Twenty open tabs in three browsers on two computers. I read and think about last week’s shocking-but-utterly-unsurprising revelations about NSA snoopery. A thousand thoughts run through my head but not a single word makes its way into electrons.
No, it’s no surprise at all that a government agency that was created in secret and is still called “No Such Agency” now reigns so powerful — and will continue to dominate presidents and congresses, no matter who elects them or what letters they have after their names.
It’s also no surprise that not a single MSM news source mentions the Fourth Amendment when discussing whether the latest-revealed snoop programs are legal. They talk about the FISA court and changes to FISA law. They refer to the Un-PATRIOT Act and decades of Supreme Court decisions. They wring their hands over the fact that the Obama administration has never showed the media a copy of the memo that it used to justify these data-gobbling policies to itself.
It feels unreal. You know things are bad, but has the state of things in the U.S. really gotten so dismal that some supposedly educated people believe that a secret memo, written by the executive branch to itself … makes law?
Apparently so.
Oh, how much they have forgotten!
Of course, we’re assured by everyone from the Lecturer-in-Chief to minions at Slate that we’re silly — just hysterical, paranoid, and silly — to be alarmed. Because after all, there are “safeguards.” And no mere safeguards. No! We can rest assured that all three branches of government are scrutinizing every snoop program every day to make sure that the rights of We the Marks Suckers Victims Peasants Cherished Citizens of this Great Representative Democracy are protected.
And of course, snooping on everyone is absolutely necessary because it’s for security. And it even stopped a terrorist attack! Not the one in Boston, of course. Not the one in London, either. (Even though the perps of those attacks were investigated after giving off multitudes of warning signs — then ignored.) But some terrorist attack was stopped, we can be assured (even if we can’t be informed). Because our Masters tell us so.
My “favorite” comment from Officialdom came from a person called James Clapper, a creature hardly anybody had heard of until last week, but who’s Big Brother the man in charge of national intelligence this week. He predictably claimed that merely knowing that the fedgov is spying on us all may have already compromised Vital Ongoing Anti-Terrorist Operations. But the better part was that he bemoaned the fact that The Guardian and other media sources (bless Glenn Greenwald) had the nerve — the audacity — the chutzpah! — to reveal the existence of a secret snoop program without also revealing the secret safeguards on the program, which are carried out in part by the secret FISA court and secret backroom meetings in congress.
But really, never mind the secrecy! Don’t even notice it! You are protected! Not only by your Duly Elected Representatives, but by nameless, faceless, unaccountable people you’ve never heard of — and if we have our way, you never will hear of them!
—–
No, none of this is surprising — though it feels increasingly surreal. War is peace. Lies are truth. Tyranny is absolutely necessary to protect freedom.
Can we seriously be living on the same planet with creatures like James Clapper? With journalists who cry, “Show me the memo!” — or for that matter, with the growing crowd of R&D tyrants who actually expect us to believe it’s all “for our own good”?
—–
Of course there’s nothing new here — except the degree of perfidy and the increasingly Orwellian nature of the claims from Above.
We can assume that every electronic thing we do is being recorded and stored on fedgov servers. We can even guess (if we’re nearing a level of sufficient paranoia) that the current revelations are deliberate leaks from the USSA security apparatus to gradually condition us so we’ll be less alarmed when we eventually learn the full extent of the powers of the Ministry of Truth. Some of the “revelations” may also be lies to keep us cowed and guessing about how much real reach Mordor-on-the-Potomac (or The Dark Star in Utah) actually has.
As the great Bruce Schneier notes, what we don’t know about fedgov spying is scarier than what we do know. And that’s partly because we have to imagine it and wait for the hammer to fall.
—–
Of course, there’s nothing new there, either. Let’s never forget that the original self-designated terrorist organization was a government — and governments have used terror to grab power ever since (and before).
The only real question is: What do we do about it?
And there I come up — almost — empty.
