The typical response is “What is this, Russia?” or something similar.
Privacy is really important. I will always error on the side of privacy even if that means not everyone bad is caught.
Reminds me of something my dad always told me, "I'd rather see 10 guilty people walk free, than have 1 innocent person in jail."
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Marathon Man (1976)
Sneakers perhaps.
Anyhow, I think you're missing the context of what happened in the 60's and 70's that stoked paranoia in the culture and in fiction.
1. CCTIFBI
Only because some morally-flexible activists broke into an FBI field office did they uncover COINTELPRO and quoting Chomksy "40% [of FBI work activities] were devoted to political surveillance and the like"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/fbi-office-bre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Inve...
Furthermore, in modern times, there is:
- warrantless mass surveillance (NSA)
- license plate readers (LPRs)
- cellphone tower/position tracking
- Ring and other IoT devices recording to cloud providers evidence of technical crimes. All it takes is law-enforcement getting access for something else and digging around with automated tools in data to round up bodies to prosecute. For example, a small child escaping from a bath without clothes in front of an always-recording security webcam is considered child pornography.
- No-name webcams and other IoT being hacked or manufacturing backdoored to be used for spying, malware injection, packet sniffing and who knows what else.
- As revealed by Snowden, various secret watch lists containing the names of over 2 million Americans.
Once I was in Belarus. It's a heavily authoritarian country, make no mistake. When they had protests against their rigged elections, they traced the phones of everyone who went, then brought them in for questioning and asked them what they were doing there. The president later said: "We have rigged the latest election. 93.5 per cent have voted for Lukashenko. But they say it is not a European outcome. We have made it 86 per cent."
But it does work. I was at a restaurant there. Some girls are chatting, and they walk away to go get something, and just leave their bags there unattended. Why? Because it's an authoritarian country - people aren't going to steal stuff there.
This was in the capital of one of the poorest countries in Europe, but it was still one of the safest places I've ever been.
EDIT: I don't mean to praise authoritarian countries, on the contrary. We should support human rights even if it is less efficient, because the object of governance is not to strip people of their freedoms for pennies on the dollar.
Chances are high that you could do the same in most European countries. Just like in the Soviet Union, thieves exist in Belarus. People's perception might be that they're safer, but that doesn't mean they actually are. Just like during Soviet times, people felt safer, but crime still happened. It just wasn't talked about, because it makes the state look bad.
Poor example. The anarchy that attended the collapse of the Soviet system brought about a dramatic increase in crime. And while reported petty theft was arguably a reporting problem, the dramatic rise in homicides was not.
For the record my mother-in-law lived in St Petersburg at the time. And her anecdotal reports were that crime that she and friends experienced rose dramatically.
It almost reminds me of some my parents' peers yearning for the good ole days of communism, cuz riffraffs would not dare to talk back to a cop.
edit: It is hard to argue with that kind of sentiment. It is technically right.
People have no qualms about stealing umbrellas?
I mean, if you leave something that's a strong temptation (like a big pile of cash) it'll eventually disappear.
Yeah, if you go in to one of the inner cities, your stuff will get stolen, but otherwise, generally nah.
Obviously if you put all people in jail they will be very safe there. But then you have less people working and producing more useful stuff than rotting in jail.
The best example I give of this trade off between freedom and safety is that of women in saudi arabia. They have the least amount of sexual violence in the world.
Whether or not this applies to rape is a question of debate. However in Pakistan it certainly has been interpreted to so apply. Which means that it is very hard for a woman to prove that she was raped.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudud#Requirements_for_convict... for verification.
> Obviously if you put all people in jail they will be very safe there. But then you have less people working and producing more useful stuff than rotting in jail.
Friendly reminder that the US has the highest incarceration rate of all countries.
> The best example I give of this trade off between freedom and safety is that of women in saudi arabia. They have the least amount of sexual violence in the world.
Is this according to their official statistics? How do they know they're accurate and comparable? For instance, is rape within marriage considered a crime and regularly prosecuted there?
That is a different thing.