1) In what world is this acceptable? Is it okay if I install a keylogger on your machine as part of a job application process?
2) Like watching your search history for terms like "homemade bomb" and putting you on the no-fly list if they find them?
Remember that when you say, "it's okay for the government to do X", you're saying "it's okay for people to do X", because the government is people. And the government is a lot of people, many of whom are good, but some of whom are bad, and others of whom are just plain douchebags.
1) That would depend on the job. For almost all jobs it's not ok.
Besides, keylogger is an extreme thing here, because it's direct way to steal identity (which is very bad).
Let me remind you, that original fiction story implies that information was already available to Google, and Google shared part of that information with Government. Keyloggers weren't part of that picture.
Please also restrain yourself from slippery slope argument. The slope is not slippery. In my view we have more privacy than we really need. That does not mean that privacy is not needed at all. But if we lose a little bit of privacy we are likely to gain more than we would lose.
Now freedom of speech and freedom of flying is a very different story. There is almost no benefit from limiting it, and there is lots to lose.
2) You are mixing up "watching" and "limiting freedom to fly" - something that I explicitly asked not to do.
Unreasonable placing on no-fly list is bad. Watching for "risky" search queries is not nearly as bad by itself.
Regarding leaks of collected information from government agencies into hands of bad people - that can be fixed by suing government agencies in case if such leak did happen and it hurt innocent people. Then government agencies should pay for the leak. A lot. And perhaps being dissolved if while losing tax payers money they did not provide enough benefit for the society.
1) The distinction between keyloggers and wiretaps is nearly moot. Would you allow me to run a wiretap instead?
When the government can wiretap at will, there is basically no privacy. And I agree that the slope is not slippery, because there is no slope at the bottom. Unfettered government snooping as you seem to support is the bottom. There's no way to have less privacy than none.
2) I dispute your distinction because it's meaningless. Do you believe that the government is or should be unable to act on the intelligence it gathers? If so, why would you support such a pointless waste of money? If not, why do you suppose that you could not be the target of such action?
As for suing, that's missing the point. The damage doesn't go away when you sue. Nor does it stop bad people from being bad. Abused of the system will always happen.
Besides, in your world, what grounds would there be for a suit? You said that free flow of information is a good thing. Why would it be good for someone's private info to flow to the government but not the public?
1) Where did you even get that idea of unfettered government snooping?
Did anybody suggest it to you?
2) Government agency should be able to act on the intelligence it gathers. But if that act limits people's freedom without good reason - that agency should be punished for that (cut funding, fire abusing government employee, disassemble agency, send responsible agents to jail - depending on the severity of the violation).
If I'm the only watched, then I would probably lose more than gain.
But if everyone is watched then I would probably gain more than lose.
3) I now see where the root of your mistake is.
You are assuming, that by giving government more watching power government would become more powerful.
But that does not have to be that way.
Let assume that governments need X amount of power to be efficient in law enforcement.
Where X = WatchingPower + ActingPower.
That means that if we keep government power at X and increase WatchingPower, then ActingPower of government would decrease.
That's what I'd like to see happen: government watches more and acts less (avoiding awkward actions).
Would you prefer to take WatchingPower away from government and replace it with dumb ActingPower?
>1) Where did you even get that idea of unfettered government snooping?
From you: "Why wiretapping by government is such a concern?" "Wiretapping by itself does not restrict freedom of people" "Why worry about Big Brother watching me in the first place?"
>2) Government agency should be able to act on the intelligence it gathers. But if that act limits people's freedom without good reason - that agency should be punished for that (cut funding, fire abusing government employee, disassemble agency, send responsible agents to jail - depending on the severity of the violation).
And who's going to do all this monitoring and punishing? The current system is already abused and there's basically no punishment. Why do you suppose that would change in the face of broader wiretapping?
>If I'm the only watched, then I would probably lose more than gain. But if everyone is watched then I would probably gain more than lose.
