The Church of Scientology has quite a record of effective harassment, too. They're worth studying for an excellent example of what an NGO can do. http://www.holysmoke.org/cos/harass2.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_%28Scientology%29

The drone killing is a seriously disturbing precedent, but with the backlash that's happened I think you won't be seeing that again (at least I hope).

The rest of your examples are definitely tools at the disposal of the executive branch, but they're on the same order of being put on the no fly list (the no-fly-list was more of an illustrative example than a definitive list of what the government can do). Annoying, but not at all equivalent at all to being jailed (as the parent comment stated).

In the US your assets can be seized by the police before you are convicted. This is especially the case with drug related matters. This website has details (and advocacy) http://www.fear.org

Because "backlash" stops people with enough incentive from regularly getting rid of people that inconvenience them.

A few months later Hutlor shows his true face, the government radicalizes and becomes violent. Hutlor's party does NOT like homosexuals. He does not like people posting on Hacker News either. But the average Joe is not homosexual nor a Hacker News reader, so nobody actually cares.

Then Hutlor's right-hand man comes up with a great idea: they'll just take those nice backups that the NSA collected in their huge datacenters and track down homosexuals (and Hacker News users).

Now you're screwed.

With this I mean: it's not the statu quo but whatever the future might bring.

PS: I know, Godwin's law.

And they'll have a lot of non-homosexual allies, even ones who don't particularly care for homosexuals, for enough of us remember where the pink triangle base of this organization's logo comes from, and even more will learn.

Are the Pink Pistols going to fight the army too? With pink tanks I guess :P (come on, how stereotypical is the pink reference?)

Also: you completely missed my point. Replace "homosexual" with whichever minority you want. Maybe mexicans? Muslims? And their friends too! Whoever they target, they'll be minority and will smear their name and accuse them of America's illness. Desperate people buy that shit.

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

And that's just from a reactionary point defense. Go on the offense---if you're a member of a targeted group, what do you have to lose?---and things get ... interesting.

And when you bring up fighting the army's tanks, you're implying playing the game by the other side's rules. Those of us who are contemplating the awful contingency of a hot civil war have absolutely no intention of doing so.

"Desperate people buy that shit."

And?

Do these desperate people matter at all in such a conflict? Well, they can inform on you, observe you in action or preparation for such, and call the authorities, but otherwise, most people will just want to be left alone.

Seriously. The Holocaust DID happen. Or so I'm told. And under the citizen's tolerance (or blindness, who cares).

What game are you going to play? The game of death. There's no game for you to play. You're just killed or sent to a camp and that's it. You won't stand a chance.

Nazi Germany didn't last too long because the US had too much to lose, but the USSR took 69 years to be dismantled... with how many political deaths?

You're being overly optimistic. I wasn't even talking about a civil war. It's the state and most of the population against some unpopular minorities.

Well, even if it was civil war. Do some research on how the last Spanish Civil War turned out for Republicans.

We're not the same society we were back in the 1940s.

Snooping on citizen's private business seems quite fascist to me.

> No country with a high GDP has turned authoritarian.

For how long will the US have a high GDP? Every single empire has fallen, even the wealthiest.

   The government is constrained in what it can do

As soon as you realize that "government" is the only thing filling the blank, you should realize how silly (and scary) the whole scenario is.

Maybe not anyone you know, but at least half of the nation, 300+ million guns and more every day. Heck, 2/3rds of the nation lives in shall issue concealed carry regimes, with well over 8 million licenses granted.

This puts constraints on a would be out of control government. Let us hope we don't have to file a claim on this insurance policy.

When, before or after they do it anyway, legal or not?

It's not exact, it goes like this: "Donnez-moi une ligne, disait-il, la plus indifférente de la main d'un homme, et j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." and it's attributed to Cardinal de Richelieu. It probably has changed in many ways from quotation to quotation, but that is verbatim as I found it in that old book.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172338

It's a great read, and includes a section on the 'nothing to hide' fallacy

I'm not big into politics, but seeing the apathy in the media and general ignorance of the populace is utterly terrifying. This can only be fixed if we can get a real bi-partisan movement going (which, given the facts, should be a no-brainer) and find a way to counter the fear-based rhetoric that is so easy to package in digestible sound bites for middle America to swallow. Even Ira Glass, from This American Life, who clearly should be better informed was totally "meh" on the issue in the last episode. How can we get people to wake up?

- There are thousands of laws and regulations, many quite vague in their application. Even the government can't tell their exact number. Are you sure you are not violating any of them?

- Even if you've done nothing illegal, if they really have to get you all they need to do is dig dirt on someone close to you. Are you still ok with mass surveillance? Everyone's got a cousin with a drug problem or something similar.

- If you want to plan a surprise trip to Hawaii for your spouse, is it OK to want to keep it a secret? Does the "nothing illegal -> nothing to hide" argument hold here?

