Privacy Protects Bothersome People (2013)
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
As the newest information, we see that we are not only spied on, but there are also stealth techniques to mute bothersome people. It can go thus far, that you will become jailed for something you did not do.
This way, anybody that becomes bothersome to mighty people (and I don't speak about any president here) can become a target. People that are against atomic plants or against chemical fertilizers, or against ... you name it.
This thing can become worse to the democratic nations than killing random people by drones.
My conclusion is that even democracy demands some privacy breach. Privacy may be protecting individual rights but it's not a prerequisite for democracy.
Your other logical errors, I will not comment.
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%." — Thomas Jefferson
"Democracy is the road to socialism." — Karl Marx (father of communism)
"We can keep a Republic, or we will eventually end up with an Oligarchy - a tyranny of the elite." — Benjamin Franklin
"We are a Republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy." — Alexander Hamilton
Your best quote, because it shows, where we are today.
I am fully aware, that when we talk democracy in such forums as here, we all have our own artificial picture of democracy in mind, that is not the same as democracy in its genuine sense.
Good speech about it: Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g
They do!
Also: Who on earth says, that there is even one good functioning democracy at all?
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Churchill
However, "the best we've got right now" is just a local maxima.
It could be equally true that democracies die from insufficient privacy, but it just takes more than a decade or so of massive invasive snooping. In particular, the surveillance apparatus may not yet have been sufficiently corrupted to be used as a source of political power.
I should note that the US had a previous wave of improper snooping [1] which was seen as a threat to democracy and fought off. It provided a lot of the legal restrictions that prevented massive surveillance up until 9/11 got Washington's undies in a bunch.
And, to be fair, he did completely follow through on his pre-election promises. He might be the only democratically elected leader to not waver from the plan he laid out before he got elected to power.
That still doesn't mean it was a good idea.
Edit: I don't mean "the sheeple will elect whoever has better PR"; I mean that under specific social and economic conditions electing Hitler starts to seem like a good idea to normal, rational individuals. Same as with taking away privacy.
He didn't waver from the plan, that's true, but the thing is, no significant number of people ever voted for the plan either.
The problem here is that there's no such thing as a "fundamental right". All we have is government and our legal framework; nothing about what we can or can't do exists outside of that[1]. Philosophers have looked at this many times[2], and none have managed to come up with a satisfactory definition of 'rights' that works. Consequently all we have to work with when it comes to saying what we can do, what we have the 'right' to do, and perhaps more importantly what the government can do, is the law. Really, the problem is that governments are tasked with limiting their own power over us; surrendering power is something that very few people are good at.
[1] There's morals and ethics, but that's what you should do rather than what you can do.
[2] If you're interested, I highly recommend reading about Jeremy Bentham who wrote about the topic more than 200 years ago: http://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/#SH5b
It is just obvious to me, that living together (and that is basically what laws, governments etc. are all about) is only possible and can last, when some fundamentals are respected. One of them is privacy (this becomes more and more obvious in the digital age).
While people believe that they have privacy by virtue of something outside of the law and government, they're never actually going to have privacy.
The problem is, that from time to time, people have to stand up for their rights -- either by voting or by other means -- to change the behavior of governments.
What did Benjamin Franklin write: "Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
That is not only an inheritance for governments but also for all societies that want to be free. Freedom is not something to be inherited or some "virtue" you have by be born in the right country, but something that must be fought for in daily practice ... by everybody. Else, we will loose it. And we in the western countries are at the verge.
Ethics is also in the realm of what one can do. Civil disobedience is critical in rejecting tyranny. First comes mental freedom. Then comes knowledge. Then comes action. This is how systems are destroyed, changed, and built anew. It's detrimental to the human mind to stay mentally incapacitated by a particular system's arbitrary framework of laws at a point in time. The extent of a person's thought need not be limited and shall always supersede everything external (e.g. governments).
Fundamental rights don't exist in a tangible sense. I'd agree. However, they're healthy intellectual notions that exist. They compel people to dismantle or change current societal models in ways that demand going beyond the suppression of a "legal" realm.
Are there holes? Sure. But to say that none have come up with a satisfactory definition is subjective, and many would strongly disagree.
Sometimes ideas can take years to develop and make their way into a culture. If a person is attacked the moment he wants to plant the seed of an idea, either by the status quo-loving crowd or his or her own government, then progress will happen much more slowly.
Are you saying that anonymity is also a fundamental right?
If you think governments grant rights, no.
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.
See http://mathbabe.org/2014/02/26/what-privacy-advocates-get-wr...
Based on their whim, your privacy can be completely invaded, and you can be thrown in jail. This happens ALL the time.
What is the NSA going to do? Bring you ("meddlesome kids") into court based non-admissable evidence from PRISM? Never heard of it happening once. Please cite a case if you disagree.
And bothersome people working way outside the law like Deepthroat, LulzSec, etc. already do take enormous steps to preserve their anonymity in communications. NSA changes nothing for me.
Bill gets shot in the head because the cop doesn't like him.
The end.
You greatly overestimate how complicated corruption has to be.
Bad cops shoot people for no reason all the time, relatively speaking, so this story has plenty of precedence, unlike the above story, which is pure conjecture.
Someone killing someone they don't like, purely because they do not like them, and then getting away with it because they hold a position of influence or power of course happens, and is nothing to do really with whether or not anyone involved is a cop. That situation has been playing out a lot longer than there have been cops in existence and also has very little to do with the current discussion.
edit -
also, in the simple version of your story, where 'a cop shoots someone they don't like, the end', the story is actually too simple to be about corruption.
