1. Terry Albury calling this list the "Panopticon" could have merit since he's a former FBI agent. However, I'd have to research more into him to figure out how credible he is, and why he is framing it like this.
2. Amazon and Facebook being in the title is most likely clickbait. They're literally only mentioned once in the article and the rest of it has nothing to do with them.
3. It's concerning that the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) can potentially cause this network to be used to label protestors as "far-left domestic terrorists", however, that is more of an issue with the NSPM than this network. Understanding the NSPM and the effects of it is probably worthwhile.
4. The article mentions that there's no oversight program for Seattle Shield. Is that a problem? Is it typical to have oversight for a program like this, or necessary? What would the program be like?
Overall, the article feels sort of sensationalized. It frames Seattle Shield as suspicious and questionable due to its secrecy and the fact that it performs surveillance. However, there aren't any strong facts or evidence of this program being abused in some Big Brother-type way. Terry Albury framing it in this manner might be the most credible point against it, but I would have to look into that to determine how credible it is.
Any government body with no oversight program indicates that rule of law is optional.
There is no such thing as a monopoly of violence. Weber's work, which you reference, talks about states claiming a monopoly of legitimate violence.
However, legitimacy and law are two different things: while every state claims they are the only ones allowed to use violence legitimately, not every state codifies their functioning in laws ; and fewer structure themselves in such a way that these laws are sovereign.
My point is that merely codifying the state's actions in laws isn't enough to get functioning rule of law. You also need functioning government oversight (and a few other things, but that's not the current topic). When government's action is not overseen, respect of the law happens at the whim of government agents.
It's a very complicated thing :/.
Not saying it wouldn't get abused though, which seems like the primary concern of most people in these discussions..
In general the need for secrecy is liable to be inversely related to the time required for it to be secret from what we do know and this is under comparatively sane regimes. Our current regime wants to build concentration camps and imprison journalists for reporting on their foibles.
What you SHOULD do is have sane limits with truly independent oversight by parties accountable to congress and the people. After a comparatively short duration virtually everything should become public and any misuse of said systems should result in prison. It's not like we couldn't build a system that with appropriate checks and balances but we certainly don't have one now.
Fourth amendment? A terrorist might have a bomb in their trunk that the police aren't allowed to search.
Jury trial? A psychopathic murder might charm the jury into thinking they're not guilty and get released.
Prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? What if the person is actually a horrible criminal but there's reasonable doubt?
We have these protections not because they save ordinary people while still letting the government do everything possible to catch criminals, but because we think it's worth reducing the government's ability to catch criminals in exchange for fewer abuses of non-criminals.
However, if the govt claimed that the person was a terrorist and the company knew for 100% fact that the person was innocent and the investigation was in bad faith... they could tip off the victim.
The NSLs only really help in the latter scenario. As long as the govt has a plausible story, there will be a 50% chance that the target is a criminal and the company will not risk notifying the target. With NSLs they can prosecute the company even though there was no legitimate basis for the investigation and everyone knew it.
Better to wiretap everyone just in case. Why stop there ? After all there a chance any privacy could be used to conceal some terrorist plot, better to record every meat-space conversations too, let's not take any risk.
This way they might stop from doing the act for which they’re investigated instead of actually carrying it out.
Oh, sorry I thought we were pretending we cared about nonproblems in order to destroy individual privacy.
It seems like an incredibly bad idea right now, but I can imagine machines of loving grace that would do only good with such a powerful tool.
You don't need to try to force yourself to believe it not being that bad because it has been worse for like 20 years already.
You've gotta be shitting me.
That first one took me by surprise. What a random hodgepodge of organizations.
There was an front page article about aliens and American pedophile leaders in the most recent issue of The Onion.
I don't see it online. Maybe it takes a while for the dead tree stories to appear there.
Read Stranger in a Strange Land, read about Hubbard and Heinlein's friendship, and look at the timeline of when Scientology started and Stranger in a Strange Land was published.
