Good! It would have been great if this more active participation in the political process started a long time ago, but better late than never.

> The overwhelming response has been not caring

One of the reasons for this is that the focus is usually on the surveillance itself. Humans are bad a risk assessment, and most of the time common fallacy that "I have nothing to hide" is approximately correct. Like smoking, the average person is unlikely to be affected by surveillance in the short term. The accumulation of risk over time is never seen first hand.

I suggest that the important understanding that is needed to evaluate the risks of surveillance is that data never goes away. It's easy to be indifferent when you understand surveillance as an isolated event. Instead, the focus should be on growing databases that allow anyone with access to reconstruct entire lives. Practical demonstrations (like Google's map of already-collected location data) are even better.

> will embrace the expansion of the surveillance state

This is what happens when we allow problematic behavior to become normalized. Unfortunately, the too many of the people that did understand surveillance technology decided to say "I don't see any current risk" and chose convenience and features at the expense of future security.

Smoking causing cancer was substantiated by some of the strongest correlations in medical science history. Regular smoking increases cancer risk by 60x (odds ratio) in contemporary studies in the US.

I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance, or indeed nearly anything the government does. Even urban air pollution increases cancer risk by less than 2x (odds ratio). Surely eliminating urban air pollution was a huge accomplishment of government intervention. And yet look at how small that O.R. looks compared to smoking.

Smoking isn't "accumulation of risk over time." It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately.

And maybe this comes to your conflating some pop-psych notion of people being unable to assess risks with other failures of health and well-being. People are physically addicted to smoking; quitting aggravates real pain.

Nobody is "addicted" to government surveillance. In this country, pervasive surveillance could be dismantled with the stroke of a pen, much like closing Guantanamo or mass incarceration of low-level drug offenses.

Why are these orders politically difficult to achieve? I don't know, but risk assessment fallacies aren't to blame.

It's true of smoking, and it's very likely true in the case of surveillance. There aren't similar studies demonstrating this for impact of surveillance on the wellbeing of nations over periods of decades because it's totally infeasible.

However, there is a good amount of evidence that it's very dangerous (and you can come to a similar conclusion by reasoning)—so the question should be whether it's worth the risk in the face of uncertainty.

Edit: parentheses around studies relevant, I know the difference between a correctly designed controlled study and a historical observation. Point still worth making.

Of course. As westoncb pointed out, the actual risk of smoking isn't what I'm talking about. The visible damage from smoking is only seen later (i.e. when symptoms of cancer or emphysema start to appear), so it is extremely difficult for the average person to properly evaluate the risk. Humans use approximate pattern patching and heuristics when evaluating risk; this fuzzy approach to input data saves energy but fails spectacularly in some situations.

> I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance

You're exhibiting the exact problem I'm talking about: you are only considering current problems. There may not be any problems at the moment for you to observe. While that's great for today, the databases that contain an increasingly accurate profile about your activities still exists in the future. You are (severely) underestimating the risk of your data accumulating in (approximately) permanent databases if you haven't included things like:

* A judge during sentencing or parole hearing using a model that claims you are high risk because social media posts you made today correlate with the "high risk" group de jour.

* Your religious, ethic, or political group becomes the next scapegoat. Previously recorded data allows the members of that group to be easily identified "for public safety".

* On the business side, your future insurance company raising your rates because prohibited information (e.g. ethnicity, income) could be inferred from the data you are currently generating.

Those are just a few of the obvious risks that we know about. As time progresses, more risks will be discovered.

> "addicted"

That aspect of smoking is entirely orthogonal to my point. Smoking is merely one obvious example of poor risk estimation.

> It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately.

Yes. It's a damaging process that wont be easily visible to the average person when they are subconsciously judging the effects of their previous cigarette and if they should buy more. Over the last few decades we have had some success at educating people about the actual risks to counteract these common errors in perceived risk, which is exactly what we need to do for data sharing and the surveillance problem.

(They are not worried about it happening this year, but are extrapolating 5 years.)

