PRISM? Come to Israel to study our surveillance state

"The Israeli authorities took George Orwell’s book, Ninteen Eighty Four, and made it in to a master plan."

OMG! The author expands:

"Israeli nationals are always subjected to espionage and surveillance: employers read your email, the state sets up traffic cameras, parking cameras, security cameras and protection cameras"

This, my friends, is the level of hyperbole/ignorance we have to suffer from our media here in Israel.

I'm Israeli. Employers do not read my email. I have no information on whether traffic/security cameras are more prevalent than the average here (traffic, probably so), but I doubt that makes for a "1984" scenario. In fact I seriously doubt the author actually read "1984".

Unfortunately, clowns like him now learned that instead of being seen as a joke by people who actually live here, they can publish in English and get to the front page of news sites worldwide, where people don't know what's going on in Israel and are willing to believe anything.

Frankly the Israeli situation sounds more proportionate and reasonable than many - plus groups are challenging it in court which is always a Good Thing(tm).

If you want to see the REAL masters, look no further than the UK Regulation Of Investigative Powers Act.

That gives (for example) local garbage collectors the legal powers to obtain, say, your medical records - all they need to do is establish they are 'investigating' some garbage related offence and they have access to anything they want so by saying you have disposed of some 'unauthorized' medical waste they are allowed to obtain your medical records to see if you have a genuine medical condition justifying it. It is an offence for the medical staff to refuse or to inform you that they have been handed over.

Want to send your children to your local school ? Expect 24x7 surveillance of you and your children for 3 weeks: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2248295/Second-counci... [edit: this is a different example of abuse, reply below has the correct link.]

The list is endless with over 500 different 'official' organizations entitled to mount total surveillance and the abuses of the legislation are so egregious that they read like a wild fantasy.

This is the "legal framework" which the UK PM David Cameron is assuring everyone keeps them safe from PRISM and the like.

Absolute power corrupts and this power has long ago corrupted absolutely in the UK.

[edit: originally said months and it is merely weeks, reply below has the link to the correct article. Thanks to Jabbles for pointing out the link was the wrong one.]

Valid points, but I don’t think it’s a comparable situation. Israel is constantly being attacked by people living on its own soil. It’s fairer to compare US intelligence gathering in Iraq with Israel’s intelligence gathering within Israel. If Arizonans were to start firing dozens of rockets a day at California, the US government would be way less civil than Israel has been to the Gazans. (And they have been, remember the detainment camps for Japanese Americans?)

NB: I count 3 instances of ‘abhor’ in the article, none of them used correctly. (The original Hebrew article speaks of נפעם, ‘excited’.)

There's also the security card in Israel, which is pulled by the government every time people start to get excited about something. Economy problems? Security! Privacy concerns - shut up - Security! Administrative detention - Secu... you get the picture.

I fear that absolute surveillance is an inevitability, no matter where you live, or how "free" your country is.

It works like this: Best case scenario, you live in a country with a functioning republic, in which anyone is free to vote in anyway they choose.

A politician's worst nightmare is to be the one who was overseeing during an instance in which security disastrously failed (e.g. a terrorist attack).

The irony, of course, is that no matter how much security there is, a terrorist attack can always be successfully carried out in some manner or another.

Further, even if the government ran out of traditional hardened terrorists to oversee, they would start morphing dissidents into terrorists. So no way to stop terrorist attacks, and an ever-growing pool of terrorists. It bears repeating: you cannot stop security threats. Period.

That said, a politician's only recourse is to do something. That unfortunately means increasing security. No politician will ever stand in front of a camera and say, "You know what? I think we did everything we could, and these things are just going to happen from time to time. We'll learn from this and try to do better next time, but no guarantees. That's life." It's a truth, but we know that's not what politicians are here to tell us.

The other side of this tragic playing out of events is that, following a standard bell curve of distribution, most people are of mediocre intelligence, at best. That means they can't, for themselves, critically come to the understanding of the aforementioned maximum security problem. That means they're going to vote for the guy who promises to do more about security threats with straightforward security lockdown. They don't have the patience or intelligence to understand real policy reform that might actually lead to more security.

It's a feedback loop that will cause any bipartisan republic/democracy to inevitably succumb to a dictatorial-style surveillance state.

Do away with bipartisanship? There might be a way, but no elected leader in the US will ever implement the changes to make it happen, for the other evil politicians commit is to maintain the status quo at all costs.

The big thing about Israel is that they allow for administrative detention without trial. It's really hard to get worked up about surveillance when they don't even have to file charges to keep you in jail.

The thing about Israel being a surveillance state? It doesn't feel like it. I, as an Israeli, don't feel that the government is going around reading my mail even though it can totally do that.

The thing about democracies isn't that they're less likely to violate your civil rights, it's that they seem like they're less likely to do that. That's a lot of power right there.

All forms of government exists to subjugate the populace and that's easier to do the less rights the population has. The only viable state is one that's afraid of its citizens. We have a lot of power but most people don't know it. We need to spread that knowledge.

All these seem to be within the general level of intrusiveness seem in the US:

Easy access to metadata, security cameras, etc.

You haven't convinced me that the situation is much different in Israel as compared to the US (or the UK, for that matter).

I'd say the best places to learn about surveillance are China and North Korea.

I lived first 7 years of my life under the Romanian communism - they also could teach best practices in surveillance, since my parents were always careful what they said - in an era without too much electronics.

It doesn't matter the level of invasive practices in other states. It's not a competition for the most or least practices, though policy and research are worth having dialog about. This combative attitude isn't useful, in English or Hebrew.

Edit: As the first commenter of the article suggests, companies are doing far more than the government in terms of intrusion just all the time. We need to strengthen the bill of rights to not just give procedural protection from the government, but real rights that protect us all from each other.

"The authorities could approach the telecommunication providers (ISPs, mobile operators and phone operators), pay a few Shekels, and obtain answers to queries, as long as such queries relate to specific crimes or investigations. "

NSA wins - they get all records without ever needing to allude to specific crime being committed.

"out of which, almost 2,000 were related to political activities such as public disturbances."

Political activities and public disturbances are very different things. You can make public disturbances while doing political activity, e.g. protesting, but you can also beat up a cop while protesting, that doesn't mean beating up a cop becomes example of political activities.

" Israel addressed Google for subscriber information (not by the Metadata act, as it does not apply to Google), about 350 times since 2009. Google responded to most of these requests; meaning that there are 350 people in Israel that the government obtained their correspondence,"

It actually does not. It means there were 350 requests, on which in about 2/3 of them Google disclosed some data. There's no indication which data was disclosed and whether such data was correspondence or not.

"Israeli nationals are always subjected to espionage and surveillance: employers read your email, the state sets up traffic cameras, parking cameras, security cameras and protection cameras."

Parking and traffic cameras have nothing to do with government surveillance and obviously are added just to sensationalize the article, as well as allegations about email snooping by employers, which again has absolutely nothing to do with government. Both are very common and nothing specially relating to Israel.

Summarily, though the article raises a very valid question of eroding judicial overview over state surveillance - which has, unsurprisingly, the same trend in Israel as it does in the US - overly sensational tone and bunching together legitimate privacy concerns and complaints about security cameras in private places. This detracts from the quality of complaints significantly. Main message of the article - that Israel is somehow an Orwellian total-surveillance state - is false, while Israel does have the same problem as US does, this claim is exaggerated.

I didn't knew this about Israel, although the fact that the situation is worse in other parts of the worlds doesn't justify this level of Surveillance in US.

‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production'

Michel Foucault

Replying to the article's illustration here...

1984 was not the instruction manual. It mostly deals with the ongoing operations and consequences of the police state and its surveillance. _That Hideous Strength_, its spiritual prequel (written by C. S. Lewis and published shortly before the atomic bomb, later reviewed and then ripped off by Orwell) is the instruction manual. :)

(In Orwell's defense, he did make improvements. The problem with a Lewis book, as Orwell observed, is that God exists and you know that the good guys win at the end, so the dystopian police state isn't scary enough... which is the major difference between the two in the plots.)

Was that supposed to make us feel better somehow? The "oh-you-think-you-got-it-bad" mentality disinclines me to any level of empathy or sympathy and more toward apathy.

No need. Israel is already part of the US surveillance apparatus. Every single phone bill in the country gets shipped to an Israeli site for pre-processing..

Yes, but in the US saying anything that would even remotely criticize Israel is an automatic anti-semitism case. So, don't expect too many comments.

Ah, Land of the Free!

Could this be the reason why you've had the same PM for so long? I mean who knows how he used that information on his competitors, or the campaign funders of the competitors.