Also, if a judge starts being uncooperative, the NSA has a lengthy dossier on his adultery, homosexuality, communist tendencies, suspected terrorist links, etc. It would be a real shame for that dossier to find its way to the public, wouldn't it...?
By your logic, everyone who make noise about NSA should go underground to keep the right to complain.
Living in a country where rule of law is not to be taken for granted, it is a great source of concern to me that some idiot^H^H^H^H^H naive relative/friend/acquaintance might be unknowingly feeding organized crime with personal information about me and my family.
Unfortunately, Americans will always believe the world is America. When Facebook the corporation opens up their services to the world, they fail to acknowledge that they are changing stuff they are unaware of, but for good and ill. Their cavalier use or privacy data can and will (or most probably, is) be used by all sort of rouge agents, and not just to perform relatively petty crime like CC fraud or identity theft, but also to enable violent felonies.
NSA does not really bother me... it's the thug that shows up one good day and demands you to fork $200USD per week or else...
There was actually a practical example of a man FOIAing his documents from Facebook, which revealed that they had over a thousand pages specifically devoted to him alone on every facet of his life. Even though he was only a "casual" user (one wall update a week, or so). You can see it in the documentary film Terms and Conditions May Apply.
As for me personally, I've never had a Facebook account. Although virtually no one is impervious, reducing social media presence is still always useful to get rid of the blatantly incriminating things.
Unfortunately, the biggest threat is perhaps, what other people are saying about you. I have no idea about what's going on there...
The idea that you need to be able to hide your political speech is a problem to start with. You won't be saved from tyranny by that power - if you use it, you already experience it and tyranny needs no reason to kick in doors beyond suspicion. Accurate intelligence is what you need when you're trying to do things right (or you've executed all the dissidents and the remaining ones are still a real threat).
Those who want to hide don't interest me. If there fears come to pass, I'll be long dead, and they'll have sat by and done nothing while it happened.
This is currently the case-- radical political ideas have been accompanied by state surveillance and attempts at discrediting for a long time, and the current crop of NSA totalitarianism is no different.
b^)
A key factor in whether a search or seizure is unreasonable is whether or not you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The standard for what is a reasonable expectation of privacy is what society considers to be reasonable, not what you individually consider to be reasonable.
So even though you are not on Facebook, all those people who ARE on it and are sharing publicly the most intimate details of their lives are moving the 4th Amendment boundary between searches and seizures that require a warrant and those that do not.
You can file a FOIA request with Facebook to see what they have on you. Other people have, and have gotten their dossiers. Have you had a phone number or mailing address in the past 10 years? If so, they've gotcha covered.
You should not expect privacy on computer systems you do not own. HN included.
The nature of privacy has always been a function of social norms and technology, but given the directions we're headed in these days I think it's easy to make a case that the average citizen has given up a lot more privacy, then they have gained in convenience.
My life was easier when it took me an hour to download a megabyte and I spent more time outside... and I say that as a web developer.
All those anti-Israel comments on FB at the moment - bingo, you've been tagged as probably anti-Semitic, potentially a Muslim terrorism supporter and worth putting on a watch list.
Now if you happen to go to a humanitarian demo that is judged to be pro-Palestine then you are highly liked to be filmed (especially in the UK). The contents of those police cameras are later downloaded and processed. Face recognition software cross-references you with Facebook and other public people databases.
Searching....ping....found target...
- Name: <Tertia>...
- Anthropology: Caucasian
- Source: Facebook NSA hook
- Threat score: 1.3
- Upgrading threat score: + 2.5
Auto triggers:
- Flag Homeland Security
- Tag passport
- Watch social security number
- Track internet usage (log level: all)
It is probably an exaggeration as of today, but this is the system that the NSA is aiming for.