“Elect the right people”? “Reform government”? Change the laws? Riiiight …
Shoot the bastards? Conduct a revolution? Nice thought, maybe. Ain’t happening this week. And besides, fedgov bastards are worse than hydras: shoot one, 10 (even nastier ones) spring up in its place. And a revolution in this era when over half the population depends on government and “journalists” think a memo or an order is all that’s needed to rule us? Riiiight ….
Of course, we have our good old solutions of declaring personal freedom, outwitting, and (hopefully) outliving the bastards.
Paul Rosenberg notes oh-so-correctly that in their end stages, governments always turn against the people. We can gain some comfort from knowing “our” government is so desperately frightened of us.
He also notes that we can run away — and that many of history’s best people have and do.
Never mind that, in the present case (which Rosenberg wasn’t directly addressing), “running away” — as in going offshore — just means that those secret laws, regulations, and memos decree you now to be fair game for the worst of their snooping.
We can’t — and shouldn’t have to — stop using the telephone or the ‘Net just because James Clapper, Barack Obama, or some other creepazoid might be peeping.
We can take (and I hope, have taken) reasonable precautions, but few of those can go so far as protecting our “metadata,” such as whom we called or whom we emailed and where we were when we did it. And it’s hard to protect ourselves against tyrannical threats whose nature has not yet been revealed.
So I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m at a loss — where I hate to be.
We can defy. We can ignore. We can feel ever-greater contempt. We can hope the entire evil system collapses. We can keep the usual low profile and hope The Ministry never plugs in our individual wire.
I wish I had better to offer you. But today, I don’t.
So just let me close with a hearty TO HELL WITH THEM ALL. And when the day comes that their regime collapses in on itself, may the entire weight of it collapse on those who thought they could rule free people through secrecy and terror.
Yarp. There are steps we as individuals can take to, if not make ourselves safe from snooping, at least hide most of our online activity from folks who aren’t looking for us specifically.
But we won’t. There’s hassle involved, both in setting it up and on an ongoing basis. Frankly we see privacy as a too-expensive luxury. Same as everyone else.
Plus, truly effective info management might at some point raise a red flag. So what are we supposed to do, maintain public & private online “identities” and work very hard to keep them separate?
That’d be a lot of work.
Meanwhile, I think a collapse of sorts will occur. But the folks “in charge” won’t learn lessons they’re incapable of understanding. They’re likely to stay on top, at least as they perceive “top.”
Still. I’m having a good day, and I intend to continue with it. No point in letting idiots take over my life if I don’t have to.
My $.02
I’ve also been thinking about these things lately. It occurred to me that most Americans are not concerned at all about the shenanigans of our rulers. Actually, a nontrivial percentage of them actually like what the government is doing to/for them.
In earlier times I might have been very upset with the whole circus but since the end of the tunnel is in view for me personally I don’t worry so much about it any more. Pretty selfish, huh? I still use all of the countermeasures I always have and I still live my life without regard for what busybodies think I should do, as I always have. Only these days I have even less regard for laws than I used to, if that is even possible.
If for some reason our rulers decide that I need a smack down for being an uppity slave I guess there is no avoiding it. I’m having a difficult time giving a shit about it. Hmm, would that be anti-statist constipation?
As for the Utah data center:
OVERWHELM them with data!
Set up gpg (it’s not hard) and send a few tens of thousands of HUGE encrypted emails to a throw away google account (this can be done easily if you have excel and outlook and do a mail merge.) Just go somewhere that has free wifi, takes a few minutes.
Buy two burner cellphones from a convenience store. You and a friend call each other back and forth answering “City” bomb factory, or terrorist supply how may I direct your call. Drop phones in a garbage can that’s not yours.
Enough people do these things which I call “Random Acts of Revolution” and the data center and snooping becomes both impossible and useless.
Any more suggestions?
I don’t recall how old the observation is that we are governed, these days, much more by appointed bureaucrats than by elected officials. It matters not one bit who, or which party, gets elected, when the bureaucracy lives on, unchanged except for the worse. Factor in Lord Acton’s observation about power, and Bob’s your uncle.
sigh.
