well, if you read Stanislav Lem, you'd immediately see that not using "wrong" words and not visiting "wrong" sites may also be a trigger - like "this guy is deliberately trying to stay under radar, why? what he is hiding/planning?" If you try to behave following average pattern for your demographics, you may trigger another one - "he is trying to blend in" :) You can't win that game for the simple reason that the game rules are decided upon strictly after your moves had already been made.
You see, the issue isn't extra collection of data by government - this is already lost cause due to technological progress, the main issue is the ability of government to oppress using that data, ie. absence of due process.
So yeah, Lem was probably right.
There's also another chilling effect which we are seeing happening but I don't think the correlation has quite been drawn - trust in law enforcement. I recently had my house vandalised - but opted not to contact the police, as I don't want anything that looks like a law enforcement datapoint, as in the future it could be used against me - suppose I want to run for political office - all you'll see in the papers is "IN 2016 HE HAD POLICE AT HIS HOME FOR UNKNOWN REASONS. PROBABLY DRUGS AND MURDER!". Hell, Roscoe Arbuckle. It's nothing new, but the new tools are sure as hell making it worse.
To a certain extent, we have to live our lives and damn the consequences.
Usually grey-manning involves trying to do things just well enough to be signed-off, but not quickly enough to be commended and noted.
I guess the lesson is to just be yourself and try not to piss anyone off.
Chillingly, 'Grey-man'ing would require a fresh identity - if that is even possible.
Whatever bad a government can do, others can do the same or worse. Simply collecting such information means that 'bad' actors will gain access at various times and in various ways, so while the collection itself can be painted as innocent, in reality it's highly dangerous.
ie harassment and government justified theft while traveling.
I encrypt everything and carry it all with me when I leave so no one knows what I've done. I make sure I muss up the trail behind me so I can't be tracked. If I get really spooked, I have a few drop off points where I can store material along with a change of clothes (though I probably shouldn't have said that here).
It's hard work but I know it's all worth it. I haven't seen, heard of, or had any problems since I started this. Not that I had any problems before. I just know that the only issue now is I haven't received my paycheck in months. I'm worried I may have slipped up somewhere and my funding is being re-directed elsewhere in an effort to find me.
But that will never happen.
That said, it is a terrible state of affairs, and I do completely understand the impulse to self-censor to avoid future issues. Likewise, I don't see a near-to-mid term solution - mass surveillance appears fairly entrenched, is not a single country issue (which would at least make it somewhat avoidable), and very few people even near positions of power seem to be addressing it adequately (or even see it as a problem).
So yes, it "sadly looks like the terrorists have won" :(
Edit: Deleted "('just a piece of paper' according to W)".
http://www.factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-god...
Please check your facts before spreading false rumors. Thanks!
Thanks :)
> We judge that the odds that the report is accurate hover near zero. It comes from Capitol Hill Blue...
> Update, Feb. 21, 2011: The author of the Capitol Hill Blue story has now withdrawn it.
Good point. Because I mentioned two words that appear at the top of the page, that means I obviously didn't read any further.
If you read the article you'll know that nowhere does it say false, as the other poster claimed.
Why don't they say it's false, if it's false? What's stopping them?
The fact that someone eventually removes something from their site does not mean it was false.
Someone using the contrived sentence "the odds that the report is accurate hover near zero" - rather than just saying "it's false" - also does not make it false.
I don't believe it happened either - sorry if you used your 500+ karma because I didn't issue a disclaimer to that effect - but that also doesn't mean it's false.
My point was about someone whining about getting facts right, by linking to an aticle that bends over backwards to not say what they think it says.
I think maybe you're engaging in a ridiculous level of paranoia.
My anecdote - I'm Australian, lived in USA for decades, moved to Europe after 9/11. Every time I visit the USA it is an hours-long ordeal to explain, in fine detail, why I have the views I have, why I follow Snowden, why I participate in European hacker cultures, why my laptop is covered in security-conference-related stickers, etc. etc. During this process there is always the implied threat of imprisonment without due process. All my stuff is gone through. They find nothing, because I am not a threat in any way, other than that I freely associate with those aspects of society and culture which 'the mainstream' find mysterious, confusing, and scary.
So, I don't go to the USA much. Its about as much fun to get there as driving into a brick wall.
Do they ask you about your FB/Twitter account or do they already know them?
You may not ever have experienced what I've described, but it happens every single day, time and again. You can find others' reports if you care to look for yourself .. my anecdote only has relevance if it serves to make you, an American citizen, truly contemplate what you have allowed to occur in your name. The security nightmare is real for a lot of people.
BTW, I left you the, surprisingly hard(took me 3 minutes) to find, evidence you asked in the other comment.
A 5 minute search on the Internet would be... enough?
As if all similar stories are part of some global conspiracy?
Like... you only know how good, efficient and super cool the people at the TSA are?
Really?
Laura Poitras is an American citizen too. Is she credible enough for you? Can you tell me what are her thoughts on the TSA?
No? Do you even care? If you do care, then put the effort to learn what is already accessible to you. Otherwise what's the point in engaging in discussions with comments "oh yeah you read it on the Internet derp derp"
Here, have a freebie from Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/hacker_detain...
EDIT: it seems, when facts come in, downvotes are cast! Ouch. It burns
One of the interesting effects of the Snowden revelations was how what is considered "paranoid" changed.
Pre-Snowden, if you thought that the USA government was definitly spying on everyone, you'd be considered a bit paranoid.
And well... Snowden told us those paranoid people were right...
