There are many good reasons to be concerned about surveillance, privacy, data gathering, etc. Your future presidential campaign is almost certainly not among them.
How about every future presidential candidate? The existence of a panopticon corpus of information on them which is only accessible to a certain group, grants power over them to that group. In the Internet age, the NSA's policy of tracking everyone is functionally vetting and accumulating blackmail material not just on presidential candidates (where our scrutiny veers towards the ridiculous), but on anyone who ever wants to enter into any position of power. No human being, much less human organizations, could remain uncorrupted by that level of influence over power for any duration of time.
If these policies are not changed, eventually it takes almost negligible amounts of misuse before the NSA or parties within the NSA are quite literally running the country & the world. It takes perhaps a solitary bad actor in the organization with this level of information to merely tip the balance in favor of bureaucratic survival, shift one election or pop an adultery scandal in the way of one board member on one telco. It would require a fanatical level of self-scrutiny and belief in the norms of liberal democracy to self-police against these durable incentives, and obviously that doesn't exist.
Maybe having access to everyone's Instagram account and Google search history doesn't immediately sway the balance of power in 2001, but every year that our country doesn't cut out this brain tumor, it gains more power over us; Our odds of retaining some semblance of control over this organization drop. Quite soon, there won't be any technology-phobic individuals left in our positions of leadership. That day, control over this corpus of information will become a fulcrum that can move mountains.
In writing _1984_, contra to many interpretations, Orwell wasn't afraid of the concept of tyranny. We have had many tyrannical governments before, and documented their rise and fall. He was terrified of the singular notion that the novel power of technology and panopticon surveillance, might create a powerbase which was functionally immortal, a tyranny that could never fall to dissenting calls for change; That maybe technology had made the power of 'dissent' obsolete. If that comes true, we lose the power of self-determination forever.
The same goes for Bill "didn't inhale" Clinton.
My imaginary black-hat that hangs out on my shoulder whispers into my ear that part of the political vetting process is now either finding and securing the existing blackmail material or manufacturing some via tricks and traps. Anyone who does not have a readily-pulled lever is prevented from appearing in the news cycle, or simply libeled and slandered.
My imaginary white-hat says that virtuous folk simply choose not to dirty their hands with politics. A person who does not compromise his principles cannot compromise enough to be effective in the halls of power.
I think they may both be right.
You'd be hard-pressed to find among them illegal activity directed at suppressing mainstream political opposition. That would be the kiss of death for any such service.
It isn't that these things are not terrible or worthy of scrutiny, opprobrium, or if you prefer, outrage. Suggesting that Western liberal democracy is somehow in unique peril because of them or 'because internet' is, and I'll say it again, silly. Western liberal democracy has easily survived a lot worse.
Wrong. Nothing in history has approached the ubiquity and scale of control that the currently forming surveillance machine is capable of. And yes, all of this 'because internet'. Your comparisons are moot against this distinction.
How far do you think COINTELPRO might have gone if the FBI had been able to record every piece of mail, every conversation, had been able to lean on members of the press or members of the Church Committee with pre-recorded leverage, knowledge of every single questionable thing they'd done or said in 'private' all the way back to their childhood?
----
On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church stated on NBC's Meet the Press without mentioning the name of the NSA about this agency:
“ In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.[9][10] "
----
The power we have handed these people is becoming orders of magnitude more extreme than the power it was technologically practical for an organization to attain in that era. That power is going to grow as time goes on.
The danger is not that the NSA deploys hundreds of thousands of spies to inform on and suppress mainstream political opposition, the danger is that they don't have to, to exert effective control. We're going to need something stronger, not weaker, than the reforms implemented then, to be a durable deterrent to more severe abuses in the future.
"Information wants to be free", said they. But that's not the case. The core of the idea is that information provides an incentive to everyone with access to that information, to use it. The greater the pile of information, the stronger the draw becomes. Eventually the amount of power concentrated in that information will corrupt whatever organizational structure we surround it with, so long as we permit it to be gathered in one place.
Outside the US, the examples of these abuse are numerous. Probably the most spectacular was Francois Mitterrand in France, who was wire tapping his political opponents and some other "persons of interest" (famous actress). And by using anti-terrorist powers by the way!
And having this power is not only open for abuse from the President. Lots of people in the chain of command will probably abuse it. It will also be open for abuse by law. You don't know what is OK today but will be inappropriate or illegal in 20 years.
All of this has nothing to do with the US but with human nature. The reality of any large society is that you have a portion of the population who are crooks, bullies, rapists, egomaniacs, corrupt, etc. Designing a system that relies on everyone now and forever to be honest is bound to fail. This is why the US constitution introduced so many checks and balances. And one fundamental check and balance is to limit the power of the state. And the state having so much information on its citizens, on everything anyone says to anyone, on where anyone is at any given time, on who talks to who, on who reads what is way way too much power.