I was just having this conversation. What it comes down to for me, is that people are going to what they need to do regardless of how we are supposed to be intimated by TPTB. We’re supposed to be looking at things like this, so we completely miss the snowball, that will cause the avalanche. Could be that will be financial (at least another deep recession is likely). Could be terrorists have infiltrated and blended in and are waiting for a “go”. Theories abound who gives the signal.
sigh.
The thought police can’t be everywhere, all the time. So I’m going to go get a 20 oz soda (or maybe a PBR), load a 10 round magazine, and exercise what USED to be our “unalienable rights” to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as defined by ME. I’m betting nothing bad happens. And most importantly, I’m connecting with other people who are planning to outlast the septic drainage field in Mordor, establishing relationships, and working on mutal assistance. I’m only half through Max Boot’s Invisible armies. I’m going to finish it.
I trust a lot of those people I’m meeting to have my back, way more than I do in Mordor’s promises not to threaten my very way of life. So, if what I need to do, makes me an outlaw… well, on that scale, what does that make Mordor?
The “time” has come, it’s the “how” that’s still up for grabs.
Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning and now Edward Snowden, all real American heroes
in the words of Snowden himself, “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”…
Read the whole story:
http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance
Right now, I don’t do anything online that is bad, well, except for reading Backwoods Home, various prepper blogs and I did tell my grandson the other day how to make napalm…..BTW Jed, have you been snooping? How did you know Bob was my uncle?
David T — THANK YOU! First I’ve heard of Edward Snowden — and what a wonderful, inspiring story.
I’ve been trying out Tor Browser the last few days …
Unfortunately, I get an “Access Forbidden” error when trying to read your blog:
“We’re sorry … You are likely trying to connect from a part of the world we had to totally block due to spam and bot abuse of our website.”
Kind of ironic, given the current topic of the blogpost! Privacy shouldn’t be so hard 🙂
@stryder, I thought everybody knew that. 😉
chris — Yes, sorry about that. BHM has restrictive policies. Those policies do keep the spam comments way down, for which I’m grateful. But sometimes …
That’s quite OK. I’ve just been trying out ways to increase anonymity on the web. But really, given current usage statistics for Tor there are only something like 80,000 users in the USA … I wonder if that raises a red flag? Plus, it is rather slow and very CPU intensive.
As far as the Utah data center goes, it is rather disconcerting that a record of every website you view is potentially available … forever. (ISPs know this information, and we don’t really have much choice in this regard so like, if you didn’t trust Qwest to respect your privacy for example (now CenturyLink), what exactly are your options?) And Even /if/ the government was not using this data today to target American citizens, what about in the future? Imagine if every library book you ever checked out was recorded and centralized. Or every book you ever bought on Amazon! Oh, wait …
@Chris The problem with communications privacy is convincing correspondents and web sites to participate. In my experience most people are not inclined to protect what little privacy they have left. Web masters often block huge blocks of IP addresses because not doing so creates a lot of work tweaking filters. Email encryption, easy as it is, is just too much trouble for most people. Sadly, I believe privacy is all but dead and will be certifiably so in the very near future.
I’m hoping for some genius malcontent to come up with a completely unbreakable encryption scheme that works in the background encrypting _everything_ without user intervention. If it had a feature that melted government servers into pools of hot slag, all the better. If privacy requires any effort on the part of a user it is doomed to failure. Sad isn’t it?
Amen! and I’ll give you a hallelujah too!
David wrote, “There are steps we as individuals can take to, if not make ourselves safe from snooping, at least hide most of our online activity”
I seriously doubt that’s a true statement. I hope it is. I doubt it though:
So You Think Bitcoin is a Great Way to Remain Anonymous in Your Financial Transactions?
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/06/so-you-think-bitcoin-is-great-way-to.html
I was reading some stuff by that Bamford guy who’s written several books about this stuff (sorry can’t find the link) how they PRISM data,… how data can escape that(?) I don’t see how. All I’m saying is, I think maybe your idea of “safe” is an illusion.
