I think the essence of your argument is that this technology allows for targeted oppression and that is bad. I agree that targeted oppression is bad. I do not agree that perfect surveillance is inherently a bad thing, as seems to be the opinion in all of these privacy debates. Perfect surveillance could be amazing for society. Here are my hypothetical situations which are more or else as likely as yours. Let's go for dramatic impact first. There's a depressed kid in Bumfuck, Texas. Let's call him Ben. He hates it there. No one listens to the music he likes and he's bullied daily because he's fat. He's on 4chan a lot and they get him, unlike his school counselor or his parents, but he's forced to go to school 7 hours a day. Scotty at the NSA, he's in charge of depressed fat kid analytics for the state of Texas. Scotty is a psychology grad who specialized in childhood and adolescent development. He sets up filters that identify potentially suicidal teens for his region. At this point Ben is just another teen. But then Ben starts researching .38 caliber revolvers. His search history doesn't indicate any prior interest in guns, so this triggers an alert. Scotty sees the alert and decides to monitor Ben for a while. Ben continues to researching the .38 and only the .38. At this point Scotty runs a search on Ben's family's gun registry and finds out that Ben's dad owns a .38 for home defense. At this point, Scotty knows what's up and gives Ben's school a call. He talks to the counselor and tells Ben's story. The counselor didn't know about the bullying, so she calls Ben out of class one day. She tells him that she's heard he was being bullied and Ben tells her who it is. The two begin weekly sessions to help Ben recover. At the same time the counselor asks Scotty about the bully. Scotty runs some searches and he informs her that it seems the bully has spent an inordinate amount of time reading about alcoholism. She begins sessions to help the bully address his issues at home. She also rearranges Ben's schedule to help him avoid the bully. In the days of digital privacy, the bully catches a bullet along with six other innocents. This hypothetical assumes a lot of things, much like yours. I assume a good school counselor (though maybe one who can't monitor the internal thoughts and feelings of 800 kids). I assume an NSA employee with proper training. I assume a government that cares more about curbing school shootings than about setting up stings on Muslims. The possibilities for a perfect digital surveillance in a decent society are endlessly beneficial, especially in the realm of identifying mental health disorders early. Fuck, any medical condition. Let's say for a month I've got headaches, but I don't go to the doctor because I don't feel like waiting in a waiting room and my health insurance deductible is too high. I look up headaches on WebMD. The headaches go away, but a few months later I notice that my toes are just constantly numb. I google it and assume it's just the cold weather. Unknown to me I've just moved from the "headache googlers" list which contains pretty much everybody, to the "headache + numb toes within a few months of each other" list. These lists and filters are of course created by some of the foremost doctors in the country (I'm assuming for this hypo). At this point I get a friendly call from my doctor that I should come in for an MRI, because it has become likely that I have a brain tumor. Without surveillance, I die, because by the time I go in because my nose is bleeding every night, the cancer has spread throughout my body. (All this medical stuff isn't accurate at all, for all those wondering). You get my point. I just don't want to see this type of technology written off as inherently evil. Can it be used for evil purposes? Yes. Is atomic energy inherently evil? No. Can it be used for evil? Yes. And yet you're not writing a multi-paragraph essay on the potential HUGE devastation of nuclear weapons and calling for immediate disarmament. There is no rally in DC soon that will attract hundreds of Redditors calling for Obama to dump the nukes in the ocean. If you want to talk about ending racial profiling, let's address how to stop it. If you want to talk about drug reform, let's do it. The government has all the power they need to oppress already. It's by actually taking the time to change the political tide on issues like these that will decide whether we end up in your hypothetical dystopia or in a better one. Whether or not the NSA spies on people won't.
