The U.S. government is monitoring all computer and phone devices within its borders, and more outside. Your search history can be seen and archived. Your camera and microphone could be activated without you knowing. You can be physically tracked in real-time. There should be a revolution to overthrow the NSA, CIA, NASA, etc.
What is your opinion concerning the surveillance state?
Buffalo back at it again with the conspiracies: 1/22/2017 00:01:11
1) When it is known that everything is under surveillance, terrorists will know to use strong encryption or offline communication, so that the only people having their privacy invaded are innocents. Actually this makes it less likely to catch terrorists - if there was no mass surveillance, they might feel safe enough to use the internet for communication.
2) If you have nothing to hide, why do you feel uneasy about your parents' or your boss's requests to add you on Facebook? Why do you wear clothes?
3) The entire premise of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is wrong: why is it assumed that citizens' secrets are never legitimate while the state's secrets are always legitimate? Things to fear even while presumed innocent: being held in custody for several weeks (or several years in Guantanamo), having one's computer or work equipment taken away to be searched and retained for months, having one's bank account frozen, even if proven innocent later there is no compensation for such incurred losses.
4) Another thing wrong with that premise: why is it assumed that breaking the law is necessarily bad? It could be that the law is unreasonable, as happened in the GDR and any totalitarian regime. We're essentially assuming that the state is always right.
5) Knowing that the state is listening in, even if he's not paying attention to you in particular, you will start to censor yourself, not saying things that could be considered controversial, even if you assume that it would be legal to say those things. The ripples are several times greater than the direct repercussions of censorship.
6) There are already known instances of this internet surveillance being misused, of people being arrested because they posted comments on Twitter or Facebook that anyone would have understood to be sarcastic rather than actual threats. For example, a group of Texan teenagers were playing League of Legends online and one of them told the other "You're fucked up in the head" and the other replied "Oh yeah, I'm fucked up in the head, I'm going to shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still beating hearts. LOL. J/K." This teenager has now spent 6 months in prison and is expecting a sentence of 10 years because of making a "terrorist threat". If that's how US authorities react, can you even afford to be sarcastic? Can you afford to joke? You start to censor yourself when talking to your friends online. (the video has more examples from 4:45)
7) Surveillance cost a lot of money. With hundreds of billions of hours of surveillance every day, we have so far only managed to uncover a handful of terrorist ploys, none of them sophisticated enough to work; in one case they were initiated by an intelligence agent even as the terrorist group was too clueless. It is unthinkable that there aren't any ways that are cheaper, more respectful of human rights and that are way more effective than what we have today.
8) Collections of data can later be abused. For example, sodomy was forbidden in early 1900 Germany and the state kept lists of suspected homosexuals in order to be able to fine them for sodomy. Even if we assume that the lists were legitimate as a way to persecute what was a minor crime, the story goes on: in 1933, the Nazis were able to arrest, castrate or kill tens of thousands of homosexuals because of those lists. Given today's near-complete surveillance with biometric passports, cellphone tracing and everything, Jews would stand no chance in hell nowadays to escape whichever country wanted to harm them. And eventually there will be one that wants to harm them, or another minority.
Buffalo back at it again with the conspiracies: 1/22/2017 15:12:55