David wrote, “No point in letting idiots take over my life if I don’t have to.”
That’s just it, they already have taken over your life, they’re just not telegraphing that much obvious control at the moment so you think you’re avoiding them. Or, how much control do they have, they’re getting you to do this that and the other thing to avoid them. That’s control none the less. As long as you don’t act too far outside their predetermined boundaries, they’ll leave you alone. That seems like taking over your (and my) life to me.
Anyway, the blog entry title, ‘What to do about it?’ Reminds me of some teenage bully thugs long ago, :”Whatchya gonna do about it? Huh!?” Then push comes to shove.
Also, C.W., thanks for the laugh: “Twenty open tabs in three browsers on two computers.” I can relate.
Here’s my recipe:
1) Recognize that what the ruling class wants most is not my information, but my fear. That the whole point of surveillance is to get me to fear and to render myself “governable”. The ruling class depends crucially on self-subjugation of “the masses”. Well, don’t go along with it.
2) Question the “our privacy is being taken away from us” meme. Humans have had little to no privacy for much of our existence. It’s a relatively modern invention; nice to have, but not crucial for life.
3) Don’t be surprised at what the government is doing. OF COURSE they are doing this. There are no deterrents stopping them. And even sillier is the notion that some policy or law or court will deter them. People need to try to get a fix on reality.
4) Stop caring. I DON’T CARE what they know about me. I have long assumed I’ve had a dossier somewhere in DC when they had such things, that I’m on the no-fly list, and so forth. How can a person have a life without getting on such things? The most “damaging” things they know about me, my attitudes, I voluntarily publish on the Internet. It doesn’t take PRISM to find it.
5) Keep in focus the bottom line. I’m armed, and I won’t be disarmed. Given that fact, I am free. I can resist and fight at any time, and will when the time comes. I don’t need to worry about when the “official” revolution starts; I only need to know when I am personally, physically attacked.
6) I do use encryption, VPN servers, and other privacy tools, and I am keeping up on such tech as bitcoin and bitmessage. But I don’t do it to protect my privacy. I do it to poke the snoops in the eye and to make life difficult for them. So, it doesn’t matter if they manage to defeat one tool or another, because I am not depending on that tool. The best tool the snoops have is “rubber hose cryptography”, but if they resort to that, it’s war.
[Let’s never forget that the original self-designated terrorist organization was a government]
I looked at that link and found something interesting.
“On 2 June 1793, Paris sections – encouraged by the enragés Jacques Roux and Jacques Hébert – took over the Convention, calling for administrative and political purges, a low fixed price for bread…”
“On 29 September the Convention extended price-fixing from grain and bread to other essential goods, and also fixed wages.”
“On 9 September the Convention established sans-culottes paramilitary forces, the revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain demanded by the government.”
“Among people who were condemned by the revolutionary tribunals, about 8 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 14 percent middle class, and 72 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion.”
Anyway, it looks like the government ruined the economy, particularly for food. The more they came down on farmers, the less incentives farmers had to produce, and the hungrier the people got. The hungrier they got, the crazier they got, running around and chopping peoples’ heads off.
A lot of people say price-fixing is in our future, as it is in almost every case at the end of an empire. We had better do our best to ignore it if we want to avoid the excesses of the French Revolution.
I don’t know if this all makes sense. I’m not an expert in the French Revolution.
Paul Bonneau, it seems to me that privacy is Not a relatively modern invention; and it Is crucial for life.
I disagree with your formula of, 4) Stop caring. I DON’T CARE what they know about me.
Have you read, How the Feds Imprison the Innocent?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts274.html
Also, ignoring price fixing seems impossible. There might be work-arounds, but ignoring it? I don’t think so. Maybe ask an Argentinian about that?
To be imprisoned, you first have to be arrested, which is an act that if any of us did it, would be considered assault, battery and kidnapping. It’s an act of belief in the state, to think its blue-suited goons are specially privileged to do such things, or to think the criminal “Justice System” will set things right for you. I don’t believe in the state, so I won’t be arrested. That is, I won’t put up with it. That’s why I don’t care what they know.
