Permanent, Ubiquitous Surveillance Is Not Security

The battle against fascism never ends, because fascism is death to democracy.

Digby:

... this notion that we must keep the data forever just in case the government might want to use it in the future is the fundamental problem. I see no good reason why anyone should keep all this information forever, whether it be private companies or the government, simply because it might be useful to law enforcement. Just as we are not required to give the government every piece of paper we've ever sent or received (or the post office is not required to copy every piece of mail that passes through it's hands and "hold" it) just in case law enforcement might want to use it some day, neither should we have to give the government our digital correspondence "just in case."

I'm sure this particular group of very nice FBI and NSA employees would never do anything untoward with all that information they are storing. They sound like wonderful people with only our best interests at heart. But I'm afraid I just don't have the same faith in everyone. In fact, having watched our own government lose its collective mind after 9/11 and invade countries that didn't attack us, torture and imprison innocent people and build prison camps where the people detained are facing a kafkaesque nightmare because they allegedly can't be tried and can't be freed, you'll have to excuse me if I don't have a whole lot of faith that some future crisis won't "require" some future Dick Cheney to use some of that information they've been hoarding in ways they promise us they'll never use it today.

The party line here is that these listeners have convinced themselves that they must do all this lest some terrorist slips through their fingers. At yet, we have mass shootings every week in this country and the government follows constitutional requirements based upon the principle that there are dangers of living in a free society and we all must be willing to take the good with the bad. So I'm not convinced that it's a surfeit of concern for American lives that's driving this. And I'm very suspicious about just what is.

So no, they shouldn't be allowed to run a dragnet on everyone in the world and keep the information stored in some vault just in case they want to search through someone's data in the future. There's nothing different about that than the old practice of keeping dossiers on every citizen and telling them they have nothing to worry about as long as they are model citizens and do nothing the government doesn't think they should be doing. I think we know what to call a society like that.

this notion that we must keep the data forever just in case the government might want to use it in the future is the fundamental problem. I see no good reason why anyone should keep all this information forever, whether it be private companies or the government, simply because it might be useful to law enforcement. Just as we are not required to give the government every piece of paper we've ever sent or received (or the post office is not required to copy every piece of mail that passes through it's hands and "hold" it) just in case law enforcement might want to use it some day, neither should we have to give the government our digital correspondence "just in case."

I'm sure this particular group of very nice FBI and NSA employees would never do anything untoward with all that information they are storing. They sound like wonderful people with only our best interests at heart. But I'm afraid I just don't have the same faith in everyone. In fact, having watched our own government lose its collective mind after 9/11 and invade countries that didn't attack us, torture and imprison innocent people and build prison camps where the people detained are facing a kafkaesque nightmare because they allegedly can't be tried and can't be freed, you'll have to excuse me if I don't have a whole lot of faith that some future crisis won't "require" some future Dick Cheney to use some of that information they've been hoarding in ways they promise us they'll never use it today.

The party line here is that these listeners have convinced themselves that they must do all this lest some terrorist slips through their fingers. At yet, we have mass shootings every week in this country and the government follows constitutional requirements based upon the principle that there are dangers of living in a free society and we all must be willing to take the good with the bad. So I'm not convinced that it's a surfeit of concern for American lives that's driving this. And I'm very suspicious about just what is.

So no, they shouldn't be allowed to run a dragnet on everyone in the world and keep the information stored in some vault just in case they want to search through someone's data in the future. There's nothing different about that than the old practice of keeping dossiers on every citizen and telling them they have nothing to worry about as long as they are model citizens and do nothing the government doesn't think they should be doing. I think we know what to call a society like that..