- If you are a creative person, would you like your new novel or album to be leaked from your DropBox, Gmail or some other account to the world?

- Why would Apple hide its new products until the official release? Would it be OK for their trade secrets to be laid bare? After all, they are fully legal, thus, nothing to hide?

- If you are in business, bidding for contracts, would you like to have your communications observed by potentially rival entities?

- You have an email account with spam filters? They can label homosexuals, liberals, tea partiers and such just as easily as they label a spam.

- Do you use Google? Google makes use of a network analysis algorithm called Page Rank. In a similar way, Big Brother could rank people by their social influence (I believe FB calls its version 'EdgeRank'). They could get a list of "100 top influencers" in any social network. They could do that with the metadata from phone calls alone.

- Would it be OK for the government to know who's organizing protests against them? To have blackmail material on their opponents?

- Even with phone metadata alone they could see our social networks and movements. That would give them powerful inside information from what is considered mostly harmless data. It's not in each data point alone, it's in their aggregate that such information emerges.

- Is it OK for the government to monitor the communications of lawyers, doctors and psychologists? We entrust them with our most sensitive information.

- What will be the impact of mass surveillance on social activism? Don't we need to counter balance the government any more? Do we trust these guys implicitly?

- Information is power. Massive, asymmetrical information. They know about you everything, you know nothing about them or how they are using your info.

- In the future this database could be leaked and then you'd become blackmail-able by third entities. Imagine what the mafia would do with a database of people's secrets. If Snowden was able to get his hands on it and leak it, don't you think mafia could do the same? They could use a mole inside NSA to extract blackmail material. Hell, NSA might trade information on you with anyone if they get an advantage. Maybe NSA needs to place an informant using the mafia, while mafia wants some dirt on legitimate people and businesses to extract money from them.

- In the future all countries will (if they are not already) intercept their digital communications. The logic goes: everyone is doing it, so we need to do it too, otherwise we'd be at a disadvantage and not be able to defend ourselves. Imagine a world in which not just NSA, but hundreds of entities, national or corporate, have data on you. They could use that data for whatever interest they have. You could be indirectly targeted just for being associated with a certain person or company.

- Searching terrorists by statistical analysis of people's data doesn't work so well. The problem is mathematical: say there is just one terrorist in a million people. Even if you have a system that is 99.9% accurate, that means 1000 people flagged. That's one thousand false matches for one potential true one. Those people would then be harassed and investigated even though they are innocent. The system is bad in principle. It doesn't do so well on account that terrorists are few and normal people many. If you had a company that produced 999 defected products for every good one, would that be acceptable?

  "With the proliferation of services available for faculty to share their
  scholarship online, “download” or “view” counts have also become a domi-
  nant marker of “impact,” particular ly download counts from subject
  and institutional repositories. (Some full-text research databases and
  other com- mercial services have begun to refl ect usage statistics in
  their products.  This type of metric differs significantly from citation
  metrics: it is really a measurement of the “popularity” or visi bility
  of the article, noting whether an abstract was viewed or visited and
  whether a link was clicked rather than whether the paper was actually
  read, thought well of, and used. 
  ...
  The top downloaded paper of all time on SSRN as of the writing of this
  Article appears on none of Shapiro’s lists.  81 Furthermore, only one
  paper on Shapiro’s all-time top 100 list in Table I or recent-articles
  list in Table II appears in SSRN’s top 100 downloaded papers ( Property,
  Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark A. Lemley). Of the top
  100 downloaded law authors in SSRN, only 15 are on any of Shapiro’s
  lists. Looking at the au- thors listed in the recent-articles lis t in
  Table II, the author’s most downloaded paper of all time appears in this
  list only approximately half the time. It is clear that while arguably a
  metric in and of itself, being a top downloaded paper in SSRN does not
  equate with being a top-cited paper of all time. One could argue that an
  artic le’s presence in newer cited-reference services might potentially
  provide a new metric, but as with other metrics, it is subject to the
  volatility of the source content."[3]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network

[3] http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_a...

I guess all I can say is that you believe you have better insight into the mind of Glenn Reynolds than e.g. I do.

"..." would be a quote, albeit an entirely weird one.

"..." is a convention I first found in manga, which indicates a character has no verbal reply to what was previously just said.

Was it intended to be "Privacy, then, is not the trumpeting of the individual against society’s interests, but the protection of the individual FROM society’s own norms and values."?

I want to make sure I'm understanding the concept. The original means to me that the individual is protected by the norms and values of society. The revised version means the individual is protected from society's norms and values. It seems like both should be true.

In context of the preceding paragraphs:

Etzioni viewed privacy as a battle between the interests of individuals and society.

Dewey proposed that privacy is also a social interest, not just an individual interest.

The author is agreeing with the latter: "the value of protecting the individual is a social one."

Really, this means both of your interpretations. A society with privacy values protecting individuals from some of its other norms and values.

I've never heard of these people before reading this, and I'm not trying to be pedantic. Just my textual interpretation.

