Straight from the history books, it's one of the last phases of the plan that goes like this:
1) leverage an extraordinary event to scare everyone into supporting emergency measures
2) perpetuate fear and argument on all sides to distract, divide, and conquer public opinion, raising the possibility that these emergency powers might be (necessary|good|here to stay)
3) put on the suits and officially vent dissent to devnull (you are here)
4) everyone gives up and you can peel off the emergency sticker, pointing to your new law as precedent and tradition to uphold
I know I'm going to get called on Godwin's law and/or hyperbole for this one, but this is the exact route Hitler took (using the Reichstag fire) to escalate his authority from Chancellor to Fuhrer.
[edit]
to clarify, the reason I made this comment is to note a case where this strategy has been used in history, as mentioned by the parent post. Not to compare Obama/Bush to Hitler.
Not just Hitler. Naomi Klein (of No Logo fame) wrote an excellent book about it, called The Shock Doctrine [1]. She lists numerous examples in the last 50 or so years how convenient, but shocking events were used as excuses to implement controversial laws, that often either limited freedoms or made the life of people more miserable.
She mostly approaches the issues from an economical perspective, mainly focusing on inhumane economic policies that both Thatcher and Reagan implemented, but the gist is similar.
Generally Congress does not act until there is an overwhelming impetus to push them over the threshold: They have limited time to deal with the whole nation's and world's problems; and they are responsive to a body, the public, which is uninformed, has a short attention span, and is highly reactive and rarely proactive.
Therefore it is not surprising that shocking events lead to controversial laws. Shocking events arguably lead to most laws; it's hard to get something done unless something shocking gets the public's (and members of congress') attention and causes a reaction.
Of course, people in power are aware of this phenomenon and plan their tactics to take advantage of it. I remember reading that many provisions of the Patriot Act were written long before 9/11 and its authors had been awaiting an opportunity. Or as the Obama administration said early in its tenure (IIRC), 'never waste a crisis'.
The main goal would eventually be to require by law that all communications become privy to the government agencies, and outlawing any non-identifiable communications.
This way they'll be able to maintain some argument of 'democracy', while being able to identify any threats to their usurpation by democratic means.
Except the TSA which is still way more intrusive than before 2001, and has been expanding lately (to security lines at subway stations etc). Oh and the forming of the DHS which erased boundaries between a bunch of agencies, that's still around. And the "Patriot Act" which got cut down a bit but is still around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Reauthorizations
Profit may be a strong driver however safety and security are equal if not paramount, while not negating privacy of the innocent while preventing abuse.
What's amazing is that the arguments they're using are already out of date. The argument that these records are only being used for anti-terrorism purposes was shot down by the revelation of the NSA's "google-like interface" a week or so ago. It'd be great if someone could get that message to the lawyer.
How does an interface negate how it's claimed to be used? If the FBI has a Google-like interface on their database of felons, how would that mean it's not used for law enforcement?
However for posterity it's clear that the NSA is not about terrorism:
* The Inspector General Report on the Boston Bombings and the US's failure to discover them do not talk about the NSA (except to mention it in passing just two times). "We focused our review on the entities that were the most likely to have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the bombings – the FBI, the CIA, DHS, and NCTC, which maintains the U.S. government’s database of classified identifying and substantive derogatory information on known or suspected terrorists."
* The NSA's mission statement itself is "The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances."
* The NSA's actions regarding the Natanz nuclear processing facility, capturing data from German officials during the Eurozone crisis, of off shore oil drilling bids from Brazilian PETROBOL, programs such as HACIENTA that specifically target countries, blatant references to political and financial targets, etc
* Programs such as QUEEN, ORCHESTRA, MINERVA, BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM, JTRIG, literature and research on social contagions and PsyOps (related to recent recent USAID Cuban Twitter project and Lincoln Group)
Together these tell us that the NSA is an arm of us finance, espionage, sabotage and influence/propoganda targeting political upheaval in target nations.
How does the existence of other programs tell you how the phone records are used? You're making the same mistake as the great-grandparent in a slightly different way.
