I don't think there's any need to rehash the debate here. Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo. I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing.
It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs. If you don't like what the tech sector is doing, please by all means continue to advocate. Shout it from the mountain tops, go to work for the EFF. But don't discount people that legitimately disagree with you as being irresponsible. At least some of us have made the effort to understand your point of view. The least you could do is to try to understand ours.
So in regards to privacy we treat it like property. Governments which don't support good property rights are not going to care one whit about privacy and those who come after privacy will eventually tread on property rights.
People need to understand it as something to be protected just as you would your physical stuff and work towards having it treated similarly in government.
Which sector is building startup after startup for data mining, tracking, building profiles? This in addition to the already established companies. Then you're trying to downplay the issue to trivial actions such Facebook likes or tracking of IP addresses, a toy version of the state of the art. Finally, the sarcasm, showing how reasonable you are and putting the OP in a bad light for not being "more understanding".
It's quite simple: the topic of privacy is central to a free society and it's enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the past, we have seen a rich history of abuses, lies and deceit from huge organizations with massive resources at their disposal. Private or not.
The majority of people go on with their lives without caring, as long as they have their basic needs met. The very few that take a stand, pay the price. Otherwise, some criticism of the behavior of these organizations can be found online, but not much because of:
1) Chilling effects. Funny how I had to think before posting this message, living comfortably in a democratic country, with freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
2) "Helpful people", quick to jump to the defense of said organizations, explaining away abuses, making up excuses, muddying the waters, asking for fairness and understanding their point of view.
So thanks for keeping the balance karmacondon. They might have mountains of money, lawyers, shills, PR people and most resources imaginable really, BUT we wouldn't want to unfairly hurt their feelings. I do apologize for that.
Why not? You may disagree, that doesn't mean you can't be flat-out wrong. Having an opinion does not automatically give that opinion equal weight when history has proven to us again and again that that particular opinion ends up with making society either dangerous or at a minimum uncomfortable.
I'm sure there were border guards in former East Germany that were entirely convinced that their state was the greatest and that's why they had to keep people in at all costs, including shooting them if they persisted in believing otherwise and tried to simply leave. After all, that was best for them. But that particular opinion turned out to be very wrong in the long term.
People can rationalize the most absurd stuff to themselves and to others, especially when their pay-check depends on it, but that's not a requirement.
All those that try to pretend that there is some kind of 'reasonable disagreement' possible about the erosion of privacy and that directly and indirectly help to rush in the surveillance state have quite possibly not thought as carefully and have not considered these things with the degree of gravity required as they claim they have. Having a mortgage to pay may factor in there somewhere too.
Usually this is a combination of being too young, too optimistic and in general living too sheltered a life to know what can happen to you, your family and your friends when the tide turns. And the tide always turns, nothing is forever.
> Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo.
I hope you're right but history is not on your side in this case.
> I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing.
Yes, it isn't going to convince you any more than that border guard would be convinced that his job is a net negative to society. Every stream, no matter how reprehensible will always have its fans and cheerleaders. And later on they will never remember that they had agency all along and were perfectly capable of making a different decision. Responsibility is weird that way.
> It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs.
It is not admirable that you are so certain in yours. May I suggest a couple of talks with some holocaust survivors to get a better feel for what the true power of information can get you?
Or maybe the family members of some people that were killed while trying to flee the former SovBlock?
Or maybe some first generation immigrants to the US or Canada or wherever you live to give you some eye witness accounts on what it was like to live in those countries before the wall fell down?
'It can't happen here' is an extremely naive point of view.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide
Agreed with your advocacy advice.
> The least you could do is to try to understand ours.
That's 'mine' not 'ours', you speak for yourself.
You talk about it like it's necessarily a bad thing, by default, for everyone. Why?
It's simply hard to take your stance as one made in good faith.
The US government has a long history of using its national police, the FBI, to infiltrate and subvert domestic political movements that the powers that be found unpleasant -- including using their police powers against modern groups such as the Occupy movement.
Further, we know that the US government has used records held by tech companies to create massive cross-referenced databases of people, including domestic activities. The recent leaks about surveillance programs has made that abundantly clear.
