SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the classified-[redacted]-[redacted]-case-dismissed-[redacted] dept.
Justice Department lawyers have asked a federal court in Pittsburgh to dismiss a sweeping lawsuit brought earlier this year by a local lawyer against President Barack Obama and other top intelligence officials.
In a new motion to dismiss filed on Monday, the government told the court that the Pittsburgh lawyer, Elliott Schuchardt, lacked standing to make a claim that his rights under the Fourth Amendment have been violated as a result of multiple ongoing surveillance programs.
Specifically, Schuchardt argued in his June 2014 complaint that both metadata and content of his Gmail, Facebook, and Dropbox accounts were compromised under the PRISM program as revealed in the documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JeanCroix on Friday October 24 2014, @02:31PM
I think the biggest problem with that is that people are provided with too much to care about. The outrage of the masses is a limited resource, and it's being drawn in so many different directions these days that there can be no focus. GMOs, climate change, gay marriage, government surveillance, gamergate, fracking, Breaking Bad toys in Toys-R-Us, domestic violence in football, et cetera and ad nauseum... the internet outrage machine is powerful, but making enough people care about what actually matters is difficult due to all the noise. And everyone is sure their particular outrage is the one that deserves the most attention. Who am I to say that government surveillance is a more important issue than abused pitbulls, from their perspective?
(Score: 3, Informative) by everdred on Friday October 24 2014, @04:32PM
> Who am I to say that government surveillance is a more important issue than abused pitbulls, from their perspective?
In the same way that many believe that "the second amendment is the one that protects all your other rights," the ability to speak freely means being able to communicate about all the other things that matter to you, like pitbulls.
(Score: 1) by curunir_wolf on Friday October 24 2014, @04:52PM
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday October 25 2014, @09:58AM
And nuclear war, biological war, civil war, pestilence, plague, immigrants and cancer [soylentnews.org].
More seriously, the general public is gaining ambivalence towards technology because exercising the precautionary principle is impractical and/or too costly for most people. Yes, a member of the public can buy cheap tickets, cheap books and cheap food with their phone. Or do whizzy things like hail a taxi. However, for the rest of the time, they know that it is a spy in their pocket. Unfortunately, complete abstinence from technology which they don't understand means less discounts and being a social pariah.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Saturday October 25 2014, @02:44PM
That does bring up a good point - there are several "solutions" to government surveillance which come to mind:
1) Don't use trackable technology - which, as you stated, has many problems. On the face of it, this tech has a lot of useful functions, and it seems a shame that we've finally managed to achieve many things that sci-fi has dreamed of for so long, only to have it ruined by bad actors.
2) Rely on the tech companies to keep government from tracking it. The start of this is the whole Apple encryption announcement, and the FBI crying to the courts to allow them a required back door. To me, this feels backwards. Ostensibly, the government is the entity which should be protecting its citizens from tracking. Two or three years ago, there was talk about laws to protect against tech companies using cell phones to track its customers, but now the roles have flipped. If we need private companies to protect us from our own government, then something is seriously broken. And this leads to...
3) Make changes to the government so it does not track its citizens by default. And this is where we came into this discussion with my original post. Can we somehow make people care, and garner enough will to cause these changes? And when/if we actually do, can we ever trust that if the government says it's not surveilling all mobile devices, that it really isn't?