This is rather doubtful, since you've lost all of your privacy and gained basically nothing. The likelihood of being killed in a terrorist attack is extremely low. You're probably more likely to choke to death on a piece of chicken.
>I now see where the root of your mistake is. You are assuming, that by giving government more watching power government would become more powerful. But that does not have to be that way.
Yes, it does. The government does not readily give up its powers. History has demonstrated that government power almost invariably grows over time. There's no reason to believe that giving the government broader surveillance powers would limit its enforcement powers. Moreover, there's no reason to believe that these are exchangeable. A pound of surveillance does not equal 16 oz of enforcement.
>Would you prefer to take WatchingPower away from government and replace it with dumb ActingPower?
If I drink 5 gallons of water at once I would die. Does it mean I have to constantly think about dangers of water?
Same with privacy. We are nowhere near the levels of government surveillance which are seriously dangerous.
I'd prefer to see less of both.
And I prefer to be rich and work less, not to work a lot and be poor.
So what?
The amount of power that people grant to the government depends on the level of results people expect government to achieve.
The more power people give to the government, the better results government can achieve.
But with power comes an abuse.
So eventually public opinion settles on certain level of government power. You cannot really change that level overall (because crime would go up and public does not want that). But you can change what kind of power government has. You can give government more surveillance power and take away some power to limit people's actions.
The reason why it's possible is that more informed government would be able to accomplish the same positive effect by arresting 1 suspect instead of arresting 10.
Arresting 1 suspect requires 10 times less government ability to limit the freedom of our life.
Therefore we may grant government 10 times less power to mess with our lives by substituting it with better informational awareness of government agencies.
So within that model what would be your choice? Cut surveillance and increase ability of government to interfere with our lives?
>We are nowhere near the levels of government surveillance which are seriously dangerous
We'll have to agree to disagree. Abuses of power have happened already. It's already dangerous.
>And I prefer to be rich and work less, not to work a lot and be poor. So what?
So you posed a false dichotomy. Don't get snarky when I don't answer your unsound question the way you hoped.
>The amount of power that people grant to the government depends on the level of results people expect government to achieve.
>The more power people give to the government, the better results government can achieve.
No, the government takes the level of power that it can. The government regularly does things that the populace does not support. Don't pretend that all government powers are granted by the people. Or if you want to believe that, please explain how you would take a power away from the government.
And no, more powerful does not imply more effective. Totalitarian states are basically all-powerful (in terms of powers we've been dscussing) yet most of them have historically also been ineffective (except perhaps at retaining power).
>The reason why it's possible is that more informed government would be able to accomplish the same positive effect by arresting 1 suspect instead of arresting 10.
You're just making things up now. On what basis to you make this claim? I say that an "informed" government arrests more people, because they can find more "probable causes" to do so.
> So within that model what would be your choice? Cut surveillance and increase ability of government to interfere with our lives?
I choose less of both. I will not concede to your fantasy that the government has a fixed amount of power or that it's powers are somehow interchangeable.
You focus on limiting surveillance power of government (instead of limiting government ability to mess with peoples lives).
That indirectly increases amount of power government gets in messing up with people's lives.
It works like that:
1) You significantly limit what information government can get about people.
2) Clueless government agencies allow some major terrorist act (like 9/11) to happen (which could have been avoided if surveillance was more efficient).
3) Society is getting scared and gives government way more power to mess people's lives (crazy airport security, Iraq and Afghanistan mess etc.).
I understand that your intentions are noble, but the end result is pathetic.
No, it doesn't work like that. What evidence can you present to indicate that as the government has increased general surveillance (such as wiretapping, rather than, say, ground surveillance), they have decreased how often they interfere with citizens' lives? What evidence is there for increased efficiency? What has actually happened is that the government has taken additional liberties away on all fronts. Losing privacy did not gain us more freedom of travel, nor did it gain us any other liberties. We simply have less privacy, and less freedom to travel, and less freedom to assemble, etc.
