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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

There definitely is a tradeoff between civil liberties and security. Each action of the police, warranted or not, is an invasion of privacy (civil liberty) while still being aimed at solving a (planned or alleged) crime (security). A state monopoly on firearms is another example.

The problem with the argument that DIRNSA and similar circle make is that the current invasion of civil liberties brings negligible or no improvement of security. They're exaggerating the security gains and downplay the erosion of rights. That's the dishonesty in the current debate.

I think Damon is very well on the mark here - a decision to give up civil liberties for security should not be made by the government/powers to be but rather by a well informed public. There's a major problem with that approach though: How do we educate the public in such a way, that they can make well-informed choices. That's a pretty tough nut to crack.

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Maybe in your mind. Maybe you want to think that these innocuous debates on the internet means something.

Don't be fooled by empty words by either politicians or pundits on tv or the net. Watch what the government does - at federal, state and local, the security budget keeps slowly going up. Never coming down. The supreme court rulings slowly move in one way, never another. The number of laws slowly keep going up, never coming down.

But since you are allowed to debate it to death, which none of the decision makers take note of, there is this illusion of debate.

Damon is talking a good game, but it's still within the parameters of the talking points that the pols and talking heads put out on tv.

When the budgets for security go down, When the number of prisoners in jail go down, when the number of laws go down, when the number of people working for police, fbi, cia, nsa, military go down, when the number of supreme court decisions go left, then let's talk about civil liberties.

Till then it's nothing more than an empty, peurile phrase.

See, all I'm trying to point out is that there's a flaw in your argument that can easily be exploited to undermine your line of reasoning. I'm all on your side and agree with your assertion, but the argument cannot be "There is no balance between security and liberty" since the most secure state would be where every one of us is locked in a high security cell. No more murders, no theft, no rape, no crime, perfect security. What a beautiful world.

The right question to ask is "How should the world we want to live in look like?" and I'm certain that most people would prefer to security budgets to go down, to see the TSA disappear, see elemental rights reinstated. It's a hard argument to make since people cling to security, but you can't substitute it by denying that security and liberty are at least partially on a trade-off scale.

i think you're missing the point. the benefit to 'security' as a result of the NSA surveillance is without evidence. as a result, comparisons of an imaginary 'trade off' between security and privacy are premature. we don't know the benefit to security, so how can we possibly make an informed decision about trading some of our privacy away for it?

also, even your hypothetical example falls pretty flat on its face. your world of everyone in a cell might actually have more theft, rape, crime etc. who is guarding the cells? who is doing the feeding? would they exchange favours for additional food?

the point is that a 'trade-off' is superfluous until you have evidence that it's even beneficial.

You're repeating my argument from the GP post, so I'll summarise it again: Security and Liberty are to a significant extend tradeoffs. [1] However, currently we're so far out on the side of security that the security gains of the measures are nil. The current measures just have costs in liberty while providing no security benefit.

> also, even your hypothetical example falls pretty flat on its face. your world of everyone in a cell might actually have more theft, rape, crime etc. who is guarding the cells? who is doing the feeding? would they exchange favours for additional food?

Robots ;)

[1] The relationship is somewhat more complicated, for example at least a certain extend of security is required for liberty and there's more factors in play, but that's a different case to make.

Whatever the relationship is between security and liberty is not known at this time. Any talk of 'sacrificing privacy for security' is complete bullshit because there is no data on the effectiveness of such measures. The trade off is not known, therefore you can't attach an imaginary relationship between the two.

> The current measures just have costs in liberty while providing no security benefit.

I think we can just both agree on this point and leave it here.

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