Hacker News

points by austin-cheney 1 day ago | 0 comments

Surveillance in combination with law enforcement is not the immediate problem, and so blaming ills on extended surveillance provides a smoke screen to ignore the actual problems.

The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.

[–] cogman10 1 day ago

Let's put aside whether or not surveillance is necessary.

The very big problem I have here is that ICE is not the agency that should be doing this sort of surveillance. Their role is immigration control, not leftist or citizen control. If they suspect there's some dangerous criminal problem going on, then that's the role of the FBI to investigate.

The specific reason they are doing this is because ICE doesn't use traditional courts for most of their actions. As such, they are fairly unaccountable.

ICE also isn't even technically criminal law enforcement, they are civil law enforcers. They are supposed to involve local law enforcement or federal law enforcement when going after criminals. Their roles are, instead, to dish out tickets. The fact that they've been militarized is a major problem. CBP is the only agency under the DHS that is supposed to have any sort of military equipment and general detention powers and those are only supposed to be exerted at a border.

[–] austin-cheney 1 day ago

Constitutional rights extend everywhere the Constitution covers regardless of immigration status. If ICE is conducting business in opposition to rights conveyed by the Constitution then you have found a far more grave concern to address.

[–] cogman10 1 day ago

For sure, my point is that there's no way you can slice this as being justifiable. Even if you are pro surveillance and anti-leftist. ICE shouldn't be doing this, it's the job of the FBI.

[–] SauciestGNU 1 day ago

HSI has long been criminal enforcement within ICE, but I agree that they are the wrong agency to investigate this. They're doing it because they're unquestioningly loyal to Trump and because it's likely the administration has ordered certain outcomes.

I would also argue that there are no potential benefits that would make this sort of surveillance acceptable, let alone necessary.

[–] tavavex 1 day ago

No, the surveillance is at the core here. People love making pro-surveillance arguments in this same vein by just asserting that there can exist a world where everyone is surveilled but the usage of surveillance is checked and will never cross any line.

That world can't exist. Mass surveillance IS power, and power corrupts. Any situation where the use of surveillance is reasonable is a temporary transitory state, the final end is always the same - repressions and authoritarianism. The technology is a siren song, it's too attractive for bad actors so they will try to get it in somehow. And once your system of checks and balances springs a leak somewhere, it sets in motion its eventual undoing, because there's almost no stopping it once it's relied upon somewhere.

[–] austin-cheney 1 day ago

I am not making a pro-surveillance argument, though. I am merely stating there are malicious concerns that if left unaddressed will continue to be malicious irrespective of any technology.

[–] tavavex 1 day ago

I understand, this is why I said that the same line of reasoning is used in pro-surveilance arguments, not that yours was necessarily one of them. I agree that the concerns outside surveillance are also very real, I'm just saying that surveillance itself isn't an ideology-agnostic tool that's at the whims of its users, the technology itself inherently will always motivate all those other malicious actors and should not exist.

[–] nomel 1 day ago

> for political reasons

It's not clear that this is political. The Venn diagram for people against ICE's existence, and those that are left leaning, is a near perfect circle. The only group against ICE are left leaning, so they would be the only ones to investigate, regarding any actions against ICE.

[–] unethical_ban 1 day ago

I agree with your second paragraph, but disagree with the first.

Society and its laws have been built around the central idea of selective enforcement. We have all manor of laws on the books that are created with the assumption that they cannot or will not be enforced perfectly.

The spy powers of our governments have always been assumed to be limited - that if they choose to invasively track a person, it would take limited human resources and that would naturally limit their capacity (in theory) to those who the government truly deems a concern.

Omnipresent surveillance that can record and analyze and correlate every citizen's movements and behavior at all times is inherently totalitarian and anti-freedom. It is a power the government should not be allowed to have, period.

[–] austin-cheney 1 day ago

So, what are the harms? This is the very first question that comes up in any form of judicial review. If there exists vast increases of surveillance and law enforcement is forbidden from using it is there still a harm? There absolutely could be, but that is what must be addressed to provide the proper regulation.

The forth amendment is not modified merely because the technology evolves. This is the kind of thing defense lawyers look for. To permit evolving technology to be used as evidence in violation of privacy generally requires new law.

[–] unethical_ban 1 day ago

We might be talking past each other. You're talking purely legal interpretation, I'm talking society and philosophy.

My point is that government cannot be trusted to have this kind of power because it will at some point be turned against the population when dissent threatens the people holding power; it is inevitable. The least we should do is make laws strictly controlling access and purpose of access to such tools for criminal investigations, but I don't think that's enough to stop abuse and civil oppression.