> A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created
There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract.
This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.
Describing Obama: "the constitutional lawyer in the White House"
The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?
You can agree with the precepts of the Constitution and justify certain kinds of surveillance. Even if you think the NSA surveillance is unconstitutional, you have to concede that "privacy" is not a well-defined constitutional value. The framers spent many pages in the Federalist talking about the ins and outs of various voting systems, but never articulated a broader concept of privacy. The 4th amendment is based fundamentally on a "property rights" view: intended to keep the government from searching your property.
A perfect example is the recent case in Jones. Is it unconstitutional because putting a GPS tracker in a car enables 24/7 surveillance, or because it requires the police to physically trespass on the car to place the tracker?
The protection of "privacy" in the constitution has been extended to reach things birth control and abortion based on the "penumbras" of the rights that are actually in the text. This is fuzzy ground! You can believe that those penumbras exist yet still not believe they cover recording information people put out into the public internet.
In short, its not so much that Obama is well-placed to know how to work around the Constitution, its that he knows that digital privacy is on unsure Constitutional footing in the first place and is positioned to take advantage of where the lines are drawn.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Key word: "their." The lynchpin or a lot of the surveillance efforts is accessing information that doesn't belong to the target of the surveillance. Phone call metadata is generated by the phone company, stored in the phone company's computers, and is used for the phone company's business purposes. Its the phone company's data, not yours. Same thing with the data Google and Facebook collect about where you go on the internet. You didn't generate it and you can't even access it. How can you say its "yours?" Its "about you" but that's totally different. If your neighbor keeps a diary tracking your comings and goings, you can't assert 4th amendment protection over that data.
Privacy advocates talk about "metadata is data" as if the government's lawyers don't understand that bits are just bits. What privacy advocates don't understand is that the "metadata" distinction is about generation, ownership, and control, which are implicated in the 4th amendment by the word "their."
Putting aside what the law and constitution currently say, do you think mass surveillance of metadata, URL tracking and search history should be fair game?
I'm pretty apathetic to the whole issue. I'm a lot more worked up about the fact that these things are already fair game when it comes to private corporations. As someone who isn't hoping for some libertarian, trans-national world order based on the internet, I'm a lot more worried about how private companies can abuse that data than how the government can do so. Yes, the government can throw me in jail and private companies can't, but the government has little reason to want me in jail. Meanwhile, private companies have a lot of incentive to access that data and screw me over.
I think the libertarianness of the whole digital privacy movement is losing a lot of potential supporters. If the restrictions on government surveillance were bundled together with restrictions on corporate surveillance with a consumer protection angle, I think you'd get a lot more people on board.
> but the government has little reason to want me in jail
It has plenty of reason to want dissidents in jail which you may care about for various reasons both practical and ideological. Though I think jail is outmoded: with (near) total surveillance there are more effective deterrents.
I do think you are right about the lack of emphasis on corporate surveillance.
Why does everyone simply quote the Fourth Amendment as if that answers the question about privacy, especially privacy as applied to electronic communications?
Let me quote the Supreme Court decision establishing a right to privacy [1] (which was not previously considered present!): "Secondly, the Fourth Amendment cannot be translated into a general constitutional 'right to privacy.'" That Amendment protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all."
The decision goes further to note: "But the protection of a person's general right to privacy -- his right to be let alone by other people -- is, like the protection of his property and of his very life, left largely to the law of the individual States".
In other words, one may have statute protection, but not blanket Constitutional protection. And that opens up the possibility of the ones writing the statutes carving out "foreign intelligence" exceptions.
And this is all in accordance with the decision to invent the "reasonable expectation of privacy", it's not even going into later decisions like Smith v. Maryland which tended to expand government search ability.
The problem is that not even the members of the Supreme Court can agree on what these are or how they should be interpreted.
The everyday understanding of constitutional law is not the same as the legal understanding, which is part of the problem. The commerce clause, as read by any normal individual would not allow the Federal government to have anything to do with (e.g.) pot, but that is how it has been interpreted by the supreme court. No normal person would say that corporations are people, but according to the court they are. etc etc etc.
Reading the constitution, I get a clear picture of a federation of independent states. But this idea died after the Civil War, if not before.