The EFF has a timeline of quotes / stories that basically extend back to the September 11th attacks.
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline
I personally don't think paranoia, though. To me, this whole collecting data on everyone instead of targeted individuals is more this: a huge data storage that is both subject to both internal abuse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT) and data leaks (Snowden); a wasteful process that didn't really stop a lot of terrorist attacks (eg, San Bernadino, the Boston Marathon bombings, Fort Hood, the Charleston church, etc.); a process that damaged America's reputation considerably (even from a pure business perspective); etc. Honestly, the NSA spying appears to end up being a colossal waste of resources and a general failure overall.
If some NSA database records this opinion, good. :)
But this is the whole point... people change their behaviour because of fear of being persecuted, it may seem irrational and paranoid to some looking in with certain beliefs about what constitutes a risk, but it is entirely understandable and this is the negative effect of governments that spy on their citizens to mark them as threats.
Not at all, what we're trying to do is quantify what is the appropriate level of paranoia. As others have pointed out, (see sibling comment by rmc) it turns out that some people why were previously considered far too paranoid turned out to be right.
According to him the immigration can look at your social graph see how many Muslim friends your have can their system can raise red flags for you based on that so a lot of people avoid muslims.
CBP has hassled me over having a book on Korean and a documentary about Hitler.
It's not necessarily racist if someone was overly nervous and hid friends, especially if they were non-Arab and notably Islamic (since Muslim isn't a race). Though the chance of a random CBP agent having a bad day probably dominates your threat profile unless.you're otherwise really notable.
If I was going to, say, China, I might hide friends that were pro-evangelizing their religion. Fortunately I don't use social media.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/long-island-woman-c...
>Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now.
>“Somewhere out there, someone was watching,” Michele Catalano wrote on the “Medium” blog[...]
> The Suffolk County Police Department said it sent detectives to her East Meadow home Wednesday after a Bay Shore-based computer company reported suspicious computer searches by a “recently released” employee.
> “We found out ... that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job,” Catalano wrote Thursday night in a separate blog post on “Open Areas,” her personal site.
In sum: Mr. Catalano and his former employer got into a flap presumably related in some way to the employer becoming "former"; said employer, which sounds like a pretty lousy place to work if this is the kind of shit they pull, tried to SWAT the Catalanos in the best 4chan style; Mrs. Catalano, seeing an opportunity to grab some headlines and maybe a touch of lasting notoriety for her otherwise entirely forgettable online presence, made this out to be something almost entirely other than what it was; the post-Snowden online media grabbed hold of it for five minutes, then realized how they'd been played and turned on Mrs. Catalano [1] for thinking she could put one over on them.
I don't see how the case against ubiquitous Internet surveillance can be effectively bolstered with dishonest representations of rather trivial events.
>cops show up at multi-family house in blue collar neighborhood >guy in tank top chewing tobacco answers door >"can we step inside and discuss some stuff" >locks door, steps outside, closes door >"ain't nobody with a badge going in there without a warrant and after what happened to Jim who lives upstairs nobody around here talks to you people without a lawyer" >cops escalate situation >guy they're talking to does something that plays into their trap >police beat him senseless, taze him a few times, arrest him, wind up charging him with everything and then dropping everything except some circularly defined charge
And all that could easily happen to a middle class white guy. God forbid you're not white or Muslim...
Look back at the US, my home country, I feel like a lot of people are on the off-the-grid-survivalist spectrum of paranoia. The FBI NSA CIA don't care about 99.99% of you. They never will. Can you guys stop thinking we're an election or two away from a fascist dystopia?
Anyways.. just a different perspective from the other side of the globe
Maybe that's the thing: in China, everybody expects the government to watch everything. People were born in this society, it is normal to us. In the US, people believed the government wasn't invading their privacy, Snowden's revelations is new information to them (I'm talking about the majority of course).
From my limited experience it's also true for Singapore and Japan - so I'm inclined to believer there is an East Asian cultural element to it. When I tried to explain to some Japanese colleagues that a lot of Americas believe we should have the right to have firearms so that people have a mechanism to overthrow the government they looked at me like I was insane (b/c why the hell would you want to overthrow the government? Are you a psycho?!)
Sure, but for the people who are actually abused by the government it is extremely important. If everyone else just ignores the issue then it only ensures over time that more people's lives are ruined. And it's a pretty callous and inhumane stance to take to just not care about people's lives getting ruined simply because it's a minority of people.
Not to mention the fact that the impact of invasive surveillance on certain people is far more impactful than others. If the surveillance state is out there harassing the leaders of government accountability groups or civil rights protesters or EFF supporters that can have a huge negative effect on social and political outcomes.
Hopefully that makes a bit more sense =)
How long did it take Germany? Maybe 3 or 4 elections then.
While we're certainly disillusioned here in the U.S., our bread and circuses aren't seriously threatened yet. Once that does appear imminent, I'll agree with these dire predictions.
And until we have an election that signals a clear, unambiguous change in direction, the disillusionment will continue. The Bundy-style armed protesters will grow ever more convinced that time is running out, and those on the margins will view them less as crackpots and more as harbingers.
The "don't trust the feds; don't trust the cops" attitude is finally spreading to the median American. Our bread needs more butter, and our circuses need newer acts.
Try and pay someone using Venmo and say Achmed or Cuba revolution. *(it's not just venmo)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/venmo-cuba-sanctions_us_...
If their lists start to contain millions of people they become useless. They drown in noize. Well, let them drown.