I mean, it shows how much intel agencies can "screen for high intelligence individuals" ?
But if you're looking for a club you can advance it, I highly suspect Scientology is as quid pro quo as anything else out there. In other words, it's more of a social function than a religion.
But naturally, there significant limits on how much and how long each of infiltration be effective. A infiltrator from X sent to gain control of Y and gaining complete control there of will often identify with Y since leading it give them more power (Stalin was likely a agent of the Czarist secret police before the revolution but he probably wasn't taking orders from them in 1935 etc).
> The Seattle Shield website states that its mission “is to provide a collaborative and information-sharing environment between the Seattle Police Department and public/private partners in the Seattle area. Seattle Shield members assist Seattle Police Department efforts to identify, deter, defeat or mitigate potential acts of terrorism by reporting suspicious activity in a timely manner.”
i am sure that information obtained by seattle shield is not shared to anyone outside of seattle borders. police departments and the FBI are not known to share information, after all. police are especially cagey about sharing with other agencies when it comes to counter-terrorism.
Why are folks jumping to some conclusions that this is some illuminati threat to democracy? Why is the article so breathless?
There are already established ways for crimes to be reported to law enforcement, and arguably even in those ways that are ostensibly open to the public, it's already a well-known thing that the amount of help someone gets is proportionate to their wealth/power/social/influence/etc. There's absolutely no need to have a special extra channel for them that's not visible to the public if there's truly nothing to hide because the justice system already is tilted widely in their favor in the normal way things work.
the number of times I've been harassed by police for taking photos... even in small towns in the middle of nowhere people are paranoid.https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/chronic...
> [Be Safe: Be Suspicious] How can you tell who might be a terrorist? Look for the following characteristics:
> * A stranger or foreigner.
> * Argumentative, especially about politics or philosophy.
> * Probing questions about your work, particularly high-tech.
> * Spends a greater than average amount of time on the Net.
> * Interests in chemistry, electronics, or computers.
> * Large numbers of mail-order deliveries.
> * Taking photographs of major landmarks.
> And those are just a few. If you're suspicious, then turn them in to your local law enforcement for a thorough background check. Better safe than sorry. You and your neighbors will sleep more securely knowing that you're watching each other's back.
Might help to mention I’m American so, you know, random joes blowing stuff/people up is part of my reality.
What is the logic behind this? Why is it suspicious?
Everybody's got a camera now. People taking puctures is the most normal thing in the world now.
Please provide evidence for your claim. The wiki rfc [5] that you linked doesn't provide any DDOS evidence at all, which is odd for wikipedia.
> This caused English Wikipedia to deprecate it with the end goal of blacklisting
This appears to be a concerted effort to blacklist archive.today by unknown actors. There were at least 3 attempts with odd efforts to sway the vote [1][2][3] (the notes in the sidebars at those Wiki RFCs document these actions by bots and others), and a successful attempt to undo the blacklist [4], and then yet another attempt [5].
I'm curious as to why you did not include this very relevant background information in your comment?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
I, for one, found out about the archive.* situation recently, and am totally glad someone like the commenter pointed it out. My wanting to bypass paywalls to read content doesn't justify supporting the owner's behavior - not even close.
This lame argument should be added to the List of Fallacies. It's used everywhere as a "wild card" argument.
> Makeup
> MLB Pitch Framing by catchers
> Surveillance States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies?useskin=vect...
This is functionally no different than sharing your encounters with disruptive people on NextDoor.
The Nextdoor analogy is even more apt because it's kind of notorious for being used by people to complain about all sorts of ridiculous things that don't deserve attention
If only there were a way to address people doing destructive or harmful things.
We could even make it reachable using a telephone, with a very convenient to dial, short, easily remembered number sequence.
I don't know about you, but in my area, NextDoor is mostly "I saw non-white errrrr I mean, uh, 'someone who doesn't look like they belong here' person in my neighborhood" and general witch-hunting any time it's mentioned someone gets arrested for
Also, we have concepts like "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" for a reason. Corporatizing law enforcement is not a good thing.
If Amazon wants to work with the PD they can show up to a community relations meeting like everyone else?
The irony is that curbing this "private intelligence network" would require infringing on the free speech of private people.
If your retirement fund owns stocks of the s&p 500, does that make you an enabler?
Are there really ways out?
That's a pretty strange conflation. It's pretty commonly discussed exactly how rare it is for people to make open source to get compensated by companies that use their projects. I find it hard to imagine that you genuinely think that there isn't an obvious distinction that most observers would draw between that and direct employment.
Not with that attitude
Yes
Maybe
Is it though? Finding some ethically neutral Crud gig?
Maybe there are shades of gray between black and white.
My hope is also the more that people show up IRL the more representative the organization will be of us, or we the people will make a new one that can choose right from wrong instead of left vs right. The political middle has been diminished much like the middle class. :/
I'm all for transparency and accountability but my assumption is that the bad things being done by LEO and intelligence are far worse than this.
Basically any organization that does any attempt to analyze threats of any sort will have a need to collaborate with law enforcement.
Walmart does it for theft rings. Canonical does it for hacking threats targeting Ubuntu. Your bank does it for people trying to steal money.
The existence of a mailing list or something of that sort isn't particularly worrying. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a firewall between police departments and local businesses any more that it would be reasonable to expect one between PDs and local residents.
I would be alarmed if it turned out that Amazon was giving the Seattle PD direct, warrantless access to data about their consumers, or something like that. But there's no evidence presented here of anything particularly sketchy going on.
I think there’s lots of stuff in this space that is worth paying attention to, including for example just how complete a profile companies like Experian have assembled on US citizens, or Flock and LPR generally.
This just seems a lot of fluff with nothing substantial, hence a nothingburger.
Make a tool/browser extension that submits suspicious queries to Google, Facebook, Amazon on behalf of the user like "how to make a bomb", "How to make an explosive drone" or whatever. Have it run several times a day and use a lightweight abliterated llm to create unique queries that would match the kind of heuristics these programs are filtering for.
Hopefully 10s of thousands of users use it and poison the ETL of these intelligence gathering operations. This kinda creates a prisoner dilemma for the first set of users, perhaps the tool would only start making queries once there was enough of a user base so that the first few users aren't signing up themselves for unnecessary scrutiny.
In places like the UK, where guns are nearly banned, this is the norm.
If I can't stop you from robbing me, I should have the ability to record you and identify you later.
I'm fine if we reduce surveillance, if gun/defense rights are added.
No. Way. It's. Going. To. Ever. Get. Stopped.
The only way to level the effects are to radically increase the surveillance so that everyone ends up in a Dark Forest "I know shit about you too" deterrence stand off. And/or flood the sensors with so much input/noise that meaningful signal is tough to suss out.
We have to accept the fact that presently all democracies are merely simulation of a democracy. At the least in the USA; other countries may be a bit better, e. g. Switzerland or the scandinavian countries are somewhat better (though also not to be trusted - see how Sweden pursued Assange).
Perhaps this is how things always end? Democracies are kind of like an obsolete model when you compare it to authoritarianism (assuming the USA would still be a democracy rather than a tech-corporate-fascist country run by a corrupt elite of superrich).
Technology has made it not only possible, but easy, to control a lot more people. Freedom generally, and democracy specifically, are the exception. Might-makes-right authoritarianism is the default human condition and I think we're seeing a regression to the mean. I don't even mean in the last few years or whatever, I'm not making a comment on any country's government today. But look at the last 30-40 years, and imagine what the next 30-40 might look like, and I think we're going to look back on today fondly as when we had more freedom.
:(
I hope they dont think im doing all of this for free