[edit - for clarity, but I may have made it worse.]

Also mentioned in the post by user 'eleven7' is the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

The Right to Privacy, Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890)

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priva...

Mirror: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf

EDIT: On clicking "download" a second time, I do get a login page -- but it still has a "download anonymously" option, says you just won't count towards the paper's stats.

Perhaps they're trying to deal with people who try to game the download counts without cleverness, and somehow you got caught up in that mechanism???

It is about the faulty argument that the "nothing to hide" argument and it's various mutations are, as the paper argues. One of the problematic parts is that the faultiness of the said arguments aren't very obvious on an individual basis. Although the argument for "stopping 9/11 ever happening again"(or any other "fight terrorism" argument) is to "save lives", which inherently subjects to "any (American) lives", the "nothing to hide" argument acts on an individual basis unlike the argument about terrorism and saving lives which acts on a collective basis.

Because the "nothing to hide" arguments acts on an individual basis, it can be interpreted as "whatever as long as it doesn't happen to me" type of argument, yet it is used to argue for a collective matter.

If it were about the lives, banning alcohol would save tens of thousands of lives annually(assuming that "banning alcohol" would result in zero alcohol consumption, which is false, but brings out the point and even argued hypocricy regarding the "fighting terrorism" argument).

If you are arguing for less government eavesdropping, I would need to see evidence, first, that there is some sort of real danger. I don't share the libertarian presumption that government is by definition malicious and incompetent.

Say, for example, I have... 10,000 points of data about you. 10,000 HN posts + Facebook posts + Reddit posts, etc. You've said a lot during your Internet career.

I can take what you've written, and form a profile of you from these words. They're just words, you've done nothing wrong. Freedom of speech being what it is, and let's even say you haven't said anything particularly inflammatory. Nothing threatening, nothing dangerous - you're just an average guy.

Now, I take these words, and I compare them with words that other folks have said. Using some fancy technology, I can group you with people who say thinks kind of like what you say. Using this data, I can group everyone this way, into clouds.

And here's where things get sticky - I can use these clouds of people to look at folks who are "similar" to known terrorists. Folks who, themselves, have done nothing wrong, but who "look" similar to people I know are bad. Let's say, for some reason, you're grouped with someone who has known ties to I dunno... the militant branch of the KKK or whatever. Now you're suddenly interesting to the authorities, even if you've done literally nothing wrong. Or have you?

If you're grouped via my super special technology with a terrorist, maybe this puts you on a no-fly list. Maybe this gets your security clearance denied. Maybe you get "randomly" audited. World-ending? No. Completely unwarranted and totally annoying? Yes.

On a philosophical level, this is all kinds of against the freedoms we expect to have in America, and that sucks but let's be more practical. People are screaming about the sky falling and the world ending because the NSA knows you like Japanese porn or whatever, but that's not frankly a big deal. What's more likely is that you're going to be annoyed and inconvenienced, and there's not a lot of reason for it.

It kind of sucks, and I guess you have to decide for yourself if you're okay with what might happen to someone if they turn out to be a false positive. For me, I don't so much mind the data collection, I just want it to be fully exposed. I want Google, Microsoft, et. al. to have to say publicly when they comply with a request for data, and in a perfect world, I'd want these companies to be required to notify the people whose data they hand over. Does it make it more difficult to catch bad guys? Yes. Does it provide a level of transparency that a representative democracy requires to function properly? Yes.

If they collect too much data (or too little!) I want to be able to vote someone out of office. Just saying, "attacks haven't happened so therefore what we're doing is working" isn't something I can buy. Is that too much to ask?

    <reply type="devils-advocate">

As technology advances, both of these problems will reduce more and more.

Furthermore, if I came up with some kind of math that could determine with a high degree of certainty that someone is a (terrorist/communist/pedophile/father raper) given their online activities, the authorities would be negligent not to follow up on that information and determine if it's valid or not.

Much like spam, verified false positives help train the filters further.

That leaves only the abuse argument.. and honestly, I don't see /potential/ abuse as an argument against any kind of technological advance. We have ways of dealing with abuse.

And let's not forget the "verified false positives" are counted in lives ruined/ended. Could we do it? Yeah, no one's denying that. But if we throw out ethics in the name of technological progress, we could do a lot of great things.

There's not really a deterministic line, beyond which a person is "certainly" a threat. At the end of the day, a person has to decide what is and isn't a threat, all the computer can do is help that decision along. A person pulls the trigger, and as we all know, people can really suck sometimes.

For the first problem (that algorithms' results will be wrong), you're assuming that the technology to avoid false positives will progress faster than the technology to collect more data. On what do you base that assumption?

The second problem (that the results will be misinterpreted or misused) isn't a technological problem at all, so how will the advancement of technology reduce that problem?

Something your friends probably don't give a crap about and won't do. I know mine wouldn't if I tried to get them to - it's just too hard.