Re: [sudo-discuss] Breaking: Oakland to lead country in diverting anti-terror funding to ubiquitous warrantless surveillance

Re. the police using Facebook and Google, and Stephen Spiker's question "what happens when someone doesn't like me and has access to all that information?": Right now 41% of employers use Facebook to screen job applicants and monitor employees. That creates an _enormous_ chilling effect on speech. And, credit agencies are also using Facebook to assign creditworthiness-by-association. If your "friends" have bad credit, your own credit rating goes down. That creates an _enormous_ chilling effect on freedom of association. With all the anarchists, left-libertarians, and civil liberties hawks onboard here, where's the outrage about those abuses? Or have we become smug in our status as geeks, whose economics are secure even if we wear the circle-A flag into the office and into job interviews? Do we care about Joe Average Worker whose job may be dangling by a thread, whose boss may be a diehard Fox Newz enthusiast, and who might end up unemployed and out in the streets for voicing an "unpopular" opinion online...? Is that a paradigm example of why Marxists consider the "intelligentsia" to be an unreliable class as far as solidarity with workers is concerned? Are we better than that?, or not? -- The primary difference between NSA and Google is that you can vote for NSA's boss every four years, but Google has better marketing. The root issue is _collection_. Data that aren't collected, can't be abused. If you're on Facebook, if you use GMail or Google Voice, or if you carry around a "smart" phone with a battery that can't be removed, you're already subjected to a degree of surveillance that NSA reserves for members of Al Qaeda. If you don't like the Oakland Police getting access to the data, the place to start is with the mega-corps that collect the data. Complaining about the police using data that huge corporations collect, without complaining about the mega-corps collecting the data, is a self-contradiction. Lastly, shot-spotters shouldn't be controversial, even among those of us who support the personal rights interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. A gunshot on a city street means one of two things: a criminal has just shot a victim, or a criminal's would-be victim has just shot their attacker in self-defense. Either of those things merits getting the police and paramedics on the scene, pronto. -G. ===== On 13-10-13-Sun 7:13 PM, Eddan Katz wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/technology/privacy-fears-as-surveillance-… ------------------------------ October 13, 2013 **Privacy Fears as Surveillance Grows in Cities** ** By SOMINI SENGUPTA<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/so… **** **** OAKLAND, Calif. — Federal grants of $7 million awarded to this city were meant largely to help thwart terror attacks<http://aapa.files.cms-plus.com/PDFs/FY2009PSGPGuidanceFINAL.pdf&… at its bustling port. But instead, the money is going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from around town — from gunshot-detection sensors in the barrios of East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the city’s upscale hills. The new system, scheduled to begin next summer, is the latest example of how cities are compiling and processing large amounts of information, known as big data, for routine law enforcement. And the system underscores how technology has enabled the tracking of people in many aspects of life. The police can monitor a fire hose of social media posts to look for evidence of criminal activities; transportation agencies can track commuters’ toll payments when drivers use an electronic pass; and the National Security Agency, as news reports this summer revealed, scooped up telephone records of millions of cellphone customers in the United States. Like the Oakland effort, other pushes to use new surveillance tools in law enforcement are supported with federal dollars. The New York Police Department, aided by federal financing, has a big data system that links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists. Police in Massachusetts have used federal money to buy automated license plate scanners. And police in Texas have bought a drone with homeland security money, something that Alameda County, which Oakland is part of, also tried but shelved after public protest. Proponents of the Oakland initiative, formally known as the <http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center/_files/Port%20of%20Oakland%20DAC%20Report.pdf/_info/> _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing listsudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org');>http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss