For 2014, all those claiming telephone or email metadata isn't invasive should voluntarily & regularly post their own for the world to see.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 1, 2014
You're tempted to agree with him for a minute, right? Fuck yeah, Orwellian scum, why don't you just show everybody yours.In fact, I would totally do it, as a kind of conceptual art project if you will, if I could get a grant for it sufficient for paying somebody else to do the actual data entry work, or better, program an automated daily upload from all my email addresses and phone [jump]
Image by darkuncle. |
Image via Chris Sanders. |
Via The Verge. |
Nevertheless, there'd be a real, possibly measurable risk that somebody—the helpmeet, say, or my boss—could be searching that phone number on purpose, get to my secret website, and do all that work or hire a detective to do it (for me, not for the friends and associates, since their contacts with me are the only ones documented—no NSA hops into their networks). And then they'd find out all about my frequent emails to XXXFurryFriends ("Jeez guys, can we please have more angora goat video?").
Seriously, I would not like that, whether I have "anything to hide" or not. And I don't care for the possibility that the NSA can do it, to me and two hops out, or to anybody, citizen or otherwise; it's why I'm enthusiastic about the recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Committee (as amusingly linked by the freedom-loving, surveillance-hating supporters of Kim Jong-un here, and hey Kevin Gosztola, do you know who's linking you?) to get this stuff under some independent control. But Greenwald's tweet, and this from the Leon opinion
Via Townhall. |
The NSA does not have the capacity to profile for a particular set of people (Muslims, CounterPunch subscribers, or Man-Dog Love Associates), as the truly invasive FBI possibly does. The NSA does not have the capacity to photograph you as you pee, and they may be dumb but they're not dumb enough to photograph you, if they do have that capacity, as you stare glumly at your computer screen or walk back and forth around it, with a bag of Cheetos in hand. The NSA can only pick a number (legally, only a foreign number or email address) and follow it through to other numbers with which it may or may not display an interesting pattern of relations, and then try to find out whose numbers exactly they are.
They are, I believe, likely to go wrong in a couple of different ways here, finding things out that they shouldn't (like the XXXFurryFriends connection) and failing to find out things they should (like who Ayman al-Zawahiri plays Words With Friends with), and I'm morally certain the latter is a much more prevalent problem than the former. But the slope from there to fascism is a lot less slippery than that from the folks that Pastor Niemöller failed to speak for to the pastor himself, so much so that it really barely exists.
Image from EnemyOfTheState. |
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