This is amongst mid-westerners and west coast types. East coast liberals I talked to years ago were part of the DC or military machine, and think 100% surveillance is just a natural tool for vetting politicians: "You have to live inside DC norms since birth or will be blacklisted, even if it is just a joint in high school... Otherwise, how will the ruling class keep running things?"

This was pre-Snowden, but after the at&t leaks, and they didn't believe NSA universal surveillance was possible inside the US. Maybe their tunes have changed. Anyway, maybe that demographic is the type of 'mainstream democrats' you are talking about. Is it some other group?

(I'm talking about my social circles, not trying to stereotype entire states, regions, though the above reads that way no matter how I word it)

edit: I see you live in DC. Called it, I guess. :-(

Politics and positions aside, a refreshing thing about this year was seeing that someone flaunting almost all those norms can still get mass voter appeal.

(Though at the same time, the establishment on both side has reasons to love Trump: Democrats can point at his violations of norms and out-there ideas instead of addressing their own issues, and Republicans can let him soak up the media attention to reduce attention on their passing more of their generally-not-that-popular agenda.)

Keep fighting the good fight.

Rounded up for what? No one I know has that fear.

I say this in all seriousness: why?

Edit: also the treatment of First Nation peoples

Saying injustices happen and are eventually rectified is one thing (which seems to be your argument), saying injustices can never happen again is something completely different.

The Japanese internment has already been trotted out as a precedent for creating a registry of American Muslims. That doesn't sound like recognizing our mistakes and making corrections to me.

I haven't talked to any climate scientists recently, but I suppose living in antarctica for a year gets you on the "maybe losing your job" list.

The "america first" chant on Friday didn't help. Neither did the "for americans" rhetoric.

Don't get me wrong, mass surveillance, the continued and most likely expanded drug war, climate change skepticism, and a long list of other existential threats, all worry me, but they don't really worry me as much as housing costs, employment, not being killed by the Mexican gangs in my neighborhood, not being mugged while riding the metro, or being killed by the police because of mistaken identity and itchy trigger fingers.

Also, to clarify so there is no misunderstanding, when I mentioned Mexican gangs, I'm not using Mexican as an uniformed euphemism for Hispanic/Latino, I'm specifically talking about Mexican gangs who are active in targeting non-Mexicans, and in particular blacks, with violence to try and force us out of entire neighborhoods.

Again, this isn't to dismiss the valid concerns you've raised, just giving an example of things that concern me more immediately.

Multiple people I know (from a range of demographics) have talked to me about the concerns I tried to summarize above. None of them would post that here, so I felt obligated to speak up.

(I'm not personally worried about the stuff I mentioned, just weirded out that it is a repeated conversation)

It's not like other countries don't deport undocumented immigrants either whether leftist or rightist so I don't see how when the US does it it's especially denouceable. [keep in mind, that Obama deported more than W].

I've lived in other countries [China as well as Eastern Europe], and it's not uncommon for regular police to either enforce immigration themselves or cooperate with the immigration office when people overstay their visas or sneak in.

There's plenty of blame to cover both parties.

People seem more concerned that the system elected him than anything else. How bad (in this discussion, xenophobic) will the next president be?

I have noticed a profound, bipartisan disappointment with both parties.

I can understand the preoccupation that he might especially kerb people from the ME. However I see this constant conflation seemingly to scare all immigrants into thinking that the new administration is "anti-immigrant" whereas I see it as anti-illegal/undocumented immigration.

It's clear many people are _trying_ to sew division where none exists in order to advance an agenda [in the immigration case there are people who because they favor unregulated immigration do purposely conflate things in order to raise concern with legal immigrants --people completely unaffected by any new immigration laws]

When I cross a street, a simple second can separate me from getting plastered by a car or a cyclist. But it's not the same as actually being plastered by a car or a cyclist.

differentness, dissent, journalism.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/21/media/donald-trump-war-with-...

On that note, while government has been tearing down walls between agencies, in some cases we should be raising walls.

