Take a look at your technology with an engineer's eye. If it can be done, they probably will. If it can be done easily they probably already are. You may as well just assume this is always the case.
In the current political climate, why in the world wouldn't they?
Of course. You should also be fighting it with every fiber in your body. Generations behind you gave their lives for rights like these, and the current generation seems to be giving them away because they are too busy chatting with friends on Facebook to care about it.
And if you don't fight it now peacefully, you'll be fighting it in the streets in a bloody revolution, in a decade or two.
Have Congress pass laws to make such surveillance illegal. Stop using Verizon or any other carrier that complies (economic protest). Only use technologies that don't permit such spying. Pass state legislation that is counter to the federal mandate and create an uproar that way. The list goes on.
We're stil a democracy and when it comes down to it we're still a democracy that gives a lot of power to any one senator. If you have one dog in the fight - if the people in even one state can get their act together enough to elect someone on your side - there are things you can do to have your voice heard.
You really shouldn't feel so unempowered - despite the 1% rhetoric, it's still pretty much the best time in the history of the world for the little guy.
Aaron Swartz designed Victory Kit ( https://github.com/victorykit/victorykit ) with the beginnings of this exact use case in mind. What would you do if you passionately cared about an issue but lacked the massive funds required to mount a lobbying campaign? Start building grass roots social pressure by A/B testing your entire movement start to finish.
Root Strikers is fundamentally misguided, they attack the symptoms instead of the cause. The root of all this corruption is how large the federal government is, any organization with that much power and money will be co-opted.
I don't agree. Good governance is possible, and size has little to do with it. If there is proper democratic control over government, government can be a force for good. Many northern European countries governments show this (they generally are trusted, and few people resent paying taxes).
Democratic control can provide equality and fairness, with every person one vote, rather than the market where some people having more impact than others, simply because they are richer.
Maybe because in America there hasn't been good governance for so long, trust is low, and the only solution many see is to simply chop down government to the minimum... but there are other solutions, actual democracy is one of them.
Well, specific solutions would to be close various federal agencies, e.g. the department of education. Push law making wherever feasible to the state level or lower. Simplify the tax code - i.e. end tax breaks, reduce the overall tax rate so that the government spends less money.
The key thing is to not attack our freedom to associate and speak, which is what rootstrikers are advocating. Many of the policie they advocate will be used to silence anonymous speech/activities.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I'm not sure why you think Rootstrikers is such a bad thing. I read the wikipedia entry but still don't know what you are specifically talking about...
* political expenditures which are limited and transparent
--> Restrictions on spending = restrictions on speech
--> Transparent means anonymous donations can't be done, anonymous speech is an import part of the American political process
In general they're against people forming groups (corporations) to promote their ideas and believe that once you're in a group then you lose your right to free speech among other things.
If they can't control said technologies, and put backdoors in them, then they'll make them illegal. That's a non-starter. A solution can only ultimately occur in D.C.
"I don't see any way to fight it now. What are your suggestions?"
Develop and deploy good cryptosystems, and encourage people to use them. My mother uses OTR to chat with me; she does not fully understand why it matters (or even that it is being used), yet our conversations are safe from prying eyes. Sure, it is just a small step, but it is better than nothing. A lot of small steps would quickly make the NSA's program prohibitively expensive (even for the NSA).
"The cypherpunks credo is 'privacy through technology,
not legislation.' The law of the land can be changed by
the next administration. The Laws of mathematics are more
rigid."
Voice printing all but eliminates the idea of anonymity for tracfones. All they'd need is one conversation, and they can look for you from there on using your voice. They can back trace who you are by who you talk to and so on; relatively trivial to figure out who you are from there, particularly assuming you make a few calls and or reveal any details.
I'm skeptical how accurate voiceprinting can be after all the distortion/compression of a cell signal. If you have a device you use to have contacts you want to keep secret from the NSA, you probably shouldn't call your friends on it.
Having done some work with watermarking, I would assume it's extremely accurate. There is so much information that makes it through the transmission process: your speech cadence, inflection, pronunciations, word choice, interjections, background noise, etc. The only way I'd feel reasonably comfortable defeating something like voice printing is using a text-to-speech engine.
You are thinking about it from someone trying to understand another person through distorted comms. You aren't thinking about every other signal in the "speech" that is really quite easily identifiable with a reasonable margin of error.
You can do this anonymously, but it may take you a few tries. I've had the best luck with 3rd party T-Mobile dealers. Just give a name and decline showing an ID. Buy refills with cash at Walmart or wherever.
In the current political climate, why in the world wouldn't they?