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> I agree with GP that it takes a wacky moral compass to willingly engage in mass surveillance but feel strongly enough about weapons to quit over them. It's either very naive, hypocritical, or both.

I don't see why it's inconsistent. They don't want to be complicit in physical violence and death, but surveillance leads to neither.

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Surveillance does lead to that if it's how we identify where someone is located or leads to actionable intelligence which can then be used as justification for dropping a missile from the sky.

Name a single industry or product that can't be a starting point of a chain that ends in a missible dropping from the sky.

1. Being curt with someone can lead to them going home and beating their spouse to vent their frustrations. Should we then never be curt because it might lead to domestic abuse? How improbable does the outcome need to be before this kind of argument is considered invalid?

2. Dragnet surveillance alone cannot lead to actionable intelligence, it can only be used to confirm other sources of intelligence. The false positive rate is simply too high. Would they still drop that bomb without that surveillance? In most cases, probably.

3. Weapons have only one purpose: to physically harm. Surveillance can have many legitimate purposes. They simply aren't directly comparable.

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