Big Brother, Monitoring Your Video Viewing Activities
A short but very useful article, Linked below, on Big Brother seeking to "legally" find out the identities of people watching certain videos on YouTube, including perfectly legal ones.
I don't doubt that this has been ongoing surreptitiously for years. The shift is that they want to formalize and obtain official approval for the widespread dragnet surveillance.
As Martin Luther King, Jr., observed:
"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
Illegally obtaining information can have its limits, even given the sad state of the legal profession. A concise summary of the potential limitations, from Cornell Law School:
Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained. As the metaphor suggests, if the evidential "tree" is tainted, so is its "fruit." The doctrine was established in 1920 by the decision in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, and the phrase "fruit of the poisonous tree" was coined by Justice Frankfurter in his 1939 opinion in Nardone v. United States. The rule typically bars even testimonial evidence resulting from excludable evidence, such as a confession.
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As Albert Fox-Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) observes in the article, “No one should fear a knock at the door from police simply because of what the YouTube algorithm serves up. I’m horrified that the courts are allowing this.”
In other words, NSAGoogle baits the trap, directing YouTube users to certain videos so that they can, in turn, find themselves in peril for watching the video—including those who just watched a small portion of the video and found it not worth continuing to view.
There is no reason to think the warrants will be limited to the highly-censored YouTube. By first “targeting” YouTube, bad law and bad precedents will be established, making it much more difficult when Big Brother goes after the genuinely free-speech video platforms. It's not like the YouTube branch is going to seriously, let alone vigorously, fight other tentacles of the organism.
No doubt...