Surveillance is here to stay. It is developed not only by the US government, but also by several large and small entities. Fortune 500 companies have developed this technology and individual hackers have developed it. Every government has access to the patents which describe how the technology works and the equipment to carry out this software based technology are readily available to anyone with a relatively modest budget.
The only limitation on the access to the groups who are investigating this is access to the information, that is the phone switches and the internet switches.
Every phone and every computer has an identifying address. The only requirement to know where everyone is at every moment in a modern society is access to the switches, ten thousand dollars in hardware and a copy of voice recognition software which is generally available for various uses, such as transcription.
Everyone acts like the Snowden disclosures are something extraordinary. This is true and false. Everyone with any knowledge in this area, already knew what Snowden disclosed. But what he did was to point out from someone who was actually involved what everyone knew was going on. You say, "I didn't know?" You did, whether you recognized it or not. How else did you think your computer knows what you are thinking and communicating. When I post this post, even as I type it, the hosting companies are scanning the key words and targeting advertisement towards those key words. The step of converting voice to text is absurdly simple, every time you call your bank or anyone else who "records for quality control" you are leaving information "voluntarily" that may be copied; but if you have access to the "switches" then you can get every communication, written or oral; convert them all to written form and can then search them for whatever you want for whatever purpose you want.
Have set the groundwork for this; let's talk about term limits. As long as we have an imperial congress, this surveillance is for imperial purposes. It will exist, it is private as well as public. What we need is a government as much subject to surveillance as we are. Only then will our government act responsibly. Likewise we need a dynamic government that will understand, as much as anyone can, the full extent and the short term, medium term and long term effects of a loss of privacy.
Industries understand this already as a group, but many large companies do not understand the full extent of their exposure to industrial espionage, just as it was up to Edward Snowden to focus the common man on even the existence of this technological phenomena, but incorrectly focus it on the "government".
The two enemies are those who control the technology, increasingly China, and those who control it locally (China increasingly controls it globally) and that is the government, and those who would use it against you is the imperial congress which must be reined in, by term limits if there is no better mechanism.
It is necessary that the powerful parties be limited by limiting the access to acquire money by threats (actual or implied) compared to though policies or competence.
These are dangerous times, increasingly liberty is subject to the whims of smaller and smaller groups of people. But this is the subject of a future post.
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