Lack of intell was not the cause of the 9/11 attacks. There was no lack of intell. There was a lack of coordination and communication among the various agencies, and more surveillance doesn't change that. There's little to no evidence that our eroding freedoms have increased safety (not that that would justify the lost freedoms anyway).
1) I know for sure that in my business, lack of information (about customers) leads to less accurate fraud detection. End result of missing information is that both me and my customers suffer more.
I don't see why it should be different with government.
2) Loss of freedoms in the last 10 years was caused by people being scared of 9/11. You cannot do much about it anyway. But you can choose what freedoms are more important to you. If I have to give up some freedoms, I'd better give up surveilance, but keep freedom of speech and freedom from being arrested.
If you don't make such choice - that choice would be made for you.
1) Because no amount of information will ever be complete, and in any event there's no way to analyze that information efficiently. If you had the recorded phone calls of every customer you deal with, would that solve fraud? Of course not, because they'd have to mention the intent to defraud, and you'd have t listen to the conversation.
2) I find it strange that you believe that you actually have a choice at all. So far no one has come to my house to ask what freedoms I prefer, nor have they asked me whether I'm okay with giving up more freedom in general. And I still don't understand why you think these freedoms are somehow exchangeable, as if the government will be content to give back freedom to assemble if they can just take away enough privacy.
If I'm not able to do what I want then I cannot accomplish what I want. That makes my life worse.
Another reason: certain people's actions keep government in check (e.g. speech). If government punish for delivering speech then it removes checks that prevent government from turning into dictatorship.
Privacy works in the opposite direction. Privacy adds barriers to the information flow and decreases our awareness, which causes less informed and less efficient decisions.
This only makes sense if information flows both ways. When one party has significant information about another party, and the second party doesn't have similar information about the first, an imbalance is created that gives the first party power over the second. When I know your secrets, I have power over you. You fear my knowledge, perhaps rightfully so, because your secrets might be enough to destroy your life, or at least cause you significant embarrassment.
When the government engages in widespread privacy violations, they are creating this same kind of power imbalance. You know nothing new about the government, but the government may know many things about you. They may have information tha could greatly embarrass you. They might have information they could use to arrest you, even if you've done nothing wrong or illegal.
This is not an increase in awareness or information flow or efficiency. It is merely an increase in government power.
That's a valid argument. The solution - making government more open. Including being open about what kind of information government does collect. Including creating another government agencies that oversee government agencies that collect information about citizens.
As usual there are budget constraints on that system, so even though government would not be limited legally too much about the amount of information it can collect, it still would be pretty limited by the budget, because it's expensive to maintain red tape and keep collected information secure.
In any case, legal system should mostly limit government in how much it can restrict citizens, not in how much information government can collect.
> Including creating another government agencies that oversee government agencies that collect information about citizens.
Because the solution to government overstepping is government oversight?
> In any case, legal system should mostly limit government in how much it can restrict citizens, not in how much information government can collect.
I don't understand how you can hold this belief. Do you believe that information holds no value, or that it doesn't give the government power to hold the secrets of its populace? Or do you believe that the government cannot be too strong? I'm seriously confused how you can believe that government snooping has no downside.
> Because the solution to government overstepping is government oversight?
Yes.
+ Budget limitations.
+ Oversight from the press.
Every action has downside (including watching), but relatively to restricting freedom to act, downside of watching is small.
In addition to that there are significant benefits of efficient watching. Imagine that there is watching device that clearly identifies people who are planning terrorist attack. That significantly simplifies security check in airports and saves everyone time and effort in the process.
Budget is a pretty weak limiting factor when it comes to automated wiretapping. It may limit the usefulness (can't watch all the "bad guys") without limiting the abuses (creepy fed employee can watch you). Depending on the press assumes that they have both interest and visibility into the government's wiretapping, the former of which may not be true and the latter of which definitely is not.
Do you imagine that we have the ability to clearly identify terrorists via wiretaps? Why would we allow such people to walk around freely in the first place? The idea that we would simply stop them from flying is bizarre.
There are also significant drawbacks to efficient watching. Sure, it might catch a real terrorist. Or it might just watch to see if you're in a "dangerous" group: anarchist, revolutionary, extreme libertarian, etc. As a member of one of these groups, you might need to be interrogated. Meanwhile some creepy FBI agent is listening in on your wife because it gets him off, and your neighbor is being blackmailed by a DHS agent who's threatening to put him on the No Fly list and publicly reveal that he visits prostitutes.
The idea that we would simply stop them from flying is bizarre.
Last time I checked blackmailing is illegal by itself. There is no need to increase privacy in order to prevent blackmailing.
The same with other things that you mention.
But in any case, the real choice is between "decrease privacy and decrease government power to act" and "increase privacy and increase government power to act".
Last time I checked, warrantless wiretaps were illegal. Yet the government has done a lot of that with no apparent reprisal.
And again, I disagree with your assessment. The government gains nothing useful by snooping on its average citizen. It average citizen is not committing crimes. The government can snoop on suspected criminals by getting a warrant. They do not need further freedom to snoop in order to do their jobs.
So instead of enforcing prosecution of illegal wiretaps you are suggesting to make grey-area wiretaps illegal?
And then not enforce it either, I assume?
Are you serious? You equate limiting warrantless wiretaps with alcohol prohibition? In your mind limiting the government's power is the same as limiting citizens' freedom?
How about we just enforce the existing wiretap laws instead of making them even looser as you suggest? Sure, if you loosen the laws, there's less illegal activity. Tha doesn't mean there's less activity, though.
How can you think we'd do a better job of prosecuting illegal wiretaps if there were more wiretaps in general? If there are more wiretaps, then there will be less oversight on each individual wiretap. That makes it easier to hide illegal ones, because they get lost among the masses (which is already a problem). Why don't you come up with a way to decrease abuse our existing surveillance systems before you propose expanding them?
1) Your idea of replacing law enforcement [of illegal wiretaps] with even stricter laws without enforcing them - that's what reminds me about alcohol prohibition.
2) You again are attacking a straw man.
I'm not suggesting increasing surveillance.
I'm suggesting not to pay much attention to it and focus our very limited resources on what's really important:
- Freedom of law-abiding citizens from government persecution.
- Reducing legal restrictions on citizens.
- Freedom of speech.
Government surveillance abuse is not nearly as important as these three principles above.
If you insist that limiting government surveillance is more important, then please name what item in my list you consider less important.
1) Prohibition had nothing to do with replacing enforcement of laws with stricter laws. It was about passing a new law where none existed before, to take away a freedom. Your comparison makes no sense.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't enforce the law. I'm saying that the range of the allowed wiretaps should be narrow so that enforcement is feasible. And indeed, the range of legal wiretaps is actually not that broad. If we enforced the existing law, there would be fewer.
2) You have repeatedly said that we shouldn't be concerned about government privacy violations, that wiretaps are not a problem, that we have more privacy than we need, that we should trade privacy for other freedoms, that the government is efficient with less privacy. You may not have explicitly said "I want more wiretaps", but you've been arguing in favor of it quite clearly. This is not a straw man. If you don't like where your arguments lead, then maybe you should ask why you're making those arguments.
Your attempt to separate privacy from other freedoms and present them as a tradeoff is still unsound. I could likewise ask you whether you'd rather have freedom of speech or freedom from false arrest, and pretend that this is a legitimate tradeoff and that we need "not to pay much attention to it and focus our very limited resources on what's really important".
1) If wiretapping X is illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent only wiretapping X.
If wiretapping X and wiretapping Y are illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent both of them, which makes law enforcement harder (not easier as you are saying).
2) Of course there is no point in blindly giving government more surveillance power and hope for improvement. But if government agency claims that with more surveillance power it can significantly reduce spending and significantly reduce number of false arrests while maintaining low crime level - then it might worth to try.
