New UN Privacy Chief Proclaims – UK Digital Surveillance is “Worse than Orwell”

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Cannataci says we are dealing with a world even worse that anything Orwell could have foreseen. “It’s worse,” he said. “Because if you look at CCTV alone, at least Winston was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already.

– UN Privacy chief, Joseph Cannataci

The UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, pulls no punches when it comes to privacy. It’s hard to disagree with what he has to say.

From the Guardian:

The first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the internet to safeguard data and combat the threat of massive clandestine digital surveillance.

Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.

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Pennsylvania to Become First State to Use “Precrime” Statistics in Criminal Sentencing

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Criminal sentencing has long been based on the present crime and, sometimes, the defendant’s past criminal record. In Pennsylvania, judges could soon consider a new dimension: the future.

Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country to base criminal sentences not only on what crimes people have been convicted of, but also on whether they are deemed likely to commit additional crimes. As early as next year, judges there could receive statistically derived tools known as risk assessments to help them decide how much prison time — if any — to assign.

– From the Five Thirty Eight article: Should Prison Sentences Be Based On Crimes That Haven’t Been Committed Yet?

As technology generally continues to advance, one thing you can be sure of is the criminal justice system’s use of innovative new “tools” will grow exponentially. This can be a good thing, but it can also be a very dangerous thing. Pennsylvania’s new law that permits the use of data showing whether people are “deemed likely to commit additional crimes” in criminal sentencing, is a perfect example of how an over reliance on technology can be a threat to liberty and due process.

Rather than explaining my position on the matter right here, I think it best to make my points within excerpts from the article itself.  From Five Thirty Eight:

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How the Department of Homeland Security Monitored and Tracked Peaceful “Black Lives Matter” Protests

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They also show the department watching over gatherings that seem benign and even mundane. For example, DHS circulated information on a nationwide series of silent vigils and a DHS-funded agency planned to monitor a funk music parade and a walk to end breast cancer in the nation’s capital.

“It is concerning that the government would be diverting resources towards surveilling citizens who are assembling and expressing their First Amendment rights,” says Maurice Mitchell, an organizer with Blackbird, a group that helps support activism against police violence in communities across the country. “The fact that our government is doing this — I can only assume to disrupt us — is pretty alarming… Directly after 9/11, people said, ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about.’ Well, now we’re fighting back against police brutality and extrajudicial killings, yet they are using this supposedly anti-terrorist infrastructure against us.”

– From the Intercept article: Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter Since Ferguson

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. Nothing.

In fact, as I and many others have stated for years, the primary purpose of the DHS, and well as the other intelligence-industrial complex agencies, is to keep the unwashed masses in line when they wake up to the incredible criminality and theft perpetrated by the status quo. Pointing this out in 2015 isn’t particularly novel, prescient or insightful. It’s just obvious.

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Why They Spy – Cory Doctorow Writes about IT-Powered Feudalism

Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 2.38.00 PMThe amount a state needs to expend on guard labour is a function of how much legitimacy the state holds in its population’s reckoning. A state whose population mainly views the system as fair needs to do less coercion to attain stability. People who believe that they are well-served by the status quo will not work to upset it. States whose populations view the system as illegitimate need to spend more on guard labour.

Why spy? Because it’s cheaper than playing fair. Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism, where property is the exclusive domain of the super-rich, where your surveillance-supercharged Internet of Things treats you as a tenant-farmer of your life, subject to a licence agreement instead of a constitution.

From Cory Doctorow’s Guardian article: Technology Should Be Used to Create Social Mobility – Not to Spy on Citizens

At this point, only the most clueless and gullible amongst us thinks that government surveillance has anything to do with stopping terrorism. Nevertheless, it remains as important as ever to explain to people the true reason behind the elimination of the 4th Amendment. Namely, protecting the oligarchy from restless plebs.

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