POLL: Outsourcing Surveillance - Good Idea or Bad?

[What Would Jesus Do?]

Which scares you more: putting control of surveillance in America in the hands of the government or outsourcing it to the private sector (sometimes including multinational and foreign companies)?

Right now we do both. But one of the reactions to the rising criticism of our surveillance state and NSA excesses is not to scale back but to turn more of it over to the private sector. Google and Verizon and Booze Allen Hamilton, will do more, and then the US will ask for the data. Presto, the US government isn't Big Brother any more. It's just paying the corporate version of Big Brother.

This is NOT a question about more or less surveillance. Just a question of who does it.

 

[Hawkeye009]

There was just a story on NPR about public backlash to governmental use of license plate data (from cameras). The response has been that police departments just buy the data from private companies doing the same thing. We get the same result, but with less oversight.

 

[What Would Jesus Do?]

Another element of this question is paying for it. There's a guy on RT talking about how the government developed a program called Thinthread to do some surveillance activity. Cost $3 million to develop it. Worked perfectly. But Hayden (perhaps on orders) decided to outsource it. So Google got a $4 billion (with a "B") contract to develop basically the same capability.

If you are one of those who doesn't want the government doing this (which is probably a lot of us) but you somehow OK with the private sector doing it and then handing the info over to the government, are you also on board with paying more than a thousand times as much?

 

[What Would Jesus Do?]

There was just a story on NPR about public backlash to governmental use of license plate data (from cameras). The response has been that police departments just buy the data from private companies doing the same thing. We get the same result, but with less oversight.

It's the "less oversight" part that should trouble us. You don't like the government in your bedroom? At least you can complain on constitutional grounds and vote in reps who will stop it. In theory. But Google isn't bound by a Bill of Rights and you don't elect its directors.

 

[KitingHigh]

None of the above. We need less, period, end of options.