I see your point, but my argument does not actually hinge on the existence of other programs. It's multifaceted and draws from sources outside of the leaks as well, including the mission statement of the NSA. If you look into the nature of how the NSA uses the phone information you'll find that it is used for political and espionage purposes. None of the programs exist in isolation - they all hang together. An example of this is the NSA's program to discover company hierarchy structure from phone metadata - which is used among other things to find targets that give the NSA leverage into and/or access to the parts of a company they want to infiltrate. Finally, Merkle and other political leaders _were_ (are) part of the phone metadata program.
If you want to know what the FBI does with guns, you can't just inspect what their guns are capable of. You have to look at their mission statement, their actions, their other technological investments, reviews and investigations of the FBI, etc.
The NSA works with bureaus that handle domestic terrorism. They provide some small tools and data for that. Some selectors and social analysis of phone metadata are surely part of that. But if you look at what the NSA does, what their capabilities are, what their mission is and objectives are, and reports about their internal posture and attitudes you quickly learn that their programs are not broadly about counter-terrorism, although sometimes they partner for these purposes.
This is theater. They have absolutely no intention of ever shutting down the NSA, or restricting them, or deleting one single file in their database... the one that's so huge they had to put it in the desert.
The location in Utah is between the state's two largest population centers. That picture looks back into a live-ammunition range for the Army reserves and up into mountains that are pretty much owned by a mining company (so no developments), but that doesn't reflect the reality around it. The location wasn't chosen for the space (sure, it's big, but there is a lot of federal ground around the US); it was chosen because of cheap, plentiful electricity and good connectivity to the Internet.
If it's any consolation, there have been efforts underway to get the water rights for the NSA's Utah DC revoked[1]. Personally, I think it is deplorable that they built a data center that will use nearly two million gallons of water a day in one of the driest places in the US. It irks me every time I look across the valley and see it.
What could they possibly need that much water for? They can't build closed loop cooling? Can the water not be reclaimed afterwards and used for other purposes?
Provo was looking to get out of the fiber infrastructure they owned after a failed attempted at state-wide fiber left them holding the ball. Utah has a very strong tech sector, of which Provo is one of the hubs. It basically gave them a nearly free entry into the Utah market, a market that tends to be much more business friendly than, say, the Bay Area.
I fail to see how it could be anything other than coincidence (with the possible exception of good connectivity to the rest if the world).
Let's be technically accurate. They put a data center in Utah, and a matching data center in San Antonio that most people forget about, because those are nearly ideal places to locate data centers that are survivable and efficient for their purposes. That it is in desert is only somewhat related.
Unlike the NSA headquarters location, the data center sites are in locales with low exposure to geological and other risks, both sites sit on major fiber aggregation points, and power is inexpensive. Frankly, it makes pragmatic sense to put them there.
It isn't that different than Facebook putting a huge data center in the Oregon high desert. It may be far from civilization but from a data center economics standpoint it makes perfect sense. One of the curiosities of the western high deserts is that there are several industries where that environment is conducive to efficient and economical facilities. Data centers are one of those use cases.
Criticism of use cases aside, I would hope that the government would build sensible and economically efficient data centers. If I was building a massive scale data center, I would probably locate similarly.
>those are nearly ideal places to locate data centers that are survivable
Yes, because we sure as hell wouldn't want all these these billions of records on random innocent U.S. citizens to die along with us in a nuclear blast, would we?
Actually, given how fragile and ephemeral (by design) most of the rest of digital media is and how much of our culture is tied up in it, no we wouldn't.
It may wind up being the case that the NSA's and similar surveillance architectures become the last great archive of human thought and culture, should something horrible happen. Unless archive.org has some serious Cryptonomicon-like servers hidden deep in a cave somewhere, governments seem to be at least putting more effort into the preservation of digital knowledge than anyone else has.
Many large-scale data-centers are located in desert areas with extremely reliable electricity.[1] Besides, size is irrelevant, they could achieve the same result by splitting them and placing them in smaller complexes. Might cost them a bit more, however.