You need the rest of the story to know if that particular cop is corrupt. As it stands it is just plain murder.
Now if the cop doesn't then hand themselves in and starts planning on how to get away with the killing, then you are into corruption, but also the story gets more convoluted.
Both stories are about things that occur in the real world, however one is about the subject of privacy and surveillance and one isn't, so given the thread I think the one on topic is possibly more constructive.
Yet there are no examples of the story being told in the above comments. It's literally fiction, and it hurts the conversation.
I assume that cops while having great leeway in how they frame their story, still have to explain such incidents and have a risk to their career if they don't do a good job of it.
So at the very least the cop has to hate Bill enough to go through the pain of explaining away Bill's death and dealing with any administrative consequences.
Forget the state; possession of marijuana is a federal crime rendering the possessor eligible for jail time in all 50 states, including the states where it is regarded by the general public as "legal".
This strikes me as an incredibly dangerous development that most seem to ignore. Selective enforcement of laws broken by everyone, all the time, is just as terrifying as the loss of privacy.
The line I'm trying to draw is between Intelligence/Communications-intercepts Vs. Enforcement.
All the police needed to do in the above case is go on FB, no spycraft needed. It's always a question, like with the IRS, of what they can do to you.
I don't understand this logic at all.
The federally-run exchanges, euphemistically called “new health insurance marketplaces,” are accompanied by collection of a wide variety of personal data, which can now be legally shared numerous faceless government agencies — agencies which previously had to snoop, steal, or spy to get it. No longer will any of our intimate medical details be reasonably considered either private or protected.
To facilitate this forfeiture of individual privacy, the Department of Health and Human Services has created a massive, comprehensive database to record and store Americans’ personal information called the Federal Data Services Hub. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that the purpose of the Data Hub is to provide “electronic, near real-time access to federal data” and “access to state and third party data sources needed to verify consumer-eligibility information.” No longer will any of our intimate medical details be reasonably considered either private or protected.
I think, this road taken, by the country, that once was the big model for many countries like the one I live in, is a really bad omen for freedom in the whole world.
Being in Germany, you are already in fully socialized medicine, so any battle for privacy of health records is already lost.
What is a little stranger to me are those on hacker news that want the government to gain complete control over their personal autonomy with a "basic income." While they insist that the income would be unconditional, it would be from a government which currently revokes many rights -- voting, free speech, and even life from citizens and non-citizens alike.
An obvious way to level the field is privacy, so that nobody has access to anybody else's information; another way would be transparency, so it's difficult for the power to hide their abuse of power.
And if the startup I've founded with a friend and been working on for two years is any proof of concept of something like that working (yes we are revenue generating as of a month ago, and growing with plenty of things in the pipeline), I beg to differ. We have managed to get people who never would have heard of/or read Hacker News to care (because we made it relevant to their everyday lives in ways they can see the manifestation of their collective behaviors these past decades) about mass surveillance/data collection and acknowledge that as a society if we have collectively let things get to this point, to think that a roll back of the technical capabilities of governments/corporations/other organizations through political pandering will placate, is naive at best. Here's a post I made before the Snowden leaks[0]. I think about these things everyday, and work on ways to show that the emperor of mass surveillance is naked for everyone to see if they remove their hands from their eyes and plugs from their ears because perhaps at the end of the day, we will only see ourselves in front of the mirror reflecting upon our individual and collective actions we make everyday.
[0]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/47787766458/why-so-silent
Like I said, I wholeheartedly agree that privacy is a fundamental right. But, I would like to see more people acknowledging the flip side of the argument.
Unfortunately, there's no way to independently verify this statement. Only those inside the security apparatus have any data to examine this but they have a clear incentive to make themselves look indispensable (and indeed, get more funding).
We don't know this. In any case, it's the wrong question as we have to ask ourselves what the cost really is. The gov could just implement a curfew, lock everyone up in their homes and then we'd all be 'safe'. This the fodder of many a scifi movie and it would certainly thwart the plans of 'bad guys'.
I agree that more transparency is necessary, and that we must have an intelligent debate, leading, ultimately to dismantling the current mass-surveillance apparatus. But I disagree about the "undoubtedly" part. If you'd said "maybe" I might have agreed, but there's just no evidence. There is evidence of abuses, but no evidence of successes.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140111/22360125843/nsa-go...
They claimed 52 or 53 at first, then lowered that number to 1.
Then to zero.
There is no evidence whatsoever that this dragnet surveillance has been useful in any way whatsoever in fighting terrorism.
I think you might also be seriously overestimating how many people actually want to attack the US. Terrorists have more or less become a boogeyman at this point, the chances of anyone in the west experiencing a terrorist attack are so ridiculously small.
After September 11th some Americans thought a mass termination of people in Afghanistan would be a good idea (you had to be an adult or teenager at the time, people spoke this, they certainly did not print it in the NYTimes.)
The point is, once you begin making judgements solely on outcomes, those judgements become amoral. That can be ok when its an amoral activity, like optimizing server architecture, but when the activity involves who to kill and not to kill, the decisions last forever.
1) All the public ones they have published on their website are false, made-up bullshit. You'd expect the NSA bringing forward some credible evidence of thwarting terrorist plots in light of incredibly heavy criticism, yet they can't.(the article says 13, but it was later proved that it was exactly 0.)
2) From that, we can infer that, if your assumption of people wanting to hurt the U.S. is true, only old fashioned ways of countering terrorism work e.g. human intelligence.
3)"There are people out there wanting to hurt the US" sounds rather naive fox-news-like.