I think it is important that we all take a second to realize that surveillance can be a reasonable apparatus of a well maintained democracy. We should strive to have proper checks and balances on those powers rather than pretend they are not useful or do not exist. With proper checks surveillance can greatly improve national security but it should be kept to that domain and we should seek to prevent abuses.
I think us in the EU are due for a Snowden moment at some point here - the public is pretty in the dark on the level of surveillance pervading EU countries. I think it would be better if it was more transparent because we could actually have these discussions and work to prevent abuses.
> important that we all take a second to realize that surveillance can be a reasonable apparatus of a well maintained democracy
No, I don't think we should just "realize" that. By all means, let's have a discussion; but to accept a priori that some form of surveillance is acceptable reeks of an outlook that has already given up. We should not be fearful and dependent, but rather willing to accept danger as the price of no one looking over our shoulders.
That's a semantic difference that doesn't bear any relevance to what I'm saying. To "realize" that it can be reasonable is to accept the underlying premise - that surveillance is not necessarily (logic term there) unacceptable.
I am specifically arguing that we do not (should not) accept a priori the premise that surveillance is not necessarily bad.
To do so is to capitulate the entire argument against surveillance, and reduce our fight for privacy to nothing more than weighing lesser evils.
I’m not sure moral puritanism is really that useful here. Surveillance isn’t going anywhere and it is demonstrably useful for national security. We are best off working to allow it to operate with ample checks and balances rather than closing our eyes and pretending it is superfluous.
Is it? Please demonstrate it by listing terrorist incidents prevented or active terrorists caught due to surveillance other than narrowly-targeted police investigation, or military action in an active combat zone.
To qualify, the use of broad surveillance should be a necessary component of the investigation, i.e. the investigation would not have started or reached the conclusion it did without it. If some of these exist but they're all classified, that's problematic from the perspective of democracy because it prevents the public from making an informed decision about their merit.
I don't think that's quite fair. I greatly doubt that successful preventions would be willingly associated with questionably legal surveillance. In the US, "parallel construction" is used specifically to hide how information was obtained and I'm sure similar motivations exist here.
It is if you're not going to accept a priori the claim that surveillance can be justified. If you need to have it demonstrated that surveillance can be justified, the only possible grounds for such a demonstration is to show the people the benefits--the actual harms that surveillance has prevented. If we the people can't see those benefits, how can we possibly judge whether or not surveillance can be justified?
In other words, the government of any free society is in a kind of Catch-22 position with regard to surveillance: it can't be justified to the people without revealing that it's happening and what it's discovering, but revealing those things destroys the usefulness of the surveillance. The only choices are to not permit the surveillance at all, or to accept an unavoidable loss of freedom--as a citizen, you will never be able to know whether the surveillance your government is conducting is justified. You just have to accept it.
The assertion was that it's demonstrably useful for national security. Without such a demonstration, I submit that it is not, and that terrorists are caught using normal police work.
"It's too secret to tell the public in broad terms a decade after the investigation is over" strikes me as incompatible with democracy. Questionably-legal surveillance also strikes me as incompatible with democracy outside of short-term use in exceptional emergency conditions, which should be disclosed to the public once the emergency is over.
As I said earlier, you're espousing an outlook that has already given up. As other commentators have pointed out, checks and balances are unreliable at best, futile at worst.
If you are interested in negotiating for minor concessions with entities who have demonstrated a willingness to work outside the law (and write new laws where needed), then your pragmatism will boil you slowly.
Surveillance != Mass Surveillance. If you need to have an investigator show up in person to carry away a thumb drive of data about one case then this means you need to make a cost-benefit analysis about when to send out that investigator. If you can just go dragnet fishing and hoard data forever then there's no incentive to ask whether you really need to.
I think you're right in theory but wrong wrong in practice. While there probably exists a form and degree of surveillance that is very beneficial at the expense of minimal freedom, it's far more difficult to hold the line there than it is to hold the line at "surveillance is wrong." Rallying points like that are essential in politics and in personal moral integrity.
There are likely forms of eugenics that have the same cost/benefit characteristics as the forms of surveillance to which we've alluded. We know that the legalization of abortion has the long-term effect of reducing crime, so what about laws that make abortions easier to access when the fetus has certain genetic characteristics associated with disabilities? Or with psychopathy? "NO!" is the resounding response. "THAT'S EVIL!" And a good thing too, because it's probably the only reliably way to hold the line against policies that really are murderously bad. We don't debate practical eugenics. We muse about it in fiction and hypothetical scenarios, but we don't debate it in politics. We reject it because it's wrong. It's wrong because it is.
Surveillance policy should be met with this same sort of rallied opposing force. Write books about it, discuss it in an academic space, try to imagine ways in which it could do more good than bad; fine. But propose surveillance policy in the real world, and the response should be: "NO! THAT'S EVIL!"
You won't find a more powerful force than moral outrage. It doesn't need to be worked around, it needs to be channeled. On the one side, you will have people channeling their outrage towards criminals and terrorists. On the other side, you must have people channeling their outrage towards the idea of using espionage against civilians. A compromise involving "only the good kinds" of surveillance is unacceptable, because it allows the side that's rallying against criminals and terrorists to continue using moral arguments, while the side opposing them is neutered and can only make comparatively weak arguments. It's nearly impossible to successfully argue that something is morally wrong if it's already the status quo. Why is it so easy to say slavery is wrong now when it was so hotly debated in the 17th century? Same question applies to eugenics, once a topic of much political discussion. We're in that boat with surveillance right now. It feels normal to be spied on, and the uncompromising argument that surveillance is totally morally abhorrent in all its forms sounds extreme, and you'd never hear it made by a sitting politician.
How would such proper checks look like? I don't know of a country which I would trust to protect such data from misuse in day to day policing. Even more concerning is what happens if the country becomes less democratic but the surveillance infrastructure is still there.
> With proper checks surveillance can greatly improve national security
Take a look at the past 20 years. Your argument is hollow. Ladens don't keep diaries on Facebook, and foreign spooks don't use email, no, they don't use computers as such.
With the amount of silly foreign policy blunders in between the EU, and the US shows more than anything that US doesn't seem to benefit at all from wiretapping governments of their allies.
I disagree with your premise entirely. I'm not sure a single 'check and balance' exists that can keep surveillance under control. It has an inherent propensity for abuse. There is no amount of bureaucracy or red tape that will make mass surveillance a benevolent force.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Mass surveillance is an absolute power. We can't prevent any abuses. The state is doing what they want without regards for the constitution. The FISA abuses in the US have proven that.
Organizations are made of people, at all levels. You are not trusting or not of an abstract entity, you are dealing with a lot of people that you don't know from the present and the future, any of them that can use or abuse of the information they are gathering, in individual level or more related to policy level, or act based on that information.
Also it is not about crime, is about control, for whatever agenda they have now or later. And the lack of Snowden level leaks in 7 years hints at which point they have control now.
One of those checks and balances is the legal prohibition against operating domestically. These ongoing conspiracies demonstrate that spy agencies have effectively escaped democratic oversight.
I think us in the EU are due for a Snowden moment at some point here - the public is pretty in the dark on the level of surveillance pervading EU countries. I think it would be better if it was more transparent because we could actually have these discussions and work to prevent abuses.