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I don't fully understand this line of thinking. To me, it's like saying "The belief that seat belts save lives might come as a surprise to these people who die
by skwirl 11y ago
I don't fully understand this line of thinking. To me, it's like saying "The belief that seat belts save lives might come as a surprise to these people who died in automobile accidents while wearing seat belts."
It may indeed be that this kind of signals intelligence isn't actually helpful, but I don't think this is a very good argument either way. If there was a massive disruption of planned terrorist attacks, it is not useless just because there wasn't a complete elimination of terrorist attacks.
- gist 11y agoExactly. Same reason you have locks on your doors even though they are easy to defeat. Tech types want to believe that the government is always overreaching and everything is a slippery slope to some other loss of freedom. Mixed in with a bit of overcooked paranoia thinking the government has enough time and energy to track down everyone and whatever laws they are breaking by reading their emails.
- c22 11y agoIf they actually did have enough time to enforce all broken laws by reading our emails then their unreasonable effectiveness may warrant the intrusion. If these capabilities only are able to thwart a small percent of lawless plots then perhaps the cost to our personal privacy and security is too high to justify.
- dsmithatx 11y agoBad analogy. The sites I help run are often receiving 10k attacks per minute with fuzzers and known exploits. The internet provides anonymity unlike some guy standing at your front door. I have yet to have an army of bad guys trying to pick my lock 10k time per minute on my house. Backdoors into things are economy is based on SSL etc. are just plain irresponsible.