Easily. Without hesitation, obviously, hard yes. If the KKK wants to be a tiny minority of people who lack the nuance to direct their anger at anything other than a color of skin, maybe we need to work on our education system. If they haven't committed a crime, then either they haven't hurt anybody, or we need to work on our judicial system.

Inevitably, the microscopic amount of good that could be done would be vastly outweighed by the chilling effect on every group that was trying to create positive change at the expense of the oligarchy. Aka: true patriots.

Well if you're willing to accept that the government should not keep tabs on racist organizations or militias, then I guess we've cashed out our disagreement to terminal values. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

You can think whatever you want. You can even think it with a bunch of people and hopefully not have to feel scared to think whatever is you will think, nor fear talking about whatever is you want to talk about. Even if that thing has something to do with creating real, actual change within our lifetimes.

I see you post on forums involving hackers and encryption. We're just going to keep tabs on you and other potential members of your militia, ok?

I suspect you're just disagreeing on what "keeping tabs" actually means.

The government shouldn't put someone under (specific|personal) surveillance without strong evidence of course. But I don't see what prevents them from reading twitter, going into public chat rooms, etc.

I think that was the general idea, yes. Or at least, before they have strong indication that it’s likely to commit a crime.

How should they determine when a group is about to commit a crime though? Usually that's done via pre-emptive surveillance. If they are not allowed to surveil groups that they merely suspect might one day commit crimes, it will be very hard for them to know anything about their activities before the crimes actually get committed.

It's certainly possible that this is just the price of freedom. But I think its a rather heavy price.

"Usually". Evidence? I doubt that the police pre-emptively stop many crimes at all. They catch criminals _after_ they have committed crimes.

Even if they were able to catch every crime before it started, ala minority report, they, based on past behavior, would most likely seriously abuse that power hence the strong opposition here to having them even come close to posessing that power.

> "Usually". Evidence? I doubt that the police pre-emptively stop many crimes at all. They catch criminals _after_ they have committed crimes.

Here's a long list of terrorist incidents, some of which were pre-emptively disrupted by the FBI:

https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-20...

> Even if they were able to catch every crime before it started, ala minority report, they, based on past behavior, would most likely seriously abuse that power hence the strong opposition here to having them even come close to posessing that power.

I don't really understand your point. I'm not arguing that they won't abuse their power. They will. They always do. The question is whether or not the abuses that might occur as the result of analyzing publicly available information are worse than the harms that might come from not doing so. I come down pretty squarely on the harms from not doing so being greater, but reasonable people can disagree, I suppose.

"were pre-emptively disrupted"

Says the FBI, with a conflict of interest large enought to drive a big truck full of fertilizer though in publishing these things. They also have a varified history of lying through their teeth.

So, you're simply unwilling to accept any evidence on the subject? Do you have any evidence at all to support your perspective?

Sorry, I believe the burden of proof is on you to show credible non-governement evidence that the FBI has stopped just some of the numerous terrorist you are referring.

Bring out FBI press-releases and the like and I'll just have to point you at the many FBI statements from the past that are now obviously blatent fabricated lies.

> many FBI statements from the past that are now obviously blatent fabricated lies.

You mean like the entire practice of forensic fiber analysis, which they were forced to cop to after the fact: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-testimo...

These are just isolated demands for rigor. I gave you a concrete list. You're welcome to dispute any of them on the actual facts. Until then, I think we're done here.

You gave me a press release from an organizaion that has a history of being deceptive. Why would I, or anybody, take it as a "concrete list?"

The thread of discussion here is that the FBI needs to have broad survaillance capabilities to catch crime before it occurs. The list you gave has verly little support for that in that almost all of the acts in the list were not stopped due to any survaillance, but rather invesigations after the fact. You could assert that they might have been stopped, but that is conjecture.

If you ctrl+f for the word 'plot', you'll find the ones that were disrupted prior to execution. They don't spell it out, for obvious reasons, but generally some sort of surveillance is involved.

> The question is whether or not the abuses that might occur as the result of analyzing publicly available information are worse than the harms that might come from not doing so.

How many criminals announce their plans on Twitter in a way that law enforcement can use to prevent a crime? From my perspective, it seems like the potential for crime prevention is small compared to the potential for abuse.

I think things are often planned on Twitter to some degree. A lot of the quasi-planned looting and rioting was mapped out on Twitter, for instance. It's a very rich source for information on these sorts of things.

And almost every single one of those they had evidence, indications of which particular individuals to monitor/infiltrate. Often this was through reliable sources.

And where did they get that evidence?

> I come down pretty squarely on the harms from not doing so being greater

And this feeling you have may stem from another political narrative being created and amplified: the fear of 'the other'. The fear that justifies all of this to so many people.

Sowing the FUD that e.g. most people from Mexico are "criminials, rapists, carrying disease", or that Moslims are terrorists. That terrorist sleeper cells may be everywhere. A gliding scale of xenophobia created for political purposes.

What a strange non-sequitur. You know that I am the one in this thread suggesting that the FBI should monitor right-wing white supremacist groups, right?

You are right. If I could still edit I'd replace 'you have' with 'in general' because that was what I was referring to. Didn't refer to you in particular.

> Do you really want to take the position that the government cannot monitor any group until it commits a crime?

There is an ocean of options in between “do nothing” and “surveil and database every citizen who potentially maybe, might, could exercise their constitutional protections and protest.” A vast amount of options.

Let's keep in mind what we're actually discussing here. We're talking about police monitoring public Twitter feeds. They're not tapping phones. They're not secretly infiltrating groups with undercover agents. Just reading stuff that's published in public, for all the world to see.

Reading public messages seems like a super reasonable thing for the police to be doing, to keep tabs on groups that have recently engaged in disruption and violence. Whether those groups are right wing or left wing.

It's hard to disagree with this point, really.

I don't see how you can prevent the police from reading stuff that's being broadcast for everyone else to see.

And threats of violence, or evidence of organizing to cause violence, should be investigated.

I think it's rather easy actually.

The police aggregate vast sums of data and uses it in ways that the public does not understand, intend, or expect. It's not unlike the way people 'sign' away their privacy on the internet without being aware that their data will then be sold and resold and used against them.

It is a common belief that information is a weapon, and it certainly can be used as one. So does it makes sense, at least from one perspective, that our information should not be legal to catalogue? After all, it is illegal in the U.S. for the government to create a registry of firearms owners because such a registry could be used against the people and its very existence would be an infringement on the rights of those people.

But this information is already being cataloged. It's being published on a platform that explicitly catalogs it, for the public. Anyone tweeting on Twitter is doing so with the full knowledge that anything they say might get signal-boosted by someone with a high follower count and become a major public incident. It happens with extreme regularity. The idea that there is some kind of expectation of privacy here seems far-fetched to me.

We as a collective seem to treat the government as a natural person online, but not in person.

If a police officer sits down at the dinner table next to me and listens in on my conversation with friends and family, I'd be quite uncomfortable. I'd feel equally uncomfortable if they sat across the restaurant and pointed a microphone at the table to record everything. However, suddenly we treat them like normal people if they download the entire contents of our digital lives and process every word we've ever written online.

It's one thing for Twitter to be accessible to natural persons publicly. It's another for a government to treat everyone as though they are under investigation at all times, without a warrant.

For clarity, in my opinion, a police officer who just happens to follow me on twitter because he likes video games is a natural person. However, he stops being a natural person once he starts representing the organization he works for.

Twitter is not a dinner table though. Twitter is a public square. I think you could make a reasonable case for Facebook being dinner-table like. But Twitter has privacy settings. You can protect your tweets if you want to. If the police were breaking into protected accounts, I would agree with you. But Twitter seems about as public as it gets.

Imagine every person in a public square has a police officer following closely behind them with a microphone in one hand a video camera in the other. And we're not even touching on the 3-letter-agency relationships with tech companies which almost assuredly gives them access, even to 'private' profiles.

Innocent people should not be surveilled ruthlessly on the off chance that every now and again we catch one evil person. In my mind, it's like the TSA invading everyone's privacy without ever catching a single terrorist. It's a waste of resources, on top of being a disgusting behavior.

The difference is that in a physical public square, you have a built-in expectation of ephemerality. Everyone expects that their behavior in some random physical space is not going to persist forever. Twitter, on the other hand, is explicitly build with the expectation of what you tweet persisting forever.

On the other hand, there are tons of cameras in public spaces too. So, even though people have had a built-in expectation of ephemerality, that's already been violated for quite a while now.

I don't expect Twitter to last forever either. Myspace sure didn't.

That said, in my view, surveillance against the average person has got to go.

>Do you really want to take the position that the government cannot monitor any group until it commits a crime?

Yes. That's better than the alternative. So many things can be construed as criminal that I don't think it's an impediment to the investigation of actual criminal in practice. If anything stops police from wasting our money surviving groups that are not actually threats to anything but the government wants under surveillance for political/ideological reasons.

That's a nice ideal, but ultimately very naive. Your idea would work great until a neo nazi group or a terrorist organization executed an attack killing a large number of people. Then everyone would be screaming at the government demanding to know why they weren't monitoring more so they could prevent just such an occurrence.

Absolutely, yes.

Yes

Yes.

The FBI doesn’t appear to do a great job at preventing white supremacist domestic terrorism, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

Relative to what? We have no idea how much terrorism there would be without the FBI.

We also have no idea how much terrorism we have due to the FBI, ala CONINTELPRO.

Sure. But a lack of concrete, precise information doesn't mean we can throw up our hands and just call them equivalent, either. The FBI disrupts quite a bit of terror activity, and quite a bit more never materializes because the FBI exists. They've certainly engaged in their fair share of abuses over the years, but I don't think you can seriously argue we'd be better off without them.

Um. Yes I can. It's in the same vein as letting a few guilty people go free to ensure that less innocent people get sent to prison.

I'd rather still have Matin Luther King around than to have whatever the FBI claims to have disrupted.

The FBI didn't kill MLK, though. If you eliminated the FBI, you woulnd't get MLK back. But you would have a few hundred more serious terror attacks in the US history, probably a decent number of them against minorities.

> The FBI didn't kill MLK, though.

We know they tried to do so at least once while maintaining deniability.

Do you have any evidence of this claim besides press-releases from the US government?

I envy your confidence.

Well, we do know that more people have died to white supremacy since 9/11 than died on 9/11. Not to mention people forget Oklahoma City rather quickly....

The last few cases that come to mind (Breivik, Tarrant) are from lone wolves that had radical ideas but were not affiliated with any group.

It must be very difficult to catch (unless you want a surveillance society where everyone is suspect).

Even in cases where it's planned and announced it's difficult to stop (Al Qaeda did announce they would assassinate Charb, editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, and despite police protection they managed to do so).