food? Sure. A bike? No.)