I just read Rick Falkvinges piece “You Can’t Have Consent Of The Governed Without Privacy” at Privacy Online News. He points at something very serious and all to obvious: blanket mass surveillance is incompatible with democracy.
Apart from some small semantics I couldn’t agree more. I guess you will as well.
Rick has published a lot of texts along these lines. I have too. And so have countless others. Still, the seriousness of the matter doesn’t seem to sink in with people. I guess it’s too abstract.
To some extent the same is true for the Snowden files. They are hard evidence, from inside the NSA. But still, most people seems to be unable to relate to this information.
To make people listen–and react–mass surveillance and it effects must feel real to the common man.
We need to be on the lookout for stories like this one: Looks like Chicago PD had a stingray out at the Eric Garner protest last night »
We need to find the people who have had their lives messed up by warrantless mass surveillance. They are out there and we must tell their story.
To do this we shouldn’t just look at the NSA, GCHQ and other organisations collecting information–but at their “customers”. Where do the information go? And how is it used?
In Sweden, we know that our local NSA/GCHQ partner FRA relays information not only to the military, some branches of the police and the counter espionage–but also to the government, to the political administration. But still we don’t know what kind of information or how it is being used.
We also know that the FRA has access to NSA “Spy Google” data base XKeyscore. And it is pretty obvious that it contains information about our own nationals and domestic Swedish matters. It’s at our governments fingertips. But then secrecy kicks in. We don’t know how XKeyscore is used. We don’t even know the legal basis–or where the legal mandate comes from.
This is the kind of things we must look into. Now, when we know that mass surveillance exists (told you so) we must start to find out how it is being used. That’s when it all gets really interesting. And ugly, for sure.
Mass surveillance is not “just” a fact. It is not “only” something to have theoretical discussions about. It has real implications.
/ HAX
Studies show that a totalitarian state, people seldom realize how bad things are until it hits someone they know. It is too abstract to the common man otherwise.
So I think we are screwed. Even if mass surveillance would hit someone in a bad way (like someone getting fired), it would not be obvious what happened.
I agree. What we need is a big leak from databases belonging to facebook or Google so that the avarage Joe’s and Jane’s sexting and Google search history is revealed. Then the debate will sink into the minds of the common man.