> a welcome change
Can someone explain why it's good that your official law infrastructure has no access to Google when in need?
Is this some kind of bizzaro-extermist-libertarianism "government is evil" from America again?
Can someone explain why it's good that your official law infrastructure has no access to Google when in need?
Is this some kind of bizzaro-extermist-libertarianism "government is evil" from America again?
There’s a balance between individuals rights to privacy and what makes law enforcement easier.
One argument against broad surveillance measures like this one is that surveillance infrastructure is easy to implement and hard to get rid of again. You might be fine with the laws that are enforced with it today, but you might not be with what it’s used for in the future.
A cost to catch a criminal should be a manual and expensive work from an agent and thus provide no ability to mass abuse human rights on scale. Only on actual criminals when needed.
The problem is that we're expending huge amounts of engineering power to avoid the issue when we could instead be using it to provide a privacy-first option that still safely enables law enforcement efforts to track down violent people whilst not enabling this hypothetical power-inbalance of government over individuals.
Let's be honest though, it's a hypothetical boogeyman. The real problem is that we all secretly know that we don't live in a rainbow world where we all agree on what is "right". We can't even agree on supposedly simple concepts like protecting children's bodily autonomy and safety, so who's to say we will ever be able to agree on any other political issue which arguably pales in comparison.
But I don’t think it’s an inherent tradeoff? In theory, anyway, the police work for us. They’re spending taxpayer money. It’s expensive. If there’s a way of making them more efficient then we should want them to use it. Maybe there are ways?
This doesn’t mean skimping on necessary safeguards, but that doesn’t mean we need to put up unnecessary obstacles about knowing where to look. We should still want them to win at finding criminals and we don’t want “game balance” because it’s not a game.
Catching the bad guys and not prosecuting the wrong people both involve having more accurate information. Bad information means more mistakes.
It doesn’t mean just trusting them. Defense attorneys, judges, and juries benefit from better information, too.
Are you there yet? OK. Now, the manifesto of the candidacies in the upcoming elections is proposing that the location history data of every citizen in your country should be stored in a database, just in case law enforcement needs to know the exact location of any individual at any time to be able to do their investigations. Suppose that their plan to implement it is technologically feasible and requires no additional effort from the citizens.
Would this make you more or less likely to vote for them?
My bank knows everywhere I go (if I spend money). The main mobile phone companies know everywhere I go (in real time, and who with [if they have a phone]). Shops and supermarkets track you around the building by Bluetooth, et cetera.
So, what's the problem if the police get access to this data to solve heinous crimes. I'm not talking the RIP Act (UK, regulatory investigation powers) - which lets a ridiculously broad swathe of people see, eg your internet history - but major crimes ... why not?
To answer your question, as long as the parties had a sound moral basis, supported individual rights, then it wouldn't alter my voting intention. I guess I'm happy to limit the liberty to commit serious crimes.
Why is there a 49% of people with widely different ideas about what's to be done and what's good than the rest 51% of them? What kind of fucked up society would that be?
Democracy pressuposses a shared base consensus about reality and what's good, and then arguing about the specifics and the approaches.
Elect trustworthy people first.
If you don't start there we're all screwed... but a large number seem to elect 'people who'd sell their grandma to make a nickel'.
No, it just shows that you can repress even with less ability to track people (a fact nobody doubted. The Romans could repress people too and they didn't have mass surveillance).
It, however, absolutely doesn't refute the point that with more ability to track people you can repress more, more effectively, and in novel ways.
>Elect trustworthy people first.
Popular pressure (and even ocassional popular revolt), separation of powers, and various established checks and balances are there precisely so you don't have to depend on electing trustworthy people.
Of course if we could somehow magically only be electing trustworthy people, we wouldn't need to have this discussion (or have these problems).
If you don't want fascists then vote/act against that. You can't avoid fascists by making it harder to catch criminals for non-fascists. Then you get "well at least the fascists keep crime rates down".
Maybe it's easier to just not give them the power in the first place?
8 to 9 months of undetected access. Not hours. Not minutes. Months.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_gov...
This seems an entirely different argument - the whole point of using movement data is to increase accountability. Why, excepting being immoral, wouldn't those supporting it agree to higher levels of accountability?
No, plain old respect of privacy against state surveillance.
The "official law infrastructure" also doesn't have other powers that Gestapo, GPU and Stazi used to have. Perhaps they should get them too?