But in all seriousness, you're correct, though I temper my enthusiasm with the thought that having the walls tends to make people complacent and underestimate risks.

For example, spying on other countries is as old as governments. So maybe that's pretty reasonable, as long as we put up a wall so that those things can't be used domestically. Now that we've settled that issue, let's build some really good tools so we know what our adversaries are doing and we can always find them. Unfortunately, then the hubris of it all catches up with us when some outgoing attorney general approves massive data sharing from tools that were always understood to be permissible only because they were aimed away from us.

Until we can find some way to make our politicians respect constitutional rights, walls are frighteningly temporary.

The only way to make them change their minds is if a lot of them become targets of the control apparatus and in liberal democracies that never happens. Democrats are afraid that Republicans are going to use the apparatus on them and vice versa. No one cares about the rule of law.

In fact privilege has nothing to do with your actions, it has to do with who you are in relation to the government and those in power. Privilege can't really be taken away by new laws. Privilege can't even be given by new laws. Because the laws don't apply to those with privilege. It's possible to get privilege by doing what those in power want you to do and that's mostly act as they want you to act on their terms. Privilege is about power and control. It's nothing to be guilty about, because it's not something you did. It was something that was done for you.

Now, you can apply things like mosaic theory to conjure up rights against surveillance into existence. And maybe that would be the right thing to do. But that's not the only reasonable construction of the fourth amendment, and I'd argue not even the most reasonable one (doctrinally).

But, it's certainly something we could do. The "right to privacy" that covers contraception and abortion was conjured into existence literally from "penumbras." Even most "living Constitution" types would concede that those aren't the most doctrinally strict concepts. But it took an enormous amount of political capital to make those stick (and even today it is tenuous.) The question is, are people willing to spend that kind of political capital on electronic privacy?

  when the Framers were writing the fourth amendment, they were really thinking in terms of property rights, not information

If the framers had intended to protect the information regardless of source, whether or not it was contained in your papers and effects, they would have done so. The framers did not have Facebook, but they would have understood the importance of sensitive information held by third parties. They were merchants, bankers, wealthy farmers, and lawyers. They would have been able to conceive of, for example, the government collecting manifests from a shipper to prosecute a merchant for evading taxes. Or subpoenaing books from an accountant. The fundamental legal question underlying a big chunk of the surveillance issue--can the government force Facebook to give it information Facebook has about a user--has been teed up ever since subpoenas and accountants existed (both a couple of hundred years prior to the founding).

What the framers did not contemplate is that one day the government would not have to infringe your property rights to get all your personal information.

At the time of the framing, your accountant had your information, but he was also authorized to know it. Nobody at Google is authorized to read my email or even I expect look at who I'm corresponding with. It's all done by machine.

And the whole concept of "property" as inside a machine is unusual. Is an email on a server like a letter on an accountant's desk, or is it like a letter on my desk in my apartment which I lease from someone else?

Was the government in 1780 allowed to subpoena the Post Office for your mail?

The "machine" versus "Google employee" distinction isn't a compelling one. The computer is programmed by a human agent of Google to scan your email, collect information, and use that information for Google's purposes. Also, wouldn't your reasoning allow the government to avoid any allegations of 4th amendment violations by pointing to the NSA computer that does the actual scanning?

> And the whole concept of "property" as inside a machine is unusual. Is an email on a server like a letter on an accountant's desk, or is it like a letter on my desk in my apartment which I lease from someone else?

It's not unusual. Property is defined by the bundle of rights you have with respect to something, whether that something is tangible or intangible.[1] A lease is a property right that limits what the lessor can do. Your landlord cannot, except under certain exceptions, enter your apartment and look through your desk (or send a robot to do the same). Your landlord has no interest in the things inside your apartment, which remain solely your property. None of that is true for many types of digital information held by third parties. Google explicitly retains the right to scan your emails and use the collected information for commercial purposes. At some point, Google retained quite extensive rights over what you put on Google Docs (although they've narrowed that in a TOS change). Facebook retains quite extensive rights over what you post.