Commerce clause says that the federal government shall be able to regulate interstate commerce. Pot is something traded in intestate commerce. Its not as ridiculous as you make it seem. The framers might have used narrower language if they could foresee that one day, everything would be a part of interstate commerce. That certainly wasn't true during the time of the framing, when goods were produced locally or even primarily by the individuals using them on family farms. But they used broad language with the intent of giving the federal government the power to regulate large scale commerce as it existed then.
The Supreme Court didn't say that corporations are people. It said that people don't lose their first amendment rights because they assemble themselves into a corporation. Falls naturally out of the first amendments rights to free speech and assembly.
You can't ignore the civil war. The 13, 14, and 15 amendments were a renegotiation of the Constitution at the point of a sword. The idea of a federation of independent states is called into doubt by the supremacy clause and commerce clause, which was in the original, and the 14 amendment, which allows Congress to legislate directly against the states to enforce the amendment. Moreover, looking at original intent, the federalist faction of framers wanted a strong central government. They didn't give states autonomy because they wanted to, they did it because they had to, and they set the stage for states becoming secondary powers.
The Court decided that Filburn's wheat growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for chicken feed on the open market, and because wheat was traded nationally, Filburn's production of more wheat than he was allotted was affecting interstate commerce. Thus, Filburn's production could be regulated by the federal government.
So growing and consuming just about anything locally falls under this interpretation, because otherwise you'd buy it in a market that crosses state lines.
Well, that decision was also conducted under the aegis of a wartime America with a President that actually did have much more expansive Article I powers due to the nation being in a state of war.
I could be hopelessly optimistic and naïve but I simply don't see a similar argument holding in a decision today since there's no National Food Board (or whatever the agency was) to set rationing levels or resource priorities for wartime industrial production.
Except the case preceded the war except in its winding its way through the courts, it's New Deal law, after the "switch in time that saved nine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch_in_time_that_saved_nine... from later in the Wikipedia article on the case:
"In July 1940, pursuant to the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1938, Filburn's 1941 allotment was established at 11.1 acres (4.5 ha) and a normal yield of 20.1 bushels of wheat per acre. Filburn was given notice of the allotment in July 1940 before the Fall planting of his 1941 crop of wheat, and again in July 1941, before it was harvested. Despite these notices, Filburn planted 23 acres (9.3 ha) and harvested 239 bushels from his 11.9 acres (4.8 ha) of excess area."
If they meant to limit it only to keep the states from taxing each other then that's exactly what would have been in the Constitution. For instance Art. I. Sect. 10 is very clear about how states may impose duties and tariffs on imports/exports, it was very much not left to chance.
Knowing the intent of a given clause is helpful for the courts in determining how to interpret the law or Constitution when the written text of the same is unclear. But when the Constitution or law is perfectly clear then that's what the law is.
In this case the relevant clause is "The Congress shall have the Power to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States."
That's it... unlike Art. I. Sect. 10, there are no specific constraints or restrains embedded there, certainly nothing about taxes (since it would be easy enough to simply declare that states could not tax each other, similar to how Art I. Sect. 10 does it).
Sorry, I should have specified that I meant "grown for private consumption". Obviously if it crosses state borders it fits with what the commerce clause was designed to regulate.
It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent."
From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.
The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by democracy.
A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping, intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM. This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis.
Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world, especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation.
We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it.
The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall, walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan drone.
The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy.
As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital.
Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get "power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants.
In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay.
That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't have any money.
terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future
To put it into perspective, more people die walking across roads in the US every year than died from terrorism in 2001. Most years other than 2001, the difference between them is staggering. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that we should take drastic measures to curtail the freedom of car drivers because of the pedestrian deaths.
How little people care about the deaths of 4000+ people a year: most drivers that kill a pedestrian are not punished at all. The Freakonomics guys even did a podcast on how to commit the perfect murder, where the method was killing the person with a car.
Comparing death tolls is a facetious argument. DC ground to a halt during the sniper's shootings even though he killed just a handful of people. The whole point of terrorism is the psychological impact.
Also, cars kill twice as many people as murderers each year. If we ignore the difference between accidents and malicious acts, and the deterrent effect involved, you can probably make a case that its not worthwhile to enforce criminal laws at all.
The point of comparing death tolls is not to ignore the psychological impact, but rather to argue that the psychological impact should be the target of the remedies.
For a country like the United States, terrorism is an allergen, and the reaction to an attack is anaphylaxis.
