Talk:Mass surveillance in the United States

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What are these orange blocks?[edit]

"NSA key to (Microsoft) Windows: an open question" "You are a suspect" "Trading on the Future of Terror". What is this crap? Why are these sections singled out, seemingly at random? How is this NPOV? What's the purpose, and motive here? I'm going to delete them soon. Thanks 2601:844:8180:8B0:29B7:E675:E9B1:3BE3 (talk) 18:56, 14 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

File:NSA iphone location services.jpg[edit]

I've nominated it for deletion. —rybec 00:49, 22 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No final decision has been made, but it doesn't appear that this image is going to be deleted. It may be moved from the Commons to the English Wikipedia where "fair use" is acceptable, but that won't make any difference to this article. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 18:47, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@Jeff Ogden: The file has been deleted from Wikimedia Commons, but it has not been transferred to the English Wikipedia. Jarble (talk) 20:30, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What is the focus of this article, mass surveillance or any surveillance in the U.S.?[edit]

I was glad to see this material split out of the Mass surveillance article and into an article of its own. I'd like to thank User:Wnt for getting that started.

Reading over the article as it exists today, I'm unsure what the focus of the article is. Is it on "mass surveillance" or on any "surveillance" in the U.S. If Mass surveillance is "pervasive surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population", it seems that much of the information in the article falls short of "mass". If the focus is to be on "mass surveillance", then I think we need to remove some of the material that is currently in the article. If the focus is to be on any "surveillance", then I think we should rename the article to be "Surveillance in the United States". A "Surveillance in the United States" article could still cover mass surveillance. I don't think we need separate "Mass surveillance in the United States" and "Surveillance in the United States" articles, so I guess I favor renaming this article so that it covers both topics. But I don't feel particularly strongly about it. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 18:43, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A larger fraction is actually from 2013 mass surveillance disclosures, where it was clearly misplaced as a really long introduction. I still haven't finished hacking out all the material I copied from there, because there are little bits of actual 2013 disclosure buried in it, sometimes indicated only by reference, and there's so much of it.
I don't see the problem you describe. It should be clear that mass surveillance is the surveillance of many specific individuals. A mass surveillance program to intercept every e-mail, for example, is made up of interceptions of emails of specific individuals. The only surveillance I would exclude from mass surveillance is that which is targeted to very limited groups of people - though in practice, I think this boundary is rather ideologically defined in terms of what the Fourth Amendment ought to be. For example, if police go to a warrant and get a court order to wiretap a gangster's phone, that's surveillance, but if they get a court order to get the full text of all text messages sent in the city for the past six months, that's mass surveillance. Since the boundary is awkward and might not stand up to close inspection, I would prefer not to try to separate material very stringently based on it. If you really think "mass surveillance" is a problem we could rename the article to omit the "mass", but that would seem to imply we ought to add more run-of-the-mill material about "normal police procedure". Wnt (talk) 18:56, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It will be good to see if others will comment and what they think. We can wait on making a decision until you or others have finished your hacking (err, editing). The article may look different then and I might feel differently about the need for a change. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 20:19, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Totally agree. And the mix-up goes further involving "wartime censorship of the communications of the populace" (the phrase in the lead), which is a statement that obviously requires substantiation and in fact appears to be odd, at least: wartime censorship, according to the relevant article in Wiki, was about control of war correspondents' reports and not letters and telegrams of "the populace" (a bizarre term in this context at any rate, which strikes me as Soviet cant).Axxxion (talk) 14:57, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I completely agree. This article is an overview of "surveillance in the US." It makes no attempt to only discuss mass surveillance. Maybe 20% of this article discusses something that could reasonably termed "mass surveillance." Either rename it "Surveillance in the United States" or delete it and start over. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.218.180.142 (talk) 23:33, 21 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
So, should we move ahead and rename this article to be "Surveillance in the United States"? I think we should. Two other editors seem to be in favor and one against. I will go ahead and do the move in a few days unless there are strong objections raised here. -Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 14:27, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I completely disagree - The bulk of the article talks about mass surveillance and I wish to quote a few examples so that it becomes clearer to all:
  • During the world wars of the 20th century, all international mail sent through the U.S. Postal Service and international cables sent through companies such as Western Union, ITT, and RCA were reviewed by the US military.
  • In 1942 this included the 350,000 overseas cables and telegrams and 25,000 international telephone calls made each week
  • The now-defunct Project SHAMROCK was created to gather all telegraphic data entering into or exiting from the United States.
  • Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the United States were obtained by the National Security Agency (NSA), under a secret arrangement with U.S. telegraph companies, from 1947 to 1975.
  • The NSA's database of American's phone calls was made public in 2006 by USA Today journalist Leslie Cauley in an article titled, "NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls."
  • Under the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, the U.S. Postal Service photographs the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces in 2012.
  • The FBI collected nearly all hotel, airline, rental car, gift shop, and casino records in Las Vegas during the last two weeks of 2003.
  • By 2020, about 30,000 unmanned drones are expected to be deployed in the United States for the purpose of surveillance and law enforcement.
As for the parts of the article that deal with specific individuals, rather than the nation as a whole, would it be a good enough compromise if we shorten or remove them completely? This article needs a major rewrite to reduce the amount of less relevant content. We could use Mass surveillance in the United Kingdom as a good example. -A1candidate (talk) 15:02, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't trying to say that the article doesn't include information about mass surveillance now, it does. But it also includes information on surveillance that isn't mass surveillance. The current name, "Mass surveillance in the United States", suggests that the article is just about mass surveillance, which is misleading. The proposed new name, "Surveillance in the United States", is broad enough to include all kinds of surveillance including mass surveillance. I don't think we need or want separate articles on "Surveillance in the United States" and "Mass surveillance in the United States". I don't think removing or reducing information in the article to make the article more focused on just mass surveillance is a good solution. So, I'm still in favor of the name change. -Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 22:36, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
And I forgot to mention that the name "Mass surveillance in the United States" would stay around as a #REDIRECT to the new name. -Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 22:40, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bulk Collection vs. Mass Surveillance[edit]

The title "Mass surveillance" is already non-NPOV, since at least historically and from the POV of many, bulk collection followed by minimization is not mass surveillance. In fact this has been the prevailing position in the USA (political leaders, courts, etc.) A perhaps awkward, but more correct title would be "Surveillance employing Bulk Collection in the United States" (or perhaps, "...by the United States").

Spope3 (talk) 18:28, 31 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Article move to Electronic surveillance by the United States[edit]

Following up on the two discussions above where several important points are raised, perhaps this article should be moved to Electronic surveillance by the United States. Similarly, the article Mass surveillance in the United Kingdom could be moved to Electronic surveillance by the United Kingdom. This seems to fit all purposes and the NPOV requirement. Welcome others' views on this. Whizz40 (talk) 00:44, 7 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree there are NPOV concerns with the title which I discussed here. However I'm not happy with 'electronic surveillance' as an alternate term as it has a certain detachment where as previously complex laws and regulations end up in the 'electronic surveillance' catch-all. E.g credit card fraud software as implemented by a bank, suddenly electronic surveillance. A car's dashcam - electronic surveillance. And so forth. I appreciate separating the bad electronic surveillance from the good electronic surveillance is going to hard though! Deku-shrub (talk) 17:04, 11 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This seems to add a new dimension to the naming discussion. Electronic surveillance by the United States would seem to cover surveillance by the U.S. federal government in or outside of the U.S. Electronic surveillance in the United States would seem to cover surveillance in the U.S. by any organization be it the U.S. federal government or not. We need to cover both and use an article name that does not exclusively imply or exclude either. An alternative would be to have more than one article. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 00:59, 12 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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