Tag Archives: privacy

March 11, 2014 · 3:28 pm

Surveillance State (cont): Snowden: Why build a big haystack?

By Christopher B. Daly 

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who divulged the secret surveillance that the agency conducts on innocent American civilians, made a good point in his recent “public appearance.” Still stuck in Russia, Snowden imgres3spoke to the SxSW conference, via teleconference, thanks to multiple encrypted relays to disguise his actual location.

The Times chose to put its story in the Business section (which was unfortunate, I think) on the apparent grounds that Snowden’s big pitch was aimed at U.S. tech and social-media companies, telling them that they need to step up their privacy. They already knew that, so I am not sure what the news value was there.

Of greater interest was the theme developed by the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima. She emphasized Snowden’s view that the NSA is so swamped with big data from its indiscriminate surveillance that it is not doing a very good job of tracking individual bad guys (which is, after all, what we want them to do).

‘‘We’ve actually had a tremendous intelligence failure because . . . we’re monitoring everybody’s communications instead of suspects’ communications’’ — a situation, he asserts, that has ‘‘caused us to miss’’ intelligence.

Come to think of it, for all the money that we spend on the intelligence community as a whole, and for all the compromises we make with the Constitution and our liberties, how great is the return? Where are the answers to these questions:

–Did anyone know that Putin would seize Crimea? Did anyone tell President Obama?

–Did anyone predict the Boston Marathon bombing?

–Did anyone predict the uprising that toppled Mubarak in Egypt?

–Can anyone tell us how to get rid of Assad in Syria?

–Did anyone know what was coming in Benghazi?

–What about 9/11? What about the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Basically, we need to ask: why do all the big, important things seem to come as such a surprise (to our presidents as well as to the average informed citizen)?

Whenever you don’t find something, doesn’t that tell you that you’re looking in the wrong places?

 

 

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November 18, 2013 · 2:51 pm

Surveillance state: Cops don’t like GPS tracking either

By Christopher B. Daly 

This is rich.

Today’s Boston Globe has a story  about a contract dispute between Boston’s street cops and the city. The city wants to put GPS tracking devices in all Boston Police cruisers, ostensibly so they can mobilize patrolmen more rapidly in a crisis.

Turns out, the cops don’t want GPS trackers to be used on them. They don’t like it any better than the rest of us do, and they want to bargain with the city to keep GPS devices out of their cruisers.

Great quote from the Globe story:

“No one likes it. Who wants to be followed all over the place?” said one officer who spoke anonymously.

And another one — from the patrolmen union’s lawyer:

“This thing keeps a permanent record of where an officer is all day. If he stops to go to the bathroom, that stop appears on the screen. If he goes a mile over the speed limit, someone can question that. It’s quite an intrusion on people’s lives.”

Exactly. This is exactly why ordinary, law-abiding citizens don’t want to be watched all the time either.

This comes on the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling back in January, in which the court held that it was an invasion of privacy for police agencies in general to slap a GPS tracker on the automobile of a suspect who has not been charged with a crime.

I welcomed that decision, but now the Boston police cruiser case raises a question: why not track the cops? After all, when they are on duty, this is a workplace issue, not a privacy issue. We give them those cruisers and the guns they carry and the power that goes with the badge. For 40 hours a week, while they are exercising that awesome power, and if they are put on notice first, then I would be okay with monitoring the cops. After all, someone has to watch the watchers.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? 

 

 

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