Your position is literally that an organization with a history of doing this kind of activity won't use the technology we already know the government possesses to keep doing the same thing.
So I think there is a need for you to rehash the debate here, because it's not clear how you sincerely hold that position.
Because rather than a rational view, what you describe sounds like irrational denial.
I understand what you're saying, and I think I get where you're coming from. But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the government monitoring potentially criminal groups or building databases. That's what we pay them to do. If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.
The people that I know in real life that hold views like these are best described as scared, rather than ignorant. They feel that they price they pay is a small one as long as it gives them an un-specified increase in perceived security in return.
Fear is a very powerful tool when it comes to getting people to choose against their self-interest.
This sounds more like a uncompromising proclamation instead of thorough analysis.
It's not about mistakes. Mistakes are - usually - a sign that someone needed to learn. They do not as a rule include wanton intent.
And if a person were to make too many mistakes then they probably should not be trusted.
> I understand what you're saying, and I think I get where you're coming from. But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere.
No, that's the opposite. You have beliefs that you state are so correct that they stand on their own, in spite of a bunch of historical evidence to the contrary, starting roughly at the time that we invented writing going all the way into the present. That's a pretty gullible position.
> I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the government monitoring potentially criminal groups or building databases. That's what we pay them to do. If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.
Potentially criminal groupls: everybody.
You're apparently one of the people where the 'fear' button has been pressed, don't let your fear get the better of you.
Btw, I note that you write all these 'reasonable disagreement' things from the position of an anonymous coward which makes me think that maybe you do realize the value of your privacy after all.
The ancients had it as 'power corrupts', the abuses are plentiful and that every company that engages in these practices (and the government agencies as well) do this to ostensibly make our lives easier or keep us 'safe' is very well known and advertised. If you have evidence to the contrary feel free to share it but that's where we currently stand.
I can't think of a case where stable and mature democratic bureaucracy has ever used surveillance to influence the majority of its populace. Germany in the early 20th century was a very instable government in a bad economic situation. Soviet East Germany was communist, which isn't quite the kind of democratic that I meant. It's true that any government could turn bad, in the same way that anything is possible. But there's very little evidence for that in the current context.
So my position is this: Given that I live in the United States in 2016, I'm not worried about the government randomly deciding to screw with me by looking at my electronic communications and acting on them. It just doesn't make sense. I'm not significant relative to the scale of the US government, the government itself just doesn't work that way and all of the negative scenarios I've heard seem to be very contrived.
If you really think that it's possible that the government of a modern western nation could turn into communist East Germany, then it seems like your problem might be with governance, not privacy. If it's possible for the government to go all Walter White and just turn evil over night, then no amount of personal privacy is going to save any of us. And until it seems like that's a thing that's actually possible, I'm going to make practical decisions about my own privacy.
A better paraphrase would be "We should suspect that the US government will act in a way similar to how it has acted repeatedly over the span of decades."
I think this is a perfectly fair standard, and actually am held to that standard all the time, including professionally. If I had a continual, systemic habit of flaws in my work, for instance, I would be fired.
Your phrasing suggests that these are things that "just happen", instead of a pattern of decades of intentional programs with the same kinds of aims and behaviors.
> But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere.
I actually think you're insincere because you're minimizing and denying a pattern of sustained behavior as a few mistakes, rather than an intentional, continuing program.
That insincerity can be directly seen above when you switch from "did things I didn't agree with" to "made mistakes". No one is talking about the US government making mistakes, and decades of intentional programs operated with similar strategies is hardly "making mistakes".
Your entire analogy was insincere and meant to elicit an emotional response.
> If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.
Will we?
I'm actually very skeptical that we'll deal with it in any meaningful way, and find it much more likely that we'll surrender a great deal of control over the country to an autocratic government with a good social control program, precisely because people like you don't want to sincerely discuss the likelihood of that happening by stages.
The ability of power or authority to lock you up, take your property or worse your life is protected by rule of law and due process. Having a debate of the rule of law or due process is similar to having a debate on privacy or a surveillance state. The consequences are negative for the individual and society as a whole, even though they may benefit some stakeholders in the short term who will of course advocate for it but on the whole it's not a social good.