As to price fixing, it’s the same thing. Govt says they will throw in the slammer anyone who charges the wrong price for something. Well, cultivate friends who will trade and barter with you and who will ignore the government threats. And don’t permit anyone to arrest you.
Humans went through most of their existence with no privacy – I’m talking about tribal life, which is like small town life in spades, in that respect. It’s hardly crucial for life.
Being free from having to spend a lifetime of solitary confinement in prison isn’t technically considered crucial for life either I suppose, but it’s crucial for the life of the self, the ‘I’ or the ‘be-ing’ and likely one’s life too.
You might be talking about how you think trial life had no privacy, I’d say you’re quite wrong about that.
Do you suppose tribal clans tolerated intrusions upon burial rituals by opposing clans?
Do you suppose they allowed just any Ole body to attend their wedding ceremonies?
Wouldn’t it be very destructive to the individuals and their ‘be-ing’ if suddenly their ceremonies and rituals were put on a display for an opposing tribal community? Would it be accurate to say their very life would end as a result? It’s likely they wouldn’t want to eat, to socialize, to continue living and would soon die as a result of the lack of privacy.
I think you’re just taking what you think you know about tribal life and making stuff up without doing any research or providing any kind of evidence for your claims.
A quick Google search brought up this tag line:
“In his analysis of privacy in primitive cultures, sociolo- gist Barrington Moore
observed a general preference for seclusion during sexual intercourse”
Conceptualizing Privacy – by Daniel J. Solovet
University of Oregon
How about that, a preference for privacy in primitive cultures. You wouldn’t think that was the case after reading your comments.
This document contained a lot of worthwhile reading, here’s a bit of it:
“… when we talk about privacy, we are really talking about related dimensions of particular practices. We should explore what it means for something to be private contextually by looking at privacy problems: instances of particular forms of disruption to particular practices. …”
In his PDF he lists the elements of privacy:
1.) The right to be left alone.
2.) Limited access to the elf – the ability to shield oneself from unwanted access by others.
3.) Secrecy – the concealment of certain matters from others.
4.) Control over personal information.
5.) Personhood – the protection of one’s personality, individuality, and dignity.
6.) Intimacy – control over, or limited access to, one’s intimate relationships or aspects of life.
Seems to me these are all elements of tribal life.
He goes on to say, “… a pragmatic approach to conceptualizing privacy. seeking to understand privacy in terms of practices. By practices I am referring to activities, customs, norms, and tradition. Under my approach, privacy is not reducible to a set of neutral conditions that apply to all matters we deem private. Rather, to say that a particular matter is “private” or to talk about “privacy” in the abstract is to make a generalization about particular practices. These practices are a product of history and culture. Therefore, we should explore what it means for something to be private contextually by looking at particular practices. I illustrate these points by looking historically at certain matters Western societies have long understood as private: the family, the body, and the home….
Bloustein as well as anthropologist Arnold Simmel have criticized the theory of privacy as failing to recognize group privacy. By equating privacy with secrecy, this formulation fails to recognize that individuals want to keep things private from some people but not from others. …
Not all activities we deem as private occur behind the curtain. The books we read, the products we buy, the people we associate with – these are often not viewed as secrets, but we nonetheless view them as private matters. [My comment- This is something that occurs within tribal life!] ….
Stanly Benn, who observed that privacy is not that one’s private affairs “are kept out of sight or from the knowledge of others that makes them private. Rather, [one’s private affairs] are matters that it would be inappropriate for others to try to find out about, much less report on, without one’s consent.” [My comment- again, this is a tribal element. It’s likely been common that no one in the tribe talks about what the medicine man said or did, if he said don’t say it to anyone else.]
He [Charles Fried] defines privacy as “control over knowledge about oneself” that is necessary to protect “fundamental relations” of “respect, love, friendship and trust.” [My comment- you don’t think those things we applicable to tribal life?]
