Surveillance and privacy

Now more than ever we need to assert the fundamental human right to privacy. This right is indirectly encapsulated in the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, as protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Naturally this includes searching and seizing our information as well, since "spying on someone" is already legally considered something you need a warrant for.

A new constitutional amendment is needed to ratify the right to privacy in the modern age. I want to craft a draft of this new amendment and try to get it circulated to Trump and others. Luckily we have an electoral college system for adopting new constitutional amendments, so I believe such an amendment would actually pass, if we could unite support for it among the authentic liberals and conservatives. Basically both the true classical liberals and conservatives will support this, but right now their political parties and ideologies are hacked by the neolibs and neocons, by the same people who are adopting these spying systems to begin with.

Now seems to be the perfect time to codify our human right to privacy against massive big brother surveillance systems.

Philosophically we can explain the right to privacy by showing its connection to the right to free speech, free association and free press, all of which are connected to the right to freedom of thought. The ability to think depends on the freedom and rights of the individual, freedom from persecution and illegitimate use of force against him, most especially freedom from coercion. Surreptitious monitoring, spying and recording is the antithesis of that.

In 1984 the telescreens were always able to watch you, but you never quite knew when someone was actually watching, and this actually made surveillance much more subtle and nefarious. Similarly o the panopticon model; now we have our computers and phones playing the role of telescreen, because we literally have no way to know when someone is watching.

I remember after the Boston bombing, there was a new woman story that got short term but wide coverage: an elderly couple had their house raided by police because they had searched a combination of terms on google, including "pressure cooker". The searches were innocent as it turned out, but the unstated point of the article was that somehow their google searches in their own home was being monitored, and sent to police. I remember being shocked that this wasn't even a focus of the reporting on the story. Instead we were left to draw our own conclusions, namely to self-censor ourselves out of fear of the Orwellian superstate always being potentially watching us.

Although to look on the bright side, at least these issues are front and center. People are talking about surveillance and privacy, security and freedom. This is good, Wikileaks did a great service to humanity, as usual.

These things are now part of overt, undeniable human history and the collective existentia. The future echoes with tectonic reverberations. We should try to weigh values across decades and even across centuries.

I like Fixed's idea that we should show Google et. al. how they can make so much more money -- and save their souls and become heroes -- by working with humanity and truth rather than against it.

This is high work fit only for the world's greatest philosophical minds, namely, us.

Zarathustra comes down again from the mountain,




"(fire firing in the sky
bring your friends and bring your time.)

too many years of war
stretching the after glow
i know that your gone.
yeah, i know that your gone.
running around you know
everything comes and goes.
we lost ourselves again.
we lost ourselves again.

but i’m not fake and i’m not happy
i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,
i’m not laughing now.
so don’t be fake to keep me happy.
i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,
i’m not laughing now.

even before we lost
we had to pay the cost.
i know that you’re gone.
yeah, i know that you’re gone.
running around you know
where did you have to go?
we lost ourselves again.
you lost yourself again.

but i’m not fake and i’m not happy
i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,
i’m not laughing now.
so don’t be fake to keep me happy.
i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,
i’m not laughing now.

“i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,

too many years of war
stretching the after glow
i know that your gone.
yeah, i know that your gone.
you’rerunning around you know
where did the good times go?
we lost ourselves again.
we lost ourselves again.

but i’m not fake and i’m not happy
i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,
i’m not laughing now.
so don’t be fake to keep me happy.
i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,
i’m not laughing now.

no, i’m not fake and i’m not happy
i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,
no, i’m not laughing now.
so don’t be fake to keep me happy.
i’m not tired and i’m not laughing now,
i’m not laughing now.
i’m not laughing now."





"There's no need to settle down
To pull on my heart strings
Get your arm around someone
Yeah that's the way to live
Now the record man is dead
No more wolf in the sheep's clothes
But the music stayed around
It still sounds good and

Hey
Still got love and hey
Still got booze oh ho
Still got having fun
We still got you and hey
Sweet champaign
Mary Jane
Got my soul

Baby don't you know

Now the hawks are overhead
But the vultures are down low
We got flying in the town
Real slow

All my friends hang around
Whose to say we're the strange ones
We ain't got no 9-5
And got no institution

Hey

We still got love and hey
We still got booze oh ho
We still got having fun
We still got you and hey
Sweet champaign
Mary Jane

Got my soul
Got my soul
Oh baby don't you know
Oh baby don't you know
Baby I got soul

Soul...

Yeah we still got love yeah we still got
Yeah we still got love yeah we still got

(Repeat)

Soul...

Still got love and hey
Sweet champaign
Mary Jane
Got my soul
Got my soul

Baby don't you know."

Thrasymachus wrote:

Although to look on the bright side, at least these issues are front and center. People are talking about surveillance and privacy, security and freedom. This is good, Wikileaks did a great service to humanity, as usual.

These things are now part of overt, undeniable human history and the collective existentia. The future echoes with tectonic reverberations. We should try to weigh values across decades and even across centuries.

I was actually surprised at how many times I saw "FBI" in sub-routines of MS Windows 10.

And I agree, WikiLeaks is doing a fine job at keeping the people informed of what the government is doing.