Wow. Okay, for starters, all of my hypotheticals aren't hypotheticals. They're REAL. The names have been changed, but I do have a couple of friends who are Moroccan and Iranian, and he is an Islamic scholar at Georgetown. I didn't email him about Koran questions last time because he is on the no-fly list just for being from Morocco. I do have a Russian friend who has to keep her nose clean because her mother does fly back and forth from the US and Russia (and Uzbekistan, which is another can of worms - I mean, Russia's one thing but Uzbekistan is one of the places we practice Extraordinary Rendition). For another thing, you have Scotty the NSA agent saving Ben the depressed kid because his parents, his teachers, his guidance counselor, his friends and Ben are all incapable of doing so. I'd send you an article, but I'll just link to the intro to make a point of how ridiculous this is. our world is not full of friendly childhood counselors who work for the NSA, and it never will be - remember, the NSA has no domestic charter. They can't legally spy on Americans using American communication channels (but they do). Meanwhile, the practical effect of your Ben'n'Scotty chestnut is that Scotty works for the Division of Thoughtcrime and Ben just practiced a conscribed search. And now, in a zero-tolerance universe, he's expelled. For looking up a gun. That his father owns. So - you've spun Orwell into a Rockwell and I'm reporting real things that my real friends deal with in the real world. Tell me where the equivalency is? Let's take another step back and point out the elephant you're sweeping under the rug - CONSENT. Suppose Ben's dad wants to monitor his son's web searches. He can. Suppose Ben's school wants to monitor Ben's facebook account. They can. Suppose Ben's counselor wants to track Ben's web usage while at school. She can. Hey - suppose Ben's school wants to give Ben a free laptop to do his work on - they can monitor his fucking face while he masturbates. All this shit is available NOW and it happens. But somewhere in there, somebody said "yes, check up on my kid" even if it was a EULA for using the school computer. The above is called "monitoring" and it's an opt in. The discussion at hand is called SURVEILLANCE and it's performed on hostiles. I don't get your point. The entire argument is about intent, and your argument is "sometimes people are altruistic." Altruistic people ask permission. I think you need to bone up on what "informed consent" "surveillance" and "monitoring" mean. Because we're not talking about WebMD keeping tabs on your aspirin supply, we're talking about an autonomous organization that reports only to the executive who spies on girlfriends, spouses and friends so much they have an acronym for it.
Yes, your statements are hypotheticals when you tack the word "suppose" onto a brief description of one of your friends and then describe civil rights violations that have not occurred. And the fact that you can poke tons of holes in my Ben and Scotty hypo is because it is an unlikely event, but in my mind, it's about as likely as the world where a Russia-US "pissing contest" sends innocent citizens away at the airport because of "crimes" their RELATIVE didn't even get a trial for. It's also about as likely as an entire family getting "vanned" just for their nationality and e-mails that are clearly not threatening to anyone who takes the three seconds to read them.
Once more with feeling: Ekaterina hasn't had these problems because she has actively chosen to disobey her employer. You think people can get onto planes no problem? The guy who directed Donnie Darko got turned away from a flight to Cannes because he has the same name as a suspected terrorist. Assam is not running into trouble because I'm keeping him out of it. Remember - he's already on the no-fly list. He hasn't seen his family in fifteen years. His dad died last year and Assam didn't even get to attend the funeral. I don't give a shit about "your mind" because in your Town Called Perfect Scotty the Spook is an altruistic busybody who is only performing blanket searches on everyone so that he can help save kids from turning a web search into Columbine. "Your mind" presumes that information will only ever be used for good, and discounts the fact that the consequences of it being used for evil are absolute. I suspect you don't know any immigrants. Allow me to let you in on a little secret: America is much easier if you're a white citizen. And while I know you will continue to live in your "it can't happen here" bubble, allow me to state once more, before I set you to ignore, that it is happening here every day. I have a friend whose band had to cancel their showcase at SXSW because his name is in the TSA list as being an alias for someone who is on the list. He drove for two years, everywhere he needed to go... then he legally changed his name. Now he's the same as every other citizen. There's your ideal surveillance state. Too disconnected to know that a programmer from Seattle isn't a grudge-holding Tamil... and too clueless to care when the formerly-indicted skates because he changed his name. Bye bye.
"You've spun Orwell into a Rockwell" is a fantastic quotable. Also, the link in your original post about the Semantic Forest was eye-opening, seeing references to Julian Assange in 1999. Probably my naivete combined with the fact that I was 12 at that time, I had only really considered the NSA issues to be at least (relatively) new.
Issues of spying go way back. Here's one from 40 years ago.
Knowing that you could be watched at any time means you might as well be being watched all the time. Consider what that means when you're Billy in Texas and develop an interest in politics; having heard what the people of good people of Bumfuck say about insufficiently right-wing right-wing nutjobs, you fear being observed researching anything else. Maybe you question your religion, but because you've heard what the good people of Bumfuck say about atheists, you don't want to be observed researching atheism. Maybe you think you might be gay... Power doesn't have to be abused to be oppressive.