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Comment by jsaxton86 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you understand why people approve of what the NSA is doing, which is why that's usually going to be an ineffective argument. The NSA promises a safer country, and all we have to is let them do a little bit of surveillance behind the scenes. We won't even notice -- it's not intrusive in the same way that a cavity search is. An NSA supporter once asked me if I would have given up the metadata on my phone if it would have prevented 9/11 and saved ~3000 lives. I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed on HN repeatedly, but I think it's still a fair question.

The real issue here is the power imbalance combined with the lack of oversight and accountability. When I talk to NSA supporters, that's what I try to emphasize.

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> An NSA supporter once asked me if I would have given up the metadata on my phone if it would have prevented 9/11 and saved ~3000 lives. I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed on HN repeatedly, but I think it's still a fair question.

Did someone seriously say that to you? Did you rebut with "would you give $1 to end poverty globally?"

To play devil's advocate, if everyone in the U.S. gave $1 to a fund to help the world's poor, that'd be $314 million in aid. Nothing to scoff at, even though it wouldn't end global poverty.

But in any case, I'm not sure if your example is analogous, because $1 from a person is incrementally helpful, whereas having that person's phone data is almost certainly not. This brings me back to the grandparent poster's anecdote -- I don't think that the NSA would have been able to stop 9/11 just by sorting through everyone's texting and phone calls. It just seems infeasible to really deal with all of that information unless the attackers were very obvious through their conversations -- correct me if I'm wrong.

The real issue is close to this. The real issue is that when the organization is empowered it's up to an individual to say "no" to improper surveillance. That's what's wrong with the "well there are good people behind it and we are all on the same team" argument. When it becomes your job to prevent an attack, and you have the authority to spy more than you think is morally correct, do you spy anyway? Or are you willing to let 3000 people die, and face the music of the world knowing that you could have prevented it but chose not to for altruistic reasons.

That's why the laws must change: to protect the people who want to do the right thing.

This argument is not a fair question. It is a straw man. The debate has never been about the validity of seizing the metadata on one phone with reasonable suspicion. It is about warrantless wholesale surveillance of hundreds of millions of innocent people, who are being forced to give up essential freedoms on the remote, off-hand chance that, if the stars align a certain way, "the authorities" may stop a hypothetical criminal act. It is about a trade-off where the costs to everyone are exceedingly high and the benefits to anyone are exceedingly low.

> if the stars align a certain way, "the authorities" may stop a hypothetical criminal act.

But that's not the way it is perceived in the general populace. All the relevant authorities - police, government, NSA/CIA/TSA/... - tell you that this surveillance is important and continues to save lives. And they should know, right?, because they have the classified facts.

This narrative is also supported by our modern crime shows like NCIS where dangerous and resourceful terrorists threaten to kill thousands of people every few weeks and the heroes are kept from doing their work by petty bureaucratic restrictions like search warrants. Oh, and of course they save the world in the end, because they are awesome. In the back of their heads viewers know this is hyperbole. But it nonetheless changes the images that come to mind when people think about fighting terrorism.

We need to remind ourselves of the other side of the discussion at every step, because it doesn't help if we live in our little bubble of consent and do not hone our arguments against the views of those that we need to convince.

They had more than they needed to know to prevent 9/11. They didn't connect the dots. How would one more dot have helped?

It's a hypothetical

but the dots they had came from somewhere, right? And those were collected by some release of privacy.

The inverted argument is that, if a known criminal gets sent a letter through the mail, should the government be allowed to open it? Or is privacy that absolute?

The fact that both extremes (this and the postcard argument) seem a bit silly show that there's some sacrifice in privacy to be made.

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