If government agency fails to deliver on that promise, then the head of that agency should be replaced, budget shrunk anyway, and wiretapping grant revoked.
3) The difference between "government surveillance" and "limiting freedom of speech"/"false arrests" is that "government surveillance" has much smaller downsides and much higher upsides, while both "limiting freedom of speech"/"false arrests" have almost no upside and very painful downsides.
1) Your logic only makes sense if you assume that the rate of wiretaps is unchanged by the legal status of wiretapping. This seems a rather implausible situation.
If wiretapping X, Y, and Z is legal, then it's easier to hide an illegal wiretap of W. When there are more legal wiretaps, it's easier for illegal wiretaps to slip through. The cost of oversight isn't dominated by the number of illegal wiretaps. It dominated by the number of legal wiretaps, because each of those needs to be reviewed.
2) No, it's not worth trying. Surveillance agencies have been saying that forever, and they've not delivered on their promise.
Your beliefs seem to exist in some strange world where agencies are actually held accountable. So long as we don't live in that world, your ideas make no sense.
3) We will not agree on this. You simply don't value privacy. I do, and I think you're really naive about this.
1) Why review every single wiretap? Only wiretaps that resulted in problems need to be reviewed (e.g. some of my private info was used against me, so my lawyer would be reviewing if the wiretap was legal and would file civil suit for damages against wiretapping agency if it was illegal).
2) Are you saying that agencies without surveillance capabilities would be performing no worse than they are performing now?
3) I wish you could show me real dangers of limited privacy. But so far all your examples of surveillance abuse included government agencies doing something illegal.
1) So basically no oversight at all until someone sues? I'm sure that will go well.
2) No. I'm saying that "more surveillance" does not imply "more effective". It's true that intelligence gathering is useful. It's not true that arbitrarily spying on everyone is useful.
If you do 10 targeted wiretaps and get 5 actionable leads, that's useful. If you do 10000 arbitrary wiretaps and get 5 actionable leads, it's a pointless loss of privacy and an abuse of power.
3) I wish you would show me real dangers of limited right to travel....
Putting that aside, I'm not sure why you're so dismissive of illegal abuses. That's kind of like saying you don't understand gun laws, because the only problems are with people doing something illegal. You might disagree with gun laws, but if that's the only reason why, then your opinion is rather shallow.
Abuses are a significant issue. You should be worried about abuses happening, and you should be worried about them going unpunished. We see this stuff all the time already. It's borderline delusional to think this doesn't or won't happen with wiretaps.
Beyond that, privacy is in many ways protected for the same reasons as speech. If you can speak against a government, you can fight it (at least in theory). Likewise, private communication can be necessary to effectively fight the government. Want to stage a surprise protest? You'll probably be more effective if you aren't being listened to by the police. Or if speaking publicly is dangerous (because the government is restricting speech or because fellow citizens find your views unpalatable) privacy will allow you to speak at least to a select audience.
For one more reason, when you have the NSA mining everyone's communications for keywords, do you think there are no false alarms? Do you think that wiretaps always result in only "bad guys" getting caught? There are always going to be false positives. If 1% of wiretaps result in false positives (I'd wager the number is quite a bit higher), how many people get unjustly arrested, detained, or otherwise hassled? If only 10 people get wiretapped, possibly none. If 10000 people get wiretapped, then 100 will be unjustly interrogated.
Honestly, if you can't think of any reasons why privacy is important, then you're not trying very hard. You could probably plug "why is privacy important" into any search engine and get a lot more reasons than the ones I listed.
1) No wasting effort on oversight until somebody complain.
2) 10000 wiretaps are likely to generate some leaks and complaints, and dealing with these complaints costs effort and money. So smarter agencies would avoid pointless wiretaps or would shred wiretaps soon after it's clear that they don't produce anything useful.
Dumber agencies would be dissolved.
3) I personally don't suffer much from limited right to travel. Especially now, when Internet communications are so efficient.
But I know that for many businesses and political organizations travel is important. Limited travel makes such organizations less efficient.