The only thing we have to come to this conclusion is history, a wide body of knowledge and reason.
We can thus say with some degree of confidence that a society without rule of law or due process is not a good thing similar to a society with surveillance is not a good thing. We don’t use the ‘moral high ground’ but reason and historical experience to make these conclusions. This is not a moral issue but a practical one that has consequences for our societies. The ethical issue is the social good for the people who build these systems.
Since we are discussing the social good the alternative view needs to be backed by reason on how surveillance can be good for society as a whole, beyond offering naive presumptions suggesting people are good and will not abuse the power, or how knowing details of everyone’s activities may be beneficial to an individual or company because while that may be true they do not address the social good.
And the only thing we use in these discussions is reason, let's not make it personal.
While this may be true, certain crimes are seen as worse than others. And, as un-PC as it may sound, certain demographics are many times more likely to commit certain crimes.
Homicide: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm
Also, some government monitoring can be "for your own good":
Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5704a1.htm
But, maybe the CDC is different than the NSA.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the above events are unlikely though. When a few actors have access to the information of tens of thousands to billions of people though, this has an impact on a societal level. As jaquesm said, information is power and when one has so much information and lots of money to boot, they can begin to covertly influence policy and behavior and harass and marginalize their opponents. And they can do that directly, or by using the information of a third party, like a doctor, lawyer, religious leader, or even someone insignificant which happens to be a relative, etc. Moreover, companies can be sold, together with their databases, they can be forced to hand them over or they can be hacked. A treasure trove of data held by an otherwise principled company, might end up in the hands of an unsavory party.
Why is this a bad thing? History has shown again and again how such imbalances of power are abused. Here's a rather harmless example of data mining a mobile device + social network combined with social engineering to scam people out of money: http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions-of-... If a game producer can do this, what are the pros doing?
They don't have to. History only happens once, if you refuse to learn from history because it is not an exact repetition of the past then you can never make any progress.
> Saying "A thing happened in the past" can be instructive, especially to people who didn't even realize that the thing was possible.
You seem to think it isn't possible because of "insert magical reason why everything is different now here", not just that it can't happen again for whatever reason. That's an impossible position to argue with. All the weight of history would not be able to sway you from that position because nothing can counter magic.
> But what's much more practically useful is to say "I think what happened before will happen again in the current context and for these reasons". An example from the past is only useful if it can be tangibly connected to the current situation, right now in the present.
No practical examples will counter your magic. You will either say 'that's not the same exactly' or 'that's too long ago to be relevant' and so on.
The only thing that will convince you is when you're lifted out of your bed at 3 am and we never hear from you again. By then it will be a bit too late, but you too will be a believer in government abuse if and when that happens.
Until then you're going to head straight for the last stanza of Martin Niemoeller's most quoted lines. The vast majority of the people living in the former DDR were never lifted from their beds at 3am for interrogation. To them life was just a-ok.
> I can't think of a case where stable and mature democratic bureaucracy has ever used surveillance to influence the majority of its populace.
That's not a bad thing per se. Meanwhile, you're trying hard to change that number from '0' into '1' by allowing the present level of abuse to spread unfettered, which invariable leads to an escalation. Each and every click that you hear is one of a ratchet, it will not voluntarily click back again, it can only go forward until on that scale between '0' and 'police state' you've gotten close enough to 'police state' that there is no relevant difference.
It can't happen here is a very dangerous line of thought. See the movie 'the wave' for some more poignant illustrations of how that thought is a dangerous thing all by itself. It can happen here, it might happen here, and it likely will happen here unless we're vigilant.
> Germany in the early 20th century was a very instable government in a bad economic situation.
ok
> Soviet East Germany was communist, which isn't quite the kind of democratic that I meant.
Yes, and like that there will always be one last thing that is not quite the same which will allow you to look the other way.
> It's true that any government could turn bad, in the same way that anything is possible.
I would consider that progress, hold that thought.
> But there's very little evidence for that in the current context.
That depends on where you are looking. There is plenty of evidence that pressure is being applied, but the pressure is applied subtly enough and in places far enough away from the focal points where change is effected that you'd be hard pressed to connect the dots. That's the beauty of having a lot of information at your disposal.