I've participated on this site for almost three years, now. On what I hope are a variety of topics, with no particular agenda here. My comment history is available for your perusal.
I never understand why people place all their hope and faith in courts to fix what's broken.
I understand congress is broken. But it's like everyone wants courts to sit around as a council of learned elders and fix the stuff that congress won't.
They then get upset when courts just rule on the laws as laws, as they are supposed to.
> While I'm steadfastly rooting for this to happen, I also fear that whatever replaces it will be much worse.
You realize that when the next Reign of Terror happens, it's us on the chopping block, right? The real elite will be on the first chartered flight to Hong Kong or Singapore or some similarly authoritarian place. Meanwhile, militarized San Francisco natives will start burning Google Shuttles.
Then it wouldn't really be a Reign of Terror, would it? It's not that I disagree with what you're saying, but you seem to be implying that the 'real' elite weren't made into an endangered species by the French Reign of Terror, which afaik they sort of were.
@kordless I like your work on BTC and openstack but I disagree with the premise some Blockchain technologists evangelism about using a technology driven by a majority consensus theory to create or enforce laws. A form of government that doesn't protect the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority concensus is a dangerous thing.
> A form of government that doesn't protect the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority concensus is a dangerous thing.
Are you implying this is possible without blockchain technology, but impossible with? I can't imagine what attribute of an unforgeable ledger would do that.
People who believe in the mythic notion of "social contracts" should embrace blockchains with open arms. Minorities now have a concrete method to create enforceable agreements among each other. Isn't that what government should be -- an agreement amongst the people?
I think Satoshi must have read all of Szabo's work!
Long before the Bitcoin paper, Szabo argues that technology can supplant existing bureaucratic means of recording claims to property rights (but he notes that it doesn't directly supplant existing institutions for enforcing those rights, or beliefs about how the rights are acquired or transferred).
I thought of this piece when reading this week's xkcd what-if:
("[...] you could edit all the property records on Earth to say that you own all the land and edit all the banking records to say you own all the money. But everyone else would disagree with those records, and they would edit them back or ignore them [...]")
I agree with you regarding the dangers of consensus. Trust can be evaluated many different ways: through direct votes, aggregation, statistical analysis, and more. We should be cautious about implementing government control with the blockchain and I'm sure the current government will have a say about it when we do.
Whether they chose to arm themselves with a keyboard and coded editor is another matter entirely.
People don't matter. The vast majority of people are uneducated idiots who never decided one thing or another. The educated masses matter, those with knowledge as you call them, who have decided the trajectory of history at every turning point.
The US is, historically speaking and also when compared to many contemporary societies, very highly educated. If what you say is true, that even in the US most people are 'uneducated idiots' who never decide anything (or rather, for the sake of argument, should never decide anything, which I think is what you were getting at - correct me if I'm wrong), then it's a pretty compelling argument that democracy can never work.
I happen to disagree. Americans are not 'uneducated idiots' but rather the target of perhaps the most sophisticated, ubiquitous, and persistant propaganda effort ever seen in human history. When you consider the stakes involved (massive military, very large economy) it is not such a surprise. As for what to do about that, I propose going to the source: reduce the size of the military, and reduce the size of the economy (by splitting it into several pieces).
I think it is worse than this. The vast majority of people know about it but simply don't care. Jennifer Lawrence's private photos are much more important to the proleriat.
You have to dismantle the NSA, and kick everyone involved with this stuff out of public service forever. Then you have to have independent, and very public audits of the process and the results. Then, you can be about 90% sure.
Straight from the history books, it's one of the last phases of the plan that goes like this:
1) leverage an extraordinary event to scare everyone into supporting emergency measures
2) perpetuate fear and argument on all sides to distract, divide, and conquer public opinion, raising the possibility that these emergency powers might be (necessary|good|here to stay)
3) put on the suits and officially vent dissent to devnull (you are here)
4) everyone gives up and you can peel off the emergency sticker, pointing to your new law as precedent and tradition to uphold
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone