They said it wouldn't happen ..

[Peter Korsten]

Tony Scharf schreef op 16-12-2013 18:35:

> > Police brutality was way, way worse in the past than it is now. 
> Think about it. The police are being watched just as much as anyone else.
>
> This is the key to my statement from before.  The reason you *know* 
> about these things happening at all is because the cameras are just as 
> much on *them* as they are *us*.  Really, Gert, the stuff you are 
> reading about has been going on all around you your entire life...but 
> you were blissfully ignorant - we all were!

But it's much more satisfying to conjure up some conspiracy theory and 
blame someone else.

> The answer to the question 'who watches the watchers' is 'all of us'.

I can see where people like the NSA are coming from, and it's a bit of a 
dilemma. On the one hand, there are people that dream of imposing their 
own twisted ideas on the world at large, and have no qualms whatsoever 
by what means that can be brought about.

Remember 9/11? The one question that everybody had was: how could this 
happen? Why didn't the security services foresee this? Well, that 
question was answered (because they fucked up and weren't cooperating), 
and action was taken.

Twelve years later, we see that intelligence gathering has improved 
drastically, to the extent that they gather pretty much everything, and 
listen in on telephone conversations of supposedly friendly regimes. So, 
things have swung back, crossed "Start" without collecting $200, and are 
now at the other extreme of the spectrum.

In itself, there's nothing wrong with intelligence gathering. Are we 
complaining that the Polish nicked an Enigma machine, and that the 
British cracked its code and could decipher practically all German 
communications? I think not.

There is, however, something wrong with intelligence gathering without 
democratic oversight. We, as the population, do not necessarily need to 
know what the intelligence community is up to (even though that pisses 
us off to no end), but we need to be able to choose the people to check 
the intelligence services and make sure that they operate within the 
limits of the law.

- Peter
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