A nice example is the Iraq war, the run up to that saw massive world wide resistance in the populations of the countries of the 'coalition of the willing' whereas later on this was described as the coalition of the 'gullible, the bribed and the coerced'.
> So my position is this: Given that I live in the United States in 2016
The United States does not hold a privileged position in the world, and it does not matter whether it is 2016, 1938 or 1912. For everybody living in the past in places where these experiments went wrong they could have written "given that I live in X in Y" and they'd be accurate about that.
> I'm not worried about the government randomly deciding to screw with me by looking at my electronic communications
They might have substituted 'electronic' with 'written'.
> and acting on them. It just doesn't make sense. I'm not significant relative to the scale of the US government, the government itself just doesn't work that way and all of the negative scenarios I've heard seem to be very contrived.
They again would not have used US government but whatever place they lived in. And they would have been dead wrong, and in some cases, when the fog lifted they'd have simply been dead.
What seems contrived for you, living in a country that has never seen actual war on its own soil (sorry, your civil war does not count), that exports war on an ongoing basis, that uses IT to kill people by remote control, that used telephone taps, burglary and threats to affect they inner workings of its own government to me seems to be willful blindness.
For some reason it is more convenient to you to re-write all of history up to and including the present rather than to see that maybe your government is not all that benign, neither on the world stage (where they are a bit more overt about their intent) and internally (where they are out of necessity a lot more cautious). Have the Snowden relevations really not managed to at least peg your evidence meter that maybe not all is as it should be? That your constitutional rights were trampled and that the protections afforded you appeared to be of no value whatsoever?
> If you really think that it's possible that the government of a modern western nation could turn into communist East Germany, then it seems like your problem might be with governance, not privacy.
No, I think that we may be reaching a stage where influence can be wielded subtly enough that someone like you could convince themselves that there is none of it at all. And that's the true prize, to wield that power but in such a way that it can be applied selectively enough that as long as the bread is on the table and the games keep going nobody will notice how rotten the core has become.
> If it's possible for the government to go all Walter White and just turn evil over night, then no amount of personal privacy is going to save any of us.
It will never be that overt. It will be more along the lines of parallel construction and other nice little legal tricks such as selective enforcement. Never enough for you to cross that threshold.
> And until it seems like that's a thing that's actually possible, I'm going to make practical decisions about my own privacy.
You're more than free to do that. Unfortunately, those of us living outside of your beautiful country don't even get to have a vote in there. Your personal well-being trumps the rights of everybody that is not you, and like that we race ahead down the hole.
It looks to me like the US agencies, and the Five Eyes in general, are capable people who are just doing their jobs. They aren't bothering me and I'm not bothering them. The past actions of the US government or hypothetical scenarios based on historical examples just aren't very convincing. Anything could happen. But I'm not going to concern myself with it until I see some evidence.
I'm not making that mistake. I fully realize that the US government is comprised of many arms that even though some of those arms might have our collective best interests at heart this may not be the case for all of it.
> We're talking about hundreds or thousands of individuals spanning multiple generations.
So what. That only increases the chances of abuse, it does not diminish them at all. Just like in Nazi Germany there were plenty of people still fighting the good fight and at the same time employed by government. No government will ever be 100% rotten. But it does not have to be like that to do damage.
> I'm not going to worry about government metadata collection because of something that happened during the Eisenhower administration.
Because, let me guess that was too long ago and now it's different?
> Each person and group of people should be evaluated based on their own behavior and merits, not the reputation of the organization that they are affiliated with.
This is where you're flat-out wrong. Governments (and big corporations) have a life-span much longer than that of the individuals that are making it up, and as such we should look at them as entities rather than as collections of individuals.
If you'd be right then North Korea would not exist today as we know it (and neither would China, Iran and a bunch of other countries). The way these things work is that the general course will be slightly affected by the individuals but the momentum in the whole machinery is enormous. Think of it as a cable in which individual strands are replaced but the identity and purpose of the cable remains. Eventually you have a completely new cable and yet, nothing has changed. And in this case the entity has a huge influence on which parts of it will be replaced by who.
