The problem with the press coverage of this topic is a lack of personalization. What does the government know about me and why is that important? I think most US citizens would be shocked to learn that most of our personal information is accessible without a warrant. (phone records / bank account / email / web history / phone location data / Car location / Purchase history / Facebook etc....). Also, how much the government can interpret from that information.
Unfortunately I have found that most people aren't shocked when I explain this to them. Most commonly they just say That their life is boring and they've got nothing to hide. Additionally they think that it may be worth the invasion if we can catch the 'bad guys'. I'm not sure what would need to happen to change this sentiment on a large enough scale to get people motivated into political action.
> I'm not sure what would need to happen to change this sentiment on a large enough scale to get people motivated into political action.
A couple of razzias where they or their loved ones were taken to gas chambers should do the job.
But we have such short memories.
In just about every Dutch town, usually near the railway station there is a monument documenting just that and it still does not seem to make much of a difference.
The Nazis didn't have anything like modern surveillance, and they didn't need it to enact the Holocaust. So I'm not sure what your point is; could you clarify?
Surveillance enables many kinds of government oppression, but large-scale ethnic cleansing doesn't seem to be one of them, in that it's already possible and efficient. The Nazi's logistical problems in enacting the Holocaust were more in moving and killing Jews, less in finding them.
ETA: many of the Dutch Jews who did survive were hidden by Dutch people. And yes, such efforts could be thwarted by surveillance. But that seems like an edge case; rare even in the Netherlands, where only a few percent of local Jews were so hidden, and vanishingly rare in the Holocaust as a whole across Europe.
> The Nazis didn't have anything like modern surveillance, and they didn't need it to enact the Holocaust. So I'm not sure what your point is; could you clarify?
If they had there would most likely not be a Jewish people to speak of, as it was the little bit of automation they had coupled with a stereotypical dose of German thorougness already did a very good job (good is not really applicable here). Now combine that with say a twist of 'big data' and some nice pattern recognition algorithms (facial recognition for instance, or maybe DNA analysis) and it would have been possible to round up a significantly larger chunk of the Jewish population than what already happened.
The fact that we now have wall penetrating radar doesn't help either.
> The Nazi's logistical problems in enacting the Holocaust were more in moving and killing Jews, less in finding them.
They had a hard time actually, because the local population did a reasonably good job of hiding them in the strangest spots.
> Surveillance enables many kinds of government oppression, but large-scale ethnic cleansing doesn't seem to be one of them, in that it's already possible and efficient.
Yes. But it won't be made any less efficient by all this helpful identification technology we have nowadays, most likely more, and communications intercepted long before a conflict might even help to identify those that would aid the hunted.
> The Nazis didn't have anything like modern surveillance, and they didn't need it to enact the Holocaust. So I'm not sure what your point is; could you clarify?
There was significant custom logistical technology developed for the challenge of tracking millions of people during the Holocaust.
From what I understand, the Dutch are one of the most surveilled societies on earth. It would appear that a holocaust doesn't make a population sensitive to state surveillance.
Interestingly though, just after the wall fell if there was one country that was hyper-sensitive to any kind of surveillance it was the Eastern part of re-united Germany. That was one part of Europe where people seemed to 'get it' in large enough numbers to actually make a difference. Some parts of Poland after their independence from Soviet domination as well.
Though for the most part that seems to have slowly crumbled away.
I've heard this same argument, "I've got nothing to hide." I personally don't understand how, even if that's true, someone would want to freely provide many personal details of their lives for strangers to look at. Maybe certain privacies are becoming uncommonly valued.
Even though I feel I don't have anything worthwhile to hide, I don't like the idea of random strangers finding out the details of my personal life and habits. I don't understand why some(most?) people are totally fine with that...
I agree. I think that a lot of it lies in the fact that it is hard for a lot of people to understand how digital surveillance works and they feel powerless to change it anyway. So they dismiss it away by not caring. Just my best guess on this though.
We're fighting an uphill battle against fear peddled by various media outlets to attract viewers and clicks. Fear that is useful to the surveillance apparatus.
The fight against apathy is unforgiving, relentless, and it only works in small doses. As long as the masses have their opiate of choice nothing will ever change.
I've found that while it is true that most people don't care about government surveillance, many do care about cyber crime, identity theft, and unsettling ad personalization. I typically am successful in getting people to adjust their behavior to counter these things which has the added benefit of protecting against mass surveillance somewhat.
>What does the government know about me and why is that important?
This is why no one will care until we're years beyond too late. It won't be until the federal government starts mass-arresting (e.g. hundreds of thousands) people for some thing found through the dragnet. This probably won't be for several years, if not decades, but it will come.
Someone (the EFF?) put out a really interesting widget a few years ago that demonstrated what you could learn about a hypothetical person using two-removes metadata. In fact, they managed to build a metadata feed which cast the innocent person as a major terrorism threat by sheer coincidences.
All that is available without a warrant? Strange then that the government gets search warrants for lots of that stuff.
edit: Maybe my sarcasm/snark wasn't clear: almost the entirety of the parent comment's list of stuff available to the government without a warrant actually requires a warrant.
Would be interesting to get a comprehensive list of what is and isn't available without a warrant from a judge. For example...
"Police can get phone records without a warrant thanks to a 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which found that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure doesn't apply to a list of phone numbers. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) — a 1986 law that underpins much of how the government can get digital data — requires providers to allow access to real-time data with a court order and historical data with a subpoena."
A formal statement of "we want this information and may be using it." There is a lot of paperwork that government goes through to document how it gets its information. Getting the information via warrant shows that this was asked for and received in a legal manner (rather than someone dropping some illegally obtained data on a website - even if there are legal channels to get it).
I think it is important to note, that thought "lots of stuff" may may be available to the government without a warrant, "lots of stuff" may not be usable in court without a warrant. So - search warrant is often needed...
> I think most US citizens would be shocked to learn that most of our personal information is accessible without a warrant. (phone records / bank account / email / web history / phone location data / Car location / Purchase history / Facebook etc....).
They would probably be shocked if they did learn that, but there is no evidence for any of those besides phone records prior to 2015. Thankfully (after 2013 leaks), the USA Freedom Act was enacted in response to the "metadata" versus "data" interpretation, so now your phone records (Call Detail Records) will require a warrant if you are a US Person.
It would have to be revealed in a fashion genuinely disruptive to the public. The average Joe Sixpack may grumble about the occasional privacy headline, but he won't feel the impact until it dwarfs our daily distractions.
