We live in an America where the CIA devoted resources to figuring out how to spy on you through your tv. And you’re worried about Russia…
It’s incredible that people are surprised by this.
Unless you’re on a watchlist, they’re not that interested in you.
Not to mention the sheer amount of volume such a thing produces. And the lack of ability to do much about most of it. You’re only going to feel repercussions if you’re doing terrorist shit. No civilian court can touch it
let me try and put this in a way idiots on tumblr can understand
AUTHORITARIAN👏STATES👏USE👏PERPETUAL👏SURVEILLANCE👏TO👏INTIMIDATE👏CITIZENS👏AND👏STIFLE👏DISSENT👏AND👏CAN👏USE👏IT👏WITH👏VAGUE👏LAWS👏TO👏FIND👏EXCUSES👏TO👏PROSECUTE👏ANYONE👏THEY👏WISH👏YOU👏FUCKING👏NIMRODS
Persistent mass surveillance has a quantifiable “chilling effect” on the First Amendment
During the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, for example, the FBI—as well as many individual police departments around the nation—conducted illegal operations to spy upon and harass political activists; they spied on Occupy Wall Street and the DHS spied on the TEA Party movement as well as other “right-wing extremists”.
This latest leak shows that the CIA has all of these technologies and proliferates them to other entities who want this information all the time. You need your privacy to protect yourself and your information. If you have nothing to hide, you have plenty to hide:
The line “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about” is used all too often in defending surveillance overreach. It’s been debunked countless times in the past, but with the line being trotted out frequently in response to the NSA revelations, it’s time for yet another debunking, and there are two good ones that were recently published. First up, we’ve got Moxie Marlinspike at Wired, who points out that, you’re wrong if you think you’ve got nothing to hide, because our criminal laws are so crazy, that anyone sifting through your data would likely be able to pin quite a few crimes on you if they just wanted to.
Julian Sanchez points out:
Some of the potentially sensitive facts those records expose becomes obvious after giving it some thought: Who has called a substance abuse counselor, a suicide hotline, a divorce lawyer or an abortion provider? What websites do you read daily? What porn turns you on? What religious and political groups are you a member of?
Some are less obvious. Because your cellphone’s “routing information” typically includes information about the nearest cell tower, those records are also a kind of virtual map showing where you spend your time — and, when aggregated with others, who you like to spend it with.
We simply cannot possibly know when something is going to incriminate us and the State is not above scapegoating individuals or coercing them into submission. James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney, notes:
Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.”
Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates:
The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
Not just the State, but anyone could draw suspicion against you if they had the right information with the right circumstances. We are entitled to our privacy, and these institutions must be held to account.
I just posted an article about Snowden speaking at SXSW about how the NSA literally collects every single piece of data, every scrap of conversation. They collect EVERYTHING and KEEP IT ALL.
Published
A Middleground 