> It looks to me like the US agencies, and the Five Eyes in general, are capable people who are just doing their jobs.
That's a very very scary thing to say. "Just doing my job" has been used time and again historically to distance oneself from the responsibility taken when performing certain actions. Just doing your job is not the standard that needs to be met.
> They aren't bothering me and I'm not bothering them.
And most likely they never will.
"The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing"
> The past actions of the US government or hypothetical scenarios based on historical examples just aren't very convincing.
Of course they aren't. After all, it's not you that is personally inconvenienced in any way.
> Anything could happen. But I'm not going to concern myself with it until I see some evidence.
And none that will convince you will ever come. Because if it did it would be too late for you to change your stance anyway.
Very hard to suggest they aren't supporting the police state.
It's unquestionable that the tech sector is directly culpable for supporting the cops and the politicians to spy on us... to affirm otherwise is counterfactual. The moral high ground belongs to the people who don't collaborate with those who would rather have us dumb and controlled.
It's pretty hard to respect the pro-surveillance view because it seems flatly head-in-sand ignorant of reality time and time again. We have evidence of surveillance state wrongdoing in hand, and no successes to point to while simultaneously experiencing multiple terror attacks, and yet the pro-surveillance types are steadfast in their position, as though it's a religion.
The Snowden files showed us explicitly that disrupting political groups is actually done via GCHQ! This is very far from protecting the citizens, and is instead stifling them purposefully.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...
I actively am discounting the opinion of people that do not understand this threat realized, currently unfolding threat to our democracy. An informed opinion doesn't sound like one passed via the government through the media.
They don't just monitor criminals-- that's why the anti-surveillance folks are anti surveillance! They monitor everyone, and create criminals as needed, and nobody can question them for fear of ending up on the chopping block.
They are currently very far out of hand, and "we the people" are doing somewhere between jack and shit because of how little the people understand the problem.
It's also quite foolish to try to evaluate people in a vacuum... would you extend the same privilege to a member of a criminal gang or jihadi group? No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
"Campaigns operated by JTRIG have broadly fallen into two categories; cyber attacks and propaganda efforts. The propaganda efforts (named "Online Covert Action"[4]) utilize "mass messaging" and the “pushing [of] stories” via the medium of Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube.[2] Online “false flag” operations are also used by JTRIG against targets.[2] JTRIG have also changed photographs on social media sites, as well as emailing and texting work colleagues and neighbours with "unsavory information" about the targeted individual.[2]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEXINT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_Nerve_%28GCHQ%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...
There's your evidence-- it's been here all along. These programs are targeted at US citizens, some with the explicit aim of discrediting them, blackmailing them, or propagandizing them. These are not the actions of a friendly nanny state but rather a malevolent surveillance state.
[1] https://www.google.ie/search?q=sal+colusi&oq=sal+colusi&aqs=...
In the modern era it is information asymmetry that we should worry about. How to prevent such a thing pragmatically is tricky.
Yes, you would be unhappy. But this is not about whether you are unhappy, but whether you should have control over military, police, our tax money, and thus everyone's lives.
It simply is a very well established fact that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous, and that they are extremely hard to break up once you recognize they are heading in the wrong direction. Just look at what the problem is in countries where people are doing badly, both historically and right now, and why things are so extremely hard to improve once they have gone bad. Which is why we have built structures that try to prevent such concentrations of power from forming. That is essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers: To build distrust into the system. Dictatorships are the opposite of that (only one power, and no mechanism to remove the person in office). Yes, democratically elected officials certainly are unhappy when they are voted out - but that is the price we pay to prevent concentrations of power from forming.
And surveillance is undermining democratic decisionmaking. Having a democracy now does not guarantee you a democracy tomorrow if you aren't careful in who and what you vote for.
> If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.
Yes, "we" will. If history can teach us something, we can expect that it will take about a decade at least, with many unhappy lives, maybe millions of deaths, until foreign military gets into it to "deal with it".
Sure, maybe that won't happen. But given the prospects, wouldn't it be wise to use our experience from history, to try and make predictions where things will lead, and to then try and prevent things from happening in the first place?
You are aware, for example, that Hitler was democratically elected into office, and all his powers were given to him democratically? And you are aware what it took to remove him from office afterwards?