That said, limited travel is also not the top issue unlike freedom of speech and freedom from false arrests.
4) Now, to the core of your lapse in judgement:
It's a serious mistake to assume that percent of false positives does not depend on amount of surveillance.
With zero surveillance, percent of false positive arrests is indistinguishable from percent of innocent citizens in the society (that is ~99%).
Massive and effective surveillance allows to move that percent of false positives down to almost zero.
The constant here is the number of arrests (e.g. 100), and not percent of false positives as you claim. So if percent of false positives declines, then number of false arrests declines too.
Regarding your suggestion to use privacy as a tool to cripple government - that does not make much sense, because if you want to cripple government, just don't give it money and it will weaken to the level of your desire.
However the consequence here is that crippled government cannot properly deliver what it was designed to deliver (e.g. law enforcement).
5) Searching for "why is privacy important" shows that major concerns about privacy are not really related to government.
1) This means no oversight, which means that abuse is unbounded. Your idea would result in an eventual scandal when one detected abuse resulted in thousands more coming to light. Really, what you're saying is that wiretaps should be unlimited, because that's what a lack of oversight implies.
2) You live in a fantasy world. Sure, in a perfect world, agencies would be smart, but in a perfect world we wouldn't be debating which rights are most important, because a perfect government wouldnt be taking them away.
In our real world, 1000 wiretaps probably mean 2000 or more weeks of wasted government employee time.
3) Ugh. Let's try again. Why is freedom of speech so important? What can you realistically say that restricted speech does to you?
4) This is just dumb. Your argument here is that everyone is presumed guilty until a wiretap proves otherwise. That's not how our legal system works.
As for your "just don't give them money", why don't you try that and let me know how it goes.
5) You can't be serious. How are concerns about governmental privacy invasions not about the government?
1) You are now saying that if government does not constantly watching you then your potential abuse is unbounded.
Isn't it ironic?
2) It does not make sense to count number of agencies wiretaps in order to save budget.
In order to save budget you just give less money to the agencies that do not deliver.
3) Freedom of speech is important, because without such freedom society tends to make wrong decisions (such as supporting abusive totalitarian governments).
4) I'd suggest you to think about how email spam detection works and what improves detection ratio.
Dragging "innocent until proven guilty" principle into such detection system is incorrect, because decision if person is innocent or guilty is made after initial arrest, not before.
5) Most privacy concerns are about Facebook etc., not about government.
BTW, I wasn't able to find a good answer to the question "why privacy is important". Were you able to?
I think that you grossly overestimate both journalism and government, where it regards their respective ethics.
Mainstream journalists, the ones most likely to have access to government officials and processes, are also the ones most co-opted by that system. It is all about access, and the ones who rock the boat too much risk losing it.
As for government, there is a reason why surveillance has always featured prominently in dystopian novels: it is understood by those who have studied the way governments work that they will almost always abuse their power. The power to put a population under surveillance is a kind of control, proportional to the amount it is being done; people understand that when a government is watching them, it is also monitoring potential dissidents and related opinions, organizing, etc.
In short, I'm surprised that anyone would be so willing to trust any government with complete and unhindered powers of surveillance. I wouldn't trust a single non-government entity with that, as it happens.
You said that government monitoring would make you safer, and that privacy was a barrier to the free flow of information. If you don't favour unhindered powers of surveillance, where are you drawing the line, and why should a line be drawn?
Government monitoring might make me safer (if done right).
I would prefer to see a pitch from a government agency with the clear promise of delivery something tangible (lowering agency spending, lowering fraud, improving safety, lowering the rate of false arrests) in exchange for more surveillance.
Then evaluate the pitch and decide.
Then evaluate agency performance in new environment, and decide whether to keep surveillance power (if it was worth it) or take it back (if resulting abuse did not worth the positive outcome) or even dissolving the agency (if it was pure lie).
That can be done incrementally, until increasing surveillance stops producing worthwhile benefits.
