Big Brother

--Schot, De Volksrant

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls."

 --PRESIDENT OBAMA, 

defending government surveillance programs.

Well your nobody called today
She hung up when I asked her name
Well, I wonder
Does she think she's being clever

--Your Nobody Called Today, Sylvia

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

--Fourth Amendment

_______________________

 
If your consumer life extends beyond cash purchases at Sears and Safeway, someone's got tabs on you. They sold the Internet to you as a World of Warcraft and other fun games, but now we know that the price of our amusement comes at the cost of the State's declared need for security in the form of data mining. But is the effort worth the cost?

President Obama tells us to get over ourselves; nobody's listening.  But he sounds schizophrenic when he says the government both is and is not surveilling our phone conversations. Everyone is hedging, with tech companies conceding to surveillance programs -- but "just a bit". Sorry -- you cooperate or you do not; the act cannot be mitigated.  And the trawling is done so quickly now as to obviate the need for justification of targets. David Bromwich gives a good critique of the "Total Protection Government" HERE.

Even if you accede to your government's claims that snooping over your shoulder saves lives -- "What need I worry if I'm doing nothing wrong?" -- there are problems with electronic intelligence (ELINT) and intelligence in general. Usually, such a wide net collects too much data, and proof is never provided to justify the violation of our privacy. If the intrusion into our privacy is so crucial to fighting to terrorism, show us the data. The shelf life of these data intercepts is brief, and are designed only to develop link analysis and association matrices -- "mail trees" in pre-computer days. 

However, the efficacy of these programs was based upon stable, non-mobile targets. Terrorism is based upon dynamic membership with rapid movement, implying the need for international cooperation between police agencies versus a unilateral isolated National Security Agency (NSA) effort. History shows manifold failures of such isolated intelligence: President George W. Bush did not synthesize the terror warnings he was provided in early August of 2001; the U.S. Navy fleet was in berth at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. 

Intel is useless if it is so highly compartmentalized and classified that it is not disseminated down to the action level. If these data collections were so effective, why doesn't law enforcement use them to eliminate the spree shootings we find so horrifying, for example? No criminal or terrorist venture reaches the execution phase without giving off intel indicators that the event will take place.

We are not children, though we may be useful idiots if we believe there is congressional oversight for these intrusions into our technological lives. We must define for ourselves what is intel and what is its shelf life.

Moreover, what do we do with it, --both when it is viable, and when it becomes rancid?