Is there anywhere where you aren’t being watched now?
if you start from a place without reception, doubly so.
This is only the legal framework, I doubt they can surveil your traffic without getting physical access to your devices.
The issue comes in when the justice system is not providing correct oversight for this capability. That is wrong and should be vigorously opposed. The capabilities themselves I have no problem with.
Is it? Any government could make $thing illegal tomorrow. Anyone associated with $thing could then be watched and imprisoned. With judicial oversight.
Some possible values from $thing taken from history: being gay, (not) being christian, being a pacifist, being poor/homeless
The above have all been persecuted in the past. Sometimes in the present. All quite legally. With judicial oversight. With political (and often popular) support.
Edit: formatting, HN doesn't seem to like lists
The fact that the majority has often historically been in the wrong doesn't mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of enforcement of the laws: Anarchy is not preferable to a well ordered peaceful society.
This capability is currently very much lacking. We (by which I broadly mean western countries in general) are seeing less and less government transparency. Trade deals are brokered in secret, surveillance bills are rushed through parliaments, terrorism and child abuse are being used as blanket excuses for pretty much everything. Journalists get less and less access. In some countries (Italy comes to mind) there are very strong ties between the government and the media.
And sure, we have some form of representative democracy, but it seems like governments in many cases don't represent their people, but rather their own interests. The people are often unaware of what their governments get up to (various atrocities in the Middle East come to mind). By the time the next election comes up, the damage is already done, with zero accountability.
Long story short: it's good for governments to be able to enforce laws that benefit (all? most?) people, but the people need to be able to stick it to the government if need be. And with all this government surveillance, that's become virtually impossible.
Okay, but if a government wasn’t legally allowed to surveil you, they could change the law tomorrow so that they could legally surveil you. I’m not sure what this mode of argument really shows.
I’m playing devil’s advocate, and am interested in a stance arrived at reasonably.
Warranted, targeted surveillance is less bad than surveilling everyone to see if they are committing crimes, which less bad than recording what everyone did so they can be charged with crimes retroactively, which is less bad than charging people for crimes they're only predicted to commit.
Sure. Wire-tapping has been a thing almost as long as phones themselves. With a warrant, it is best that the police should be able to surveil your phone calls.
> Ring camera
With a warrant? Absolutely.
Besides which, the state has done just fine without such invasive measures before. Even with perfect oversight, the goals themselves can still be horribly corrupt, and no one should consider it "correct" to go about enforcing clearly immoral laws.
I did not confuse anything. You may be confused about what I mean, and if so, I'm sorry for any unclear communication on my part that led to that state of affairs. Feel free to ask for clarification of my position if you're curious.
> Besides which, the state has done just fine without such invasive measures before.
That is not obviously true to me. For most of the period of time during which the people have had the capability to communicate remotely, the state has also had the capability to surveil that communication when warranted. And it seems plausible to me that the lack of that capability before permitted much criminality that since has been prevented.