The only way to prevent tragic abuses of power is to be proactive. We cannot wait for abuses to occur, we must be constantly vigilant in recognizing potential abuses and stopping them before they occur (just imagine how effective network security would be if it were entirely reactive instead of proactive).
The world got a wake-up call with the Snowden revelations. But anyone with some technical know-how and foresight knew much of what he revealed was happening already (although I'm sure even the most forward thinking technologist was surprised at some of the revelations). I would hope the era of "but where's the proof" would be over when it comes to protecting ourselves from oppressive surveillance powers.
The only way to secure this country from domestic enemies in perpetuity is to make sure such detrimental abuses cannot occur, ever. Waiting until proof is revealed is far too late. And absolutely never trust anyone with unchecked power.
Your argument is also brain-dead in that the amount of information available was minuscule compared to now (thus avenues for abuse and relevant information was proportionately minuscule). The fact that it didn't happen in the era of the largest (known) abuses says absolutely nothing about the likelihood of it happening going forward.
And if you string together conspiracies without a shred of evidence to support them, you are by definition making shit up whole cloth. This puts you in the same irrational company as Alex Jones, Art Bell, etc , etc.
The existence of bad actors absolutely does not mean that we abandon all critical thinking and logic and rationality. There is precisely as much evidence that the NSA is blackmailing presidential candidates as there is evidence that there is a camera in my underwear drawer or that chemtrails exist.
Rationality is not equivalent to empiricism, as you seem to be implying.
>There is precisely as much evidence that the NSA is blackmailing presidential candidates as there is evidence that there is a camera in my underwear drawer or that chemtrails exist.
But the plausibility of the two are incomparable. Given what we know about human nature and the information available, and the abuses already made public, it is a legitimate fear. This combined with the immense gravity of such abuses, a rational consideration of the facts indicates that we take proactive measures to prevent it.
You say chemtrails are implausible? We already know that the TLA's have experimented with mind control agents, ala MKULTRA (though under different circumstances) and probably other still-secret programs, so using the rubric you just described, chemtrails are also a legitimate fear.
When it comes to chemtrails, a whole string of highly improbable assumptions are necessary for it to be true. The probability of these two cases are not comparable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
The only reason the US doesn't use weather modification in war is because of signed international treaties.
Clearly, but the fact they infuriate you doesn't change my rebuttal of the OP's point. Which you still haven't addressed, short of telling me how it infuriates you. I understand you're infuriated.
"The investigation of Spitzer was reportedly initiated after North Fork Bank reported suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by Patriot Act provisions, enacted to combat terrorist activity such as money-laundering."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scan...
When the law was "enacted to combat terrorist activity", how do you prevent it from being turned on any crime?
I'm not actually worried about MY presidential campaign. But if there is a close race, there is always the "we have the candidates ebay/amazon browsing history from 2009" or "those text messages he/she sent to their secretary" option that could dramatically change history.
The potential for abuse is too great to not have limits on data-retention.
The problem is we cannot be sure exactly when it has been abused. It's only fair to presume our our corrupt system does not use the NSA ethically.
edit: Even if they only have 1 exabyte of storage, that's enough to keep 3.3 gigabytes of data for every single person in America (~300 million). I would wager that's more than enough to store the text from everyone's email for many years.
Given that the 1 exabyte is a low order estimate given the size of the Utah data centre, you have to wonder just exactly what they are actually storing or planning to store there. If someone had access to it (and I'm not saying I think the NSA do), the site is physically big enough that you could fit sufficient storage to keep years worth of voice recordings of the total global phone call volume.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-rec...
http://www.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts4500/index.html
The Utah Data Center has at least 100,000 square-feet of data center space. If just half of that space was used for storage then it would be over 27 exabytes worth of storage assuming a density similar to what IBM offers.
Backblaze on the other hand has their Storage Pod 4.5 which can hold up to 270 GB of storage for less than $20,000. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-pod-4-5-tweaking-a-pr...
Which, according to the article runs less than $10000 (180 TB * 1000 GB/TB * .048 $/GB = $8640 )
270 TB is using 6 TB drives.
Backblaze uses 4 TB drives because of the increased costs and failure rates of the 6 TB drives.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/bl...
(270 TB * 1000 GB/TB * .051 $/GB = $13770 )
My original estimate of $20,000 was just a rough estimate that added some padding for overhead and accessories.
No, but you're paying the bill for your own tracking. Much easier to spend other people's money.
Right now, that recorder is temporarily paused for the most part.
Which one of us is right?
If I search lots of technology and military related topics, or do any system-admin work, or use any privacy-enabling services (VPN / TOR), then my friends/family/associates and myself would likely fall under those categories.
My concern is there should be a data-retention policy due to constantly changing laws.
If 20 years from now I want to run for president, then all it would take is to search for records in one of the many caches of NSA collected data that other agency, state, local, and even foreign law-enforcement have collected over the years. That would allow a large number of people to have the power to easily find something that would distract me enough to pull me out of the race, such as inappropriate text-messages/emails that a cheating spouse sent in the past.