The 1878 case of Ex Parte Jackson addresses the Post Office issue. It distinguishes between sealed letters (protected by the 4th amendment), and things like postcards that are open to inspection, even if they are not routinely inspected (not protected). Arguably, most clear-text online traffic falls in the latter bucket.

All of that being said, my point is that you certainly could conjure up a right to digital privacy from the "penumbras" of the 4th amendment. But the opposite view--that no such right exists--is pretty logical too. Certainly, I think logical enough that you can't say that the text of the 4th amendment compels you to find that such a right exists.

[1] This should not be a foreign concept to programmers. It's very much like a capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model.

Further, when govt attempts to prevent citizens from putting email into secure envelopes then its clear what's going on. Its goes from "I can easily read your email; thus its not protected" to "You must submit all you email for inspection!" That's clearly the sort of thing the 4th amendment is intended to protect from.

That's assuming the scanning never results in any information being conveyed to a person or recorded anywhere someone might eventually read it. That wouldn't provide much use to the government.

> None of that is true for many types of digital information held by third parties.

That depends on the third party. Not all email providers do that. And if scanning your email to target advertising was the determinant of whether the government could read it without a warrant, email providers would stop doing that or people would stop using them.

And then wouldn't it change based on whether the scanning is done client side or server side?

> Arguably, most clear-text online traffic falls in the latter bucket.

That puts a different spin on the whole encryption debate. If not encrypting traffic allows the government to read it without a warrant, a government encryption ban takes on a whole new meaning.

And the traffic increasingly is encrypted. Hosts are increasingly using TLS for HTTP and SMTP.

True, many of them may not appreciate the degree to which their lack of privacy is exploited for commercial purposes , but make too much of a fuss about that and people think you're a proto-communist or something. I'm very privacy-oriented by temperament but I've gotten used to being out of step with almost everyone I know over this.

That would be the 4th Amendment[1].

I really don't think that Americans have never cared about privacy; I think if that were true, we would have a different 4th Amendment. Instead, I think that the various amendments and overall content of the Constitution serve to limit the power of government, and in that regard, it behooves the individuals within the government to disregard as much of the Constitution as they can get away with, thereby acquiring more power for themselves.

That the American people have allowed the individuals within government to disregard the Constitution so flagrantly, to me this indicates a deep gap between the ideals of our predecessors and the ideals of the current generation. So, it's not that Americans have never cared about privacy, it's just that the people of today don't seem to have the political willpower to get it back.

[1] The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I'm not sure how the NSA thing is justified, especially given the executive order mentioned in the article.

Avoiding that "corruption" really did a whole lot of good with the actual, literal wannabe serial-assaulting autocrat who is in office, you're so very right.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/12/13/...

House Republicans revive obscure rule that allows them to slash the pay of individual federal workers to $1:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/house...

Both have been extensively reported and are well-understood. In the interest of fairness that Trump and his cronies do not deserve, they claimed significantly after-the-fact that the former request for the names climate workers was "not authorized." This is a lie, and a bad one, and the truly damning thing is that they think--perhaps even correctly--that the lie will be taken by their listeners. "Alternative facts" (hat-tip to Trump's mouthpiece Conway for that gem) are the measure of the autocrat: make the people doubt everything to exhaust them, to instill the notion that there is no truth, and to prevent them from focusing on what you are actually doing. It provides cover when suspicions are actually aroused by something you are doing to fade away, and then it is as if it never was.

We must protect scum,because otherwise it only takes a single bullshit "this person is scum" campaign to strip a person of their rights.

This isn't unique to the generation you talk about.

Democrats are not only the main,opposition to the president; they are the force that kept adding surveillance.

Unless they like those purportedly illegitimate functions, like using the federal government to put the boot on the neck of states that are OK with gay people having rights.

I get that you're good-faithing here, but the credit bank on that one went dry a long time ago.

if your house is burning down, would you be surprised if all anyone can talk about is fire? the US' situation is similar.