(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
How they’re watching you [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-15
There is an extremely uncomfortable essay in The NY Times detailing the huge surveillance systems in New York City and elsewhere that are hoovering up vast amounts of personal information every day. (Gift link)
Ms. Daniel Vasquez was a public defender in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. She now runs the Forensic Evidence Table, a nonprofit focusing on the intersection of criminal law, technology and science. Sept. 12, 2025 I ran a practice inside Brooklyn’s public defense office focused on the police department’s use of science and technology, so I am well accustomed to the department’s collection of personal information on people being investigated for crimes. But more than a decade of observing traditional police work did not prepare me for what the department is doing today: building vast, hidden repositories of data it collects on everyone in the city, with no clear boundaries on how it can be used. As cities across the country follow New York’s lead, I am gravely worried about what this system enables, and the effect on what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis termed our most valued right: the “right to be let alone.” The city’s police force has spent more than $3 billion amassing information that reveals where you have been, whom you have interacted with and what you have said, thought and believed. Unlike previous surveillance methods, new digital tools allow law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance persistently, universally, at an unimaginable scale. They can do so with no special permission, no oversight and no advance planning. The results amount to a digital time machine that not only makes our past constantly available to law enforcement officers but also can provide them with predictions about our futures.
Essentially, Miranda warnings are now irrelevant. I have friends visiting from England. To get visas to come here, they had to supply their email accounts and list the social media they use. They mention that’s why they don’t respond to messages we sometimes send commenting on political developments. It’s not unreasonable, considering news reports like this.
Vasquez lays out scenarios where this system can have corrosive effects on the lives of people, all unknowing. The scope of the surveillance would make the Stasi weep with envy. What’s even more alarming is the Trump regime is busy breaking down firewalls and linking all of these systems together in ways that guarantee abuse.
The beginning of President Trump’s second term, however, has taken this strategy to new levels for the nation as a whole. Early this year, the Department of Government Efficiency started working to break down walls between federal data collections maintained by the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Aggregating these intentionally separated data sources not only reduces their security but also allows for the instant reconstruction of the sum of our private lives, with few or no rules on who will have access to it or how it will be used. In March, Mr. Trump issued an executive order explicitly directing all federal agencies to follow suit by eliminating boundaries between the systems they use to collect data on the populations they serve. The early indications are not good. The federal government has significantly expanded contracts with Palantir, the powerful and secretive surveillance technology company co-founded by Peter Thiel. The U.S. Postal Service has reportedly started cooperatingwith the Department of Homeland Security to track undocumented immigrants. State and local police officers are collaborating as well.
In The Shockwave Rider, the late John Brunner described a particular kind of paranoia that comes with living in a world like the one we are creating. It’s the fear and frustration that comes from realizing that there is information out there that is absolutely critical for you to have — but you don’t know what it is, where it is, and who can see it but you can’t. Add to that the need to constantly self-censor and… Welcome to 1984.
Read the whole thing
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/15/2343626/-How-they-re-watching-you?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