In other words, privacy is an aspect of social structure, an architecture of information regulation, not just a matter for the exercise of individual control [My comment – seems like a tribal aspect to me.]
The right to privacy… protects the individual’s interest in becoming, being, and remaining a person”
… Surveillance restricts an individual’s range of choices and thus limits her freedom. Accordingly, privacy is about respect for personhood, with personhood defined in terms of the individual’s capacity to choose. [My comment- do you suppose those are elements of tribal life? I.e. the tribal medicine man has more choices in certain instances than the regular Joe tribal guy?]
Robert Gerstein claims that “intimate relationships simply could not exist if we did not continue to insist on privacy for them.” [My comment – that wasn’t a feature of tribal life?]
For Fried, “[i]ntimacy is the sharing of information about one’s actions, beliefs or emotions which one does not share with all, and which one has a right not to share with anyone. By conferring this right, privacy creates the moral capital which we spend in friendship and love.” [My comment – geez, they didn’t have friendship and love in tribal cultures?]
[Do you suppose tribal clans tolerated intrusions upon burial rituals by opposing clans?]
Er, you seem to miss the point. I’m saying there was essentially no privacy *within* the tribe.
As to the rest of it, I more or less agree. But just look at small town life, the closest thing we have to tribal society. Do people have sex in private in small towns? Sure they do. But, try to keep a secret in a small town. Guess what, you can’t be as private in a small town as you can in a city. People want to know about you. People talk about you. If you don’t want ’em making up shit about you, you have to be open with them. There goes your privacy.
I am not trying to say privacy is bad or is worthless. I like some privacy myself. What I am trying to do is get people to realize that government is using it to wield power over you. That’s the bad thing, wielding power over you. There are a few possible responses:
1) Don’t do anything that would annoy the rulers. (Not my favorite.)
2) Use encryption and other technologies. Worth doing but hard to do perfectly.
3) Don’t do anything you would be ashamed of if it went public. I think that is a good idea, assuming you are not ashamed of the mere breaking of laws.
4) Things you might be vulnerable about, bring out into the open pre-emptively so they can’t be used against you. The classic case is gays coming out of the closet.
5) Don’t think the sky is falling. This is what I’m getting at here. The state wants you to fear, thrives on your fear. So don’t do it. Don’t worry *overly much* about The Loss of Privacy. It’s getting better in some ways, worse in others. Nothing to get your panties in a bind. (How is it getting better? How about unbreakable encryption?)
[Being free from having to spend a lifetime of solitary confinement in prison isn’t technically considered crucial for life either I suppose, but it’s crucial for the life of the self, the ‘I’ or the ‘be-ing’ and likely one’s life too.]
That worry goes away too if one is determined never to be arrested.
“Limited access to the elf”
I want unlimited access to the elf! WooHoo!! Wait… it is a female elf, right?
Sorry- not to intrude on your squabble or anything, but I enjoyed that bit. It gives my perverted mind something to dwell on.
No Paul, you didn’t just say there was essentially no privacy *within* the tribe, you said, “Humans have had little to no privacy for much of our existence. It’s a relatively modern invention; nice to have, but not crucial for life.”
I gave a few examples of how that was not true.
I also gave a few examples of how privacy was expected *within* the tribe.
If you’re trying to get people to realize that “government is using it to wield power over you.” A good first step is to stop saying, “Humans have had little to no privacy for much of our existence. It’s a relatively modern invention; nice to have, but not crucial for life.”
2) The more I read about encryption and other technologies, the more I doubt their effectiveness. I’m no expert on that, and I’d love to be wrong, but I doubt it.
5) Another phrase to consider stop using, “Don’t think the sky is falling.”
According NASA, the sky is falling:
http://www.livescience.com/18604-cloud-heights-declining.html
They might be lying, they might not be, who knows?
And lastly, “That worry goes away too if one is determined never to be arrested.”
All I will say is, The best laid plans of mice and men.
Anyway, the example of a lifetime of solitary confinement in prison was to show how privacy was a requirement for life, not something else.
@Kent, Ha!