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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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=...
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?
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.
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.