Irony: Surveillance Industry Objects to Spying Secrets & Mass Monitoring Leaks

Irony: Surveillance Industry Objects to Spying Secrets & Mass Monitoring Leaks.

-- Tom

 

Miss Lucas is afraid that public attention will kill US jobs her conference business so Santa can't buy here a Mercedes Benz?
Her reaction to a WSJ article is well thought through;
"The article "Document Trove Exposes Surveillance Methods" (page one, Nov. 19) will have a negative effect on job creation in the U.S. as attention of this kind makes U.S. manufacturers gun shy about developing, and eventually exporting, anything that can remotely be used to support government surveillance..." link

The 'remotely' made me smile. Miss Lucas is conniving as well as cunning.

 

Mrs. Lucas has a legitimate concern, as does the state, and the citizenry. Intelligence work, especially surveillance technologies, needs to be surreptitious in order to be effective. Citizens don't like the spying technology because when that invisibility is coupled with ubiquity, it is not possible to tell when the technology is being abused for the interests of the state against the citizenry. The citizenry have an increasing interest because we are globally trending towards fascism, and with increasing surveillance power comes increasing influence, and so it is that power often has a corrosive effect on the decisions of those who use it.

The bottom line is that you cannot wish or vote away surveillance or intelligence, it is a necessary evil for the operation and maintenance of the status quo of a nation. What you can do is attempt to regulate at what government levels such powers are available to be used/abused domestically to decrease the threat, and employ counter-intelligence techniques like anonymity to increase the defenses.

 

People always object unless they're doing it themselves.

 

What I think you mean is that people always object when others do it to them.

 

Of course there's a need for hidden/covert espionage but regarding the ubiquity, citizens need to have information (to a certain degree) about the level of it, at a time when even parliamentary 'cloak and dagger'-oversight committees are more and more left in the dark regarding the ubiquity aspect.
So there is a need for the general public to have knowledge about the level of state data acquisition to even be able to form an opinion about regulation.
I still doubt whether Miss Lucas has such noble motives.