When a person is allergic to bee stings, the best solution is to convince the immune system that bee stings aren't really a big deal and should not have such a strong response. This is hard, but it's the best possible way to deal with the allergy if you can accomplish it.
Imagine if somebody was stung by a bee, and then the subsequent allergic reaction nearly killed them. Imagine if you use their near death as a reason to to be hyper-vigilant against future bee stings. Imagine if your proposed hyper-vigilance involved numerous measures to boost the immune system response against bee stings.
This is, essentially, current policy on terrorism. It's unsustainable and outright dangerous. The only long-term solution is to figure out how to get the immune system to stop reacting so strongly i.e. figure out how to get people to react to terrorism in a way that is proportionate to the direct damage it causes.
I don't know how to accomplish that outright, but we could at least start by not having the government play along with it.
Amen - you don't fix people's irrational fears by encouraging and indulging them. That is, of course, unless you own a business selling anti-boogeyman traps.
The reason death tools are worthwhile to mention is that putting things into perspective reduces the psychological impact. If more people were immune to the psychological impact, terrorism as a whole would have far less influence.
The means of the state are not endless. States carry an obligation to make rational use of their means to macimize the benefit for their citizens. The argument is not that terrorist strikes do not deserve deterrence or punishment, it's that the war on terror is inappropriate in its scale, because the same means could have achieved much more good for the american people when put (mostly) to other uses.
The whole point of terrorism is the psychological impact.
Which makes it all the more important that the state not feed into the psychological impact, no? One of the ways you keep a stiff upper lip is acknowledge that society is already accustomed to certain levels of murder and accidental death.
I agree. But even if we agree that the focus of our attention isn't completely rational, that's no reason to expect it to be completely divorced from reality as it is with the anti terrorism.
I think such a defeatist attitude will inevitably lead to a scenario where those in power are not subject to surveillance, and those without having every detail of their lives recorded.
In so far as I can tell, if you use noscript, you don't show up on google analytics, encryption isn't broken and your analogy of disney with no money trying to shut down bittorrent is completely incorrect given that the cost of computing, communication and encryption is tending towards zero over time.
I can envisage a scenario where for the vast majority of low bandwidth communications, even the endpoints aren't known to be in contact to a third party.
The will to dominate others is as old as human kind. The idea that computers have changed anything is just historical blindness of the part of people who fail to realize how totalitarian all states were until the French revolution, where you had a literal thought police going after you and huge parts of the population spying on everyone else.
Like it has always been the case any algorithm good enough to catch even a minority of people with behaviour X the government of the time doesn't like will have so many false positives that it will be useless.
The fact that after 7 million years of human evolution people can still lie to others when the cost for this was often survival makes me skeptical anyone will ever be able to make sense of the mess of ideas in someones head by the very limited number of actions they can observe in the real world.
They are welcome to believing that, just as the Catholic Church is welcome to thinking I'm going to burn in hell for all eternity for not believing their god.
> The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city.
Yet the UK government still doesn't have anything in place to know a thing about the vast majority of people leaving the country. I'm personally considerably more worried about incompetence, ill conceived reactionary policies and unintended consequences than the potential control technology would have if it was optimally exploited by those in power.
You probably wouldn't station them in the city, too easy to obfuscate avoid if the locations are fixed - something like this will be forthcoming from the Met's Open Source Intelligence Unit fairly soon, I imagine.
it depends what you believe; the UK media stories about bureaucratic incompetence and bungling or the colossal number of state employees and technologies deployed to monitor everything (GCHQ, MI5/6 buildings across river from seat of democracy etc).
If you wanted to build a vast surveillance state you'd cover your tracks by seeding the news media with stories of ineffectual incompetence and other fakery...
Those of us against surveillance seem to be making the same mistake that has been made in the DRM arena. One that Chomsky is not making. Surveillance is surely bad because of technological reasons and because it violates fundamental human rights.
However the surveillance state exists not because it's creators feel it is sound technology and does not violate humans right but because strong economic and political forces want to become even stronger. To defeat the surveillance state the economic and political powers must be attacked, not their arguments.
Technology enlarges the consequences of moral choices, but it does not carry an inherent morality. Whatever values you carry into the technology landscape are what you get out of it. Digitisation is not the cause of the surveillance state, it's the enabler.
The problem is that we're trying to use 18th century values and moral systems to deal with 21st century technology. We need to develop a system of morality adequate for the job, because unless society tears itself apart technology is only going to expand, and the gap between our moral toolbox and the job we need it for is only going to grow.
I appreciate you citing Latour. I agree his works have much to offer to science, technology and society. Slightly OT, but if you’re interested in a more critical take on some (recent) papers by Latour, I can recommend this review by Joel Wainwright.
I don't think you're right. I think digitisation is not the cause of the surveillance state, at least by default. That is, regardless of who are the prime ministers, presidents and such of the era, the surveillance state was coming.
It's not unstoppable, but I think it will need to become the no. 1 issue for a long time.
I agree with you. I think governments have always wanted to do what the NSA is doing. They've only just now become able to do it thanks to technology enabling them. Despite not being an american i also don't think the US government is worse than others, they're only better at it right now, but as technology accelerates eventually even the smallest fringe group or island state will have weapons of mass digital surveillance.
My point is that the answer is not technological or legal in nature, it is moral. We need to convince the majority of people that digital mass surveillance is immoral, regardless of who does it or why, and the (il)legality of it will follow.
The question is though: how many people even in the technology community really object to the act of bulk spying by itself, instead of just not liking it when it's done to them?
The worst part is that they collect everything to make a case against you, but you still have to wait one hour in line at Boston airport to cross the border. They don't do anything to streamline your interactions with the governement or to defend you when you're accused.
That actually caused a bit of an uproar in some circles when the NSA thing came out, because it meant that the government was sitting on a huge pile of exculpatory evidence and not disclosing it to the people they were prosecuting. It's probably too early to know if that goes anywhere, but you can imagine the result if it means that a large fraction of people put in prison since they started collecting the data have grounds for a new trial.
Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking Nineteen Eighty Four, was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 Men and Machines, edited by Robert Silverberg).
I've read 'Darkness at noon'[1] at year ago or two. It's one of the books Orwell was heavily influenced by. It's about Stalin's Russia and it's amazing. Same topic, total gov control.
Well yeah, wikipedia says 1949 but 6 months up or down doesn't change much..
About DaN[1]: 'In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon at number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.'
Although the depth of thought and analysis of the 'soviet regime' was impressive, I had no idea it was that highly praised novel.
Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints -- sometimes by 80%!
"The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment."
All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people. Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police officer who landed them in the hospital.
You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.
Slightly ironic to see (for me) a Google Adwords voucher being advertised in the corner of the webpage this anti-surveillance tech article is presented on.
Total surveillance does not return us to a no- or low- surveillance ground state. Nor does it put us in an "everyone has dirt on everyone" state. It just makes it easier for everyone to identify who is more than N standard deviations away from standard/accepted behaviors.
I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling.
What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that.
The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions between different components of those assemblages. The increasing normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security' grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.
Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent manufacturing bother.
There's no evidence of that, quite the opposite. In fact, there's been significant pushes in both countries for intelligence-collected information to be made available to routine law enforcement. This is sort of my point about overlapping but not necessarily connected assemblages of surveillance. Although it seems believable, the mechanisms just aren't there (again, yet.) - police CAN request information from the NSA/GCHQ, but it's a torturous and slow process at the moment, and is largely paper based. The forthcoming surveillance state WILL make that available, but it's not happened yet.
> GCHQ is quite strongly against allowing some evidence to be used in court cases because it would need to be tested in open court.
Yep. And that's the whole reason 'parallel construction' exists at all in the U.S.... even when NSA has solid evidence of actual crimes being conducted, they will not burn intelligence sources & methods to allow for a court prosecution of the same.
So LE has to either find a way to independently arrive at the evidence that they know is there, or go without prosecuting criminals they know to be on the street.
Parallel construction is definitely distasteful but nor is it planting evidence.
I hadn't seen that particular take on it - I don't think we're particularly disagreeing, though, since that parallel construction is still a long way off 'NSA info appearing in police cruiser computers' - it'll happen, it's just not there yet...
I'm not a Chomsky fan, but I agree with at least the premise and the beginning of this essay. As usual, he wanders far afield in trying to find the roots of the problem, digging up what probably was a huge moment for him personally -- the academic opposition to Reagan -- but wasn't really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. (It worries me that people seem to understand why the surveillance state is bad, but immediately after acknowledging it, go back to their usual boogey men and political arguments they had before they figured this out, but that's a discussion for another day.)
Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public to everybody. I don't see a middle ground.
On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The NSA is the good guys. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google, Amazon, or Facebook.
So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we need to be laser clear on what "it" means.
I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to defend this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household possessions to deter burglars.
Somewhat ironically IMO, Snowden himself seems to hold the NSA in higher esteem than HN does.
You guys all try to find ways to vilify the lowest-level tech working at Ft. Meade while Snowden complains in his interview that those same techs just trying to do the right thing "have been given a bad rap".
They may be "trying to do the right thing". But they are still working for the NSA. You'll find plenty of people in almost every organization - no matter how vile - that are just "trying to do the right thing".
This is a minor problem now, but it will get much worse if you consider technical development.
Every individual gets more and more power and capabilities with time. In not too many decades, hackers will be able to design bacteria for hobby at home, even if they probably will send for a lab to synthesize the DNA etc. Now, it is still quite expensive to make artificial life.
Consider North Korea and the possibility of a biological analogue to the Stuxnet virus...
Without a 1984 surveillance state, you need some form of immune handling -- everyone as their own bubble boy or intelligent analysis of bacteria/viruses (and hoping that Stuxnet vectors are only oriented towards military installations).
At that time, NSA surveillance like today will literally be trying to stop something as bad as terrorist nuclear weapons. You can't argue analogues about how much liberty costs, since there might not be anyone left to enjoy liberty, if NSA of the 2030s-2040s fail...
What is the link between futuristic biological terrorism and NSA surveillance? You seem to be assuming that NSA surveillance might stop it, but how?
It does seem like a potential problem and I also don't know how to solve it, but I would personally say that either technology will present us with the solution, or there will not be a solution.
We have plenty of technology right now which, if transplanted back in time a century or so, could cause complete havoc. Imagine, for example, the crime-enabling aspects of cars and highways. A small group of criminals could literally ransack an entire city by using an automobile to drive from one heist to the next, keeping ahead of the police by virtue of their machine's great speed, and finally fleeing the local jurisdiction altogether to someplace safe. What this ignores is that police will have cars too, negating the speed advantage of the criminals, and radios and telephones to alert neighboring jurisdictions, and cameras to identify the culprits, etc.
Or consider the airplane. A small group could acquire a decent sized cargo aircraft, load it up with bombs, and then fly over Buckingham Palace with it and essentially hold the entire country hostage. Firearms don't have nearly the range to reach an airplane at altitude, so there would be no way to stop them. With the great range of the aircraft, there would be no hope whatsoever of tracking it back to its origins and thus apprehending the culprits.
But of course the technology that enables this scenario also prevents it: fighter aircraft, radar, and surface-to-air missiles mean that this attack is laughable rather than terrifying.
Presumably, the technological advances that enable biological terrorism will also enable biological counter-terrorism. If it doesn't, then we are doomed. Either way, massive surveillance systems are an unrelated thing.
The problem with biological attacks is that the agent can be designed for years, then spread quickly and the process to stop it after it has been spread is hard; the virus/bacteria has to be found, analysed and then some specific solution/treatment must be found/designed. In days or weeks.
That is why I selected biological methods as an example. There will of course probably be many other areas where it might be easier to make an attack than to defend against one.
My point was -- this discussion will almost certainly get more intense, because of more extreme threats. [In some areas, the technological development will make it harder for the attackers, in others it will be much easier. And attackers choose how they attack.]
How can we be sure that someone on the other side of the apparatus won't use their position as a means towards necessary training and equipment, and as an opportunity to act with authority above suspicion, to engineer this supposed killer virus that destroys us all?
What if they become the problem we tasked them with preventing?
We might even have a middle-eastern dictator creating weapons of mass destruction, even going so far as having mobile biological weapons labs. Something surely must be done before it's too late!
The point is, this will obviously get much more dangerous -- not better. We have only seen the start of this discussion.
Edit: A bit of bad humor: As an old misanthrope which had to accept that all humanity's problems seems to get solved soon (energy from solar or fusion in a few decades, electric cars, better health, etc, etc) it is good to think everything is back to normal! Jingoism from nuclear states (Russia, China and soon Iran) and an impossibility to have humane, liberal societies... "The Road", here we come! :-)
A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created
There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract.
This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.