This only works in the US and even there I have no illusions at all about the ability of a present day militia being able to fight off a trained army, it's a pacifier for overgrown toddlers. The only people that have to fear from citizens with guns are other citizens (with or without guns), the military would have absolutely no problem whatsoever dispatching those if it was decided that their lives and the resulting PR fall-out are less important than whatever objectives they were given.
> In the modern era it is information asymmetry that we should worry about.
Note that there are always provisions in the law to protect the lawmakers from having the laws applied to them.
> How to prevent such a thing pragmatically is tricky.
I think it can't be done unless you simply outlaw it wholesale and are prepared to follow up on it. And from a practical point of view this is now a rear-guard action, fall-back bit by bit and try to push back the point in time where we will have to conclude the battle was lost. This is not a problem that will simply go away, it has already gone way too far for that.
So, you are drinking battery acid until you see evidence that it's not good for you?
Or do you maybe take the evidence of other people's experience into account?
If so, how about you take into account the evidence of hundreds of societies that have dealt with massive surveillance (where "massive" still was "almost none" in comparison to today's and tomorrow's technical possibilities) and with oppression (those two empirically tend to go hand in hand).
If those are your sincere beliefs, I really would recommend you pick up a few books about recent German history. How Hitler came to power, how the state functioned once he was in power, how people tried to get rid of him but failed, and what it took to finally remove him. And then continue with the history of the GDR, how surveillance by the Stasi influenced everyday life, how people tried to reform the political system but failed, and what it took to finally reunite Germany.
The history of other countries might teach you similar things, but Germany is a good example because it is culturally a rather "western country", so it's easier to recognize similarities.
The U.S. government has several orders of magnitude more information about the private lives and communications and beliefs and activities of its citizens than East Germany ever had. This is also incontrovertible and undeniable.
How can either of you talk about abuses that happened in the past as if those were the only abuses? Why would you need to?
RE regulation on software engineers, Its impossible. For a software written, its PURPOSE and AUTHORS are subjective interpretations. It is much much harder to get common consensus if the software is surveillance, malware etc. So any regulation would do nothing but increase the already-so-complex-and-huge set of laws.
Yes, it is. But these are not the people that the argument is about and that's precisely the problem here. They don't feel that it concerns them at all, it is always others who need to worry about what is done with that data, they have nothing to hide and absolutely nothing to fear.
> Literally billions of dollars will be spent on that purpose this year alone.
10's to 100's of billions of dollars.
> There are also the government agencies of a dozen or two other countries which the U.S. government agencies work with and share data with to a greater or lesser extent.
Yes.
> Literally thousands of newspaper articles have been written about this.
Indeed. But since this has not yet resulted in mass arrests on US soil this evidence amounts to nothing in the eyes of those that see it as a 'good thing', these people are keeping us all safe and are merely doing their jobs. Incredible to you, to me and lots of others but still that's a position that quite a few people hold and not much that you will say or do will persuade them from that point of view.
So, I don't need to use the past as a reference. But it is strange to see a person that would refuse to learn from history to be able to apply the lessons to todays environment. I'm working on a second part of that blog post about 'if you've got nothing to hide' that concentrates on the present (I think the past has been dealt with), but I still feel that those are such enormously important reminders that they serve as a good backgrounder for why all this stuff matters.
So this is a simple choice grounded in the 'those that refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it' line.
> The U.S. government has several orders of magnitude more information about the private lives and communications and beliefs and activities of its citizens than East Germany ever had.
This is true. But the mere possession is not enough to sway a die-hard denier of danger and supporter of the surveillance state. All that data by their reckoning is in good hands it is there merely to protect them from unseen dangers.
Obviously I disagree strongly with that position but that's probably because (1) I've lived for a bit in a country that was a police state by most definitions and (2) I've seen how the various layers of that society would deal with this (the majority were just like karmacondon here, only a very small minority dared to take a stance, the rest saw the whole thing as essentially beneficial, which retrospectively may seem very hard to understand. In fact even today there are still those that yearn for the communist days when life was orderly, everybody had a job and everybody had a pension waiting for them at the end of the line).
