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?
1) That's not what I said at all. For someone who likes to throw the term "straw man" at others, you certainly seem to enjoy constructing them.
First, I did not say constant. There's a lot of ground between no oversight (as you paropose) and constant oversight (which you pretend is the only alternative).
Second, I was talking about oversight of government wiretaps, not oversight of citizens' lives. There's a rather significant different between eavesdropping and making sure that no one is eavesdropping.
Third, the government does provide oversight for mine and everyone else's actions, and they do it even without wiretaps. They call it police work. The police provide oversight so that abuses are not unbounded. When you say that there should be no oversight for wiretapping until someone complains, the civilian parallel is that police should take no actions except in the face of reported crime. AKA, no crime prevention.
Fifth, no, it's not ironic.
2) It's not an either-or situation. This is like saying that if you run a company, you shouldn't attempt to improve your divisions directly. Sure, if you've got a consistently-underperforming division, the right thing might be to let it go entirely. But that doesn't mean that acceptably-performing or even exceptionally-performing divisions cannot perform better. If a division is wasting money on stupid things, you can and should simply say "stop doing that". Firing everyone is not a net gain most of the time. (Especially in a world where every division is doing stupid things. Firing every government agency that wastes money is the same as disbanding the government.)
3) Wait, am I to understand that in your fantasy world where the government never abuses private information, they do restrict speech? The government that never blackmails because it's "illegal" will forbid speech, which is apparently not "illegal"?
How do you seriously reconcile these views? How to you simultaneously believe in a government that will always do the right thing with respect to privacy and also a government that will restrict speech and enforce a totalitarian state?
4) If you want to compare email spam mitigation to wiretapping, then maybe you should realize that without spam filtering, false positives do not happen. Mail is not "presumed spam" in the case where no spam filtering takes place. On the other hand, with spam filtering, false positives are inevitable. And that's okay, so long as 1) the rate of false positives is sufficiently low, and 2) it's emails going in the spam folder and not humans going to jail.
5) You haven't tried looking very hard if the only privacy issues you can find are with Facebook. More to the point, if you dig in even a little bit, you'll see that many of the privacy concerns with Facebook are based on the fact that after Facebook collects everything possible about your personal life, the government can subpoena that info.
And yes, I found many answers, some of which I already listed. If you land on the no-fly list because of something the government heard you say, that's an important problem. If a government agent blackmails you because of something they intercepted about you, that's an important problem. If you can't speak publicly against the government out of fear that they will leak sensitive information about you, that's an important problem.
Stop pretending that privacy is not important. Or at least prove that you believe what you claim by publicly posting your full name, address, date of birth, employer, social security number, mother's maiden name, credit and debit card numbers with expiration dates and security codes, driver's license number, bank account numbers (with routing info, please), online account usernames and passwords, your present and past sexual partners, any diseases you or your immediate family have, and the last 5 years of tax returns. Absent that, I'm afraid your claim that privacy is not important is rather an obvious sham.
1) To get the irony, please try to explain why "surveillance" is bad, but "oversight" is good.
2) I'm not saying under-performing agencies should be fully dissolved. They should be partially dissolved, starting from the head of the agency.
At the same time it does not usually make sense to issue legislation which would regulate what government agencies can and cannot spend budget on.
3) I don't understand what you are asking me here.
If it's legal to suppress freedom of speech, government would do it on regular basis and that would make society less efficient and more likely to end up with authoritarian government.
4) I just detected another important mistake you are making.
It looks like you think that freedom of an individual has an infinite value.
That's a mistake.
Freedom of an individual is very important, but not infinitely important. It's ok to make occasional rare random mistakes if it significantly improves quality of huge number of people.
Attempt to protect freedom of everyone with 100% certainty is doomed to failure, and the end result is much worse than balanced approach.
5) Let me reiterate: privacy is not important only in comparison with other more important issues, such as freedom of speech, freedom from false arrests, and safety.
Of course privacy has value and deserves some protection.
But it is already protected well enough and is not a major concern at this moment.
1) Surveillance is not uniformly bad. It's bad when it turns into an baseless invasion of privacy (such as with warrantless wiretaps). It's bad because of the privacy invasion (and all the negatives that come with that). Oversight of wiretapping is not bad, because it is not an invasion of privacy unless you believe that warrantless wiretapping is a private matter. Such oversight enhances privacy.
2) You've said that they should stop funding such agencies. That's not a partial dissolution. Also, removing the head of an agency still has the same issue. It's rarely the best action. Agencies with constantly-shifting heads are less effective due to constant priority and strategy changes.
And this isn't just an issue of budget. It's not uncommon to forbid agencies from doing illegal things or things outside their jurisdiction.
3) If it's legal to suppress privacy, the government would do it on a regular basis and this would make society less efficient and more likely to end up with authoritarian government.
The government owning everyone's secrets gives them additional power and control. It has many potential abuses.
I'm trying to get you to actually think about what you're saying. The arguments you have about freedom of speech largely apply to privacy. By the arguments you've applied to wiretapping, we don't need oversight into freedom of speech abuses. Why pass strict laws protecting speech? Why worry about the "gray area" abuses? Why not allow the government to engage in widespread speech suppression if it makes them more effective?
Why does speech deserve such attention, except that you happen to believe that it's important for society (which I happen to agree with, but which you've provided no meaningful support for)?
4) A 1% false positive rate might be acceptable for spam, where the loss is simply an email, and the fix is simply to scan the spam folder. A 1% false positive is not an acceptable rate for wiretap-driven arrests, because these are humans, and the fix is a long and complex legal process.
5) Speech is not important only in comparison to more important issues, such as freedom from false arrest. Of course speech has some value and deserves some protection. But it is already protected well enough and not a major concern at this moment.
We're apparently not going to agree on whether privacy is important. What I find more bizarre is that you swing back and forth between privacy being important and not. You've made numerous statements in support of unfettered wiretaps. I feel like you actually do not believe what you're saying, or that perhaps you haven't thought it through very well.
By the arguments you've applied to wiretapping, we don't need oversight into freedom of speech abuses.
That's correct: it's the same as with oversight. There is no need to monitor government about freedom of speech abuses, because such abuses are obvious. If some government agency limits my freedom of speech - I complain and then it's time to act. There is not much to do before anyone complains.
A 1% false positive is not an acceptable rate for wiretap-driven arrests
That's why surveillance might be helpful - it helps to lower ratio of false positive accusations.
But it is already protected well enough and not a major concern at this moment.
I agree that freedom of speech in the US protected well enough to prevent the US from turning into totalitarian state.
So there is no major problem here.
Still the speech is somewhat limited and such restrictions needlessly decrease the efficiency of our society. Couple of examples:
- "Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment" court rulings. That limits availability of quality publications on the topic.
- Persecution of Wikileaks. That keeps government opaque and hides terrible inefficiencies (such as waste of lives and resources in Iraq and Afghanistan).
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.