They are trying to prevent terrorism. And they are sifting through lots of data.
They are also doing a lot of other things. I certainly hope terrorism isn't their main concern. Maybe some of that data is helpful preventing the odd hate crime. But it might just also be used for union busting or something like it in the name of stability and law and order.
Total surveillance is useful to control a population - but I don't think it's particularly useful as a counter terrorism tool.
In a way, I think the traditional mode of representative government is part of the problem. It simply doesn't reward anyone to level with the public like that. I'd like to be shown wrong, can anyone provide a counterexample of a politician serving in office who persuaded the public to just accept it? The only sort-of example I can think of is US politicians who throw up their hands over teh gun control issue after a massacre and say they can't really do anything and then wait for the issue to fall off the front page. But that's also why so many people are disgusted by politics.
If you want politicians to stop engaging in security theater and the like, it looks like you're going to have to buy them off. With enough money a politician will apparently say anything. Doesn't sound too sustainable to me though.
We can imagine a society where Stoicism is the norm (most famously the Vulcans on Star Trek) but it seems rather counterfactual to suggest it's the default condition of humanity.
No it isn't. That's the distraction.
Their purpose is the sift through all available information to stifle dissent, spread misinformation, sow discord and divisiveness among the people, destroy unions and maintaining the status quo in the interests of the elite, the wealthy and the landed that have captured supposedly democratic governments throughout the world.
We know they poison online discussion forums (not just terrorism-related ones) and have armies of paid pro-government and pro-surveillance shills much like China abnd Russia that deflect and obfuscate discussion in order to direct it in their own interests.
We know they target charities and civil rights groups like Oxfam, Amnesty, the Red Cross and Open Rights Group and label them domestic extremists' simply for wanting to help and offer people representation and due process. Apparently these things are 'extremism' now.
We know they have knowingly and intentionally targeted innocent people and compromised their personal devices and surveilled them through their webcams and microphones and location services.
We know they have targeted companies both foreign and domestic not for national security, but for economic espionage.
We know that total shit-heels that work for these organisations have used their access to target and manipulate love interests, politicians and rivals.
Those who speak up will be discovered to be all manner of criminals, or will find themselves victims of a car bomb, or a mysterious illness or timely suicide.
They do this because of the brewing shitstorm, born of a century or more of regulatory capture, widening inequality and transfer and consolidation of wealth from the many to the few.
Intelligence agencies are not your friend. They are a private army. Just look at the City of London Police. They may as well be the copyright industry's hired goons.
The next stage in this will be the increase in the use of private military contractors globally, not just by governments by by private entities.
Mass surveillance has ALWAYS been a to control populations, without exception.
I'm trying to analyse this problem by looking at it in purely rationalist terms and assuming that people I disagree with are going to pursue their collective interest whether or not I approve. I rely heavily on the selectorate theory model outlined in The Dictator's Handbook and in more depth in The Logic of Political Survival. I try to discuss this in analytical rather than agitating language on HN because the mods complain when I get too political. I hope that makes my commentary easier to understand.
Please stop trying to tell me about stuff I already know and tell me how you would work on the problem of the general public easily being stampeded into backing repressive policies. That's what I need actual help with, and I need something a lot more actionable than 'let's educate everyone and teach them to think critically' because that's a generational problem and one that is not going to just work automatically. You can contact me via gmail if you'd prefer, or other channels including personally.
If you are having trouble finding a needle in the haystack, adding more hay isn't going to help, it's just going to make your problem worse.
The best idea I've come up with (and it's got serious flaws of its own) is a social network where deletion is impossible, but you have a choice between anonymity and authority for any given submission you make thereto. Anonymous utterances might be true, but they'd have to have a very high truth-value indeed to overcome the skepticism that would attach to them. Authoritative statements would thus be backed by a person's reputation, which in turn could be good or bad to different people depending on the historical quality of their contributions. Trolls and spammers would thus be marginalized by the low quality of their output, which might be regarded as even worse than anonymous whispers.
I don't have a theoretical foundation for this, and while I've thought it out in rather more depth than I am offering here it;s the product of intuition rather than analysis and iteration. Web annotations seem the best path to explore for experimentation but I'm not equipped or inclined to develop this into an actual product.
Again, I am not endorsing this, but espionage and counter-espionage has the same arms-race characteristics as other spheres of military and indeed much commercial activity. What's your alternative proposal? I don't have a good one myself. Also, what do you think will happen to a politician that says 'this sort of thing can't be prevented,' given the fact that many pundits and media outlets are happy to promote the notion of a security state to the general public, and the general public is poorly equipped to evaluate their claims?
I'm absolutely not trying to dismiss your argument, but I wish you'd put more effort into fleshing it out. We have centuries of experience for the proposition that the public is easily stampeded into fortress-building and suspicion, and overcoming that requires more than a generalized wish people to just Do The Right Thing, as if that were easily identifiable.