Well, then logical thing would be not to give anyone any power, ever.
My point is, if you take general principles and blindly apply it with "no analysis involved", you're likely to get to a pretty ridiculous state.
Don't you see any logical problems with this line of reasoning?
That's one of my favorite author quotes. The greatest evil in this world is done by those who can see their own work and tell themselves that it is good.
Just like any other tool such insights can be (and are) abused but it need not be like that.
The conclusion to reach is not to give anyone any power ever, clearly that's not feasible. The conclusion you're supposed to reach is that you can give power to people but you'll need oversight in place. Effectively you'll end up with checks and balances, pretty much the way most governments are set up.
And what history tells us - again - is that this isn't always sufficient to prevent abuses and our newspapers and other media seem to tell us that our current set of checks and balances have outlived their usefulness in the information age.
This flows from 'power corrupts' because it appears that those placed in power have - surprise - again abused their privileges.
Think of it as a warning beamed down from historical times to our present day that does not need more embellishment and is all the more powerful for its brevity, it is something so inherent in human nature that we need to be vigilant of it at all times, no matter who we end up placing trust in.
I'm worried about both, and I can't say which I'm worried about more. What are the reasons you are concerned about one more than the other?
There is only one positive outcome of concentrations of power, and that is efficiency in execution. Which is extremely scary when combined with huge power.
This is really just the democracy discussion with different terms. It is well known that dictatorships are much more efficient at executing their plans. The inefficiency we voluntarily introduce when establishing and maintaining a democracy (and if you have ever been involved in democratic decisionmaking, the inefficiency can be really frustrating) is the price we pay to insure us against the efficient abuse of power as we have witnessed it countless times in human history.
So far, it seems pretty much like your belief that surveillance is not a problem for you is unfalsifiable, that you will believe that it is a problem for you only when the secret police is actually coming for you or maybe your family.
There are lots of bad things that the government could do. But it just hasn't happened. They've had mass surveillance technology in place for over a decade now. The world hasn't fallen apart, Hitler hasn't risen from the dead and everything is pretty much the same as it was before.
I guess we can check back in another ten years to see if your apocalyptic visions have come to pass yet.
Define 'random'...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-van-buren/parallel-const...
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130...
> Something like "Private Citizen X criticized the government and embarrassing information about his life was revealed as a consequence."
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-cove...
You mean like that?
> There are lots of bad things that the government could do.
Does, not could do.
> But it just hasn't happened.
It happens, but it just does not manage to cross your threshold for worry because you personally are not inconvenienced.
> They've had mass surveillance technology in place for over a decade now.
For longer than that, and it has been abused for longer than that too.
> The world hasn't fallen apart
It will not 'fall apart' because of this. But it will change because of this, and not for the better.
> Hitler hasn't risen from the dead and everything is pretty much the same as it was before.
Yes, we still have willfully blind people that would require things to get so bad that they would no longer be able to avert their eyes before they would consider maybe things have gone too far. But by then they would have indeed gone too far.
> I guess we can check back in another ten years to see if your apocalyptic visions have come to pass yet.
It will never be a moment in time, we will just simply keep on creeping up to it, just like the frog in the pot of water.
What fascinates me is that there are people that are obviously reasonably intelligent that manage to actually see the pot, the stove and all that it implies and they still tell other frogs to jump in, the water is fine.
I'm less pessimistic about that. I'm a big fan of gun control laws but I also think that the one positive thing that has come from the ongoing middle-east conflicts is that a determined militia can be genuinely problematic.
> Note that there are always provisions in the law to protect the lawmakers from having the laws applied to them.
To my original point about asymmetry, this is what we should be devoting our energy fighting.
> simply outlaw it wholesale
Outlaw what wholesale? I'm personally of the opinion that the long term end state will fall more on the side of honesty (combined with increased acceptance) than secrecy.
(Also: "random citizen" or "private citizen"? A citizen who criticizes the government is barely a "random citizen".)
Any kind of abuse of power. The penalties for that should be severe. It's one of the few cases where I think that the penal system should be used as a means of discouragement rather than as one of education and rehabilitation.
If the government is not corrupt, I have optimism in being able to get through a personal attack.