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.
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?
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).