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You're saying, "We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn't agree with in the past". This seems like an unfair standard to hold any

You're saying, "We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn't agree with in the past". This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to. I would be unhappy if people said "I think that karmacondon has made mistakes in the past, so he shouldn't be trusted to do his job ever again." I understand what you're saying, and I think I get where you're coming from. But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the government monitoring potentially criminal groups or building databases. That's what we pay them to do. If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.

jacquesm 11y ago
> I would be unhappy if people said "I think that karmacondon has made mistakes in the past, so he shouldn't be trusted to do his job ever again." It's not about mistakes. Mistakes are - usually - a sign that someone needed to learn. They do not as a rule include wanton intent. And if a person were to make too many mistakes then they probably should not be trusted. > I understand what you're saying, and I think I get where you're coming from. But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere. No, that's the opposite. You have beliefs that you state are so correct that they stand on their own, in spite of a bunch of historical evidence to the contrary, starting roughly at the time that we invented writing going all the way into the present. That's a pretty gullible position. > I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the government monitoring potentially criminal groups or building databases. That's what we pay them to do. If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it. Potentially criminal groupls: everybody. You're apparently one of the people where the 'fear' button has been pressed, don't let your fear get the better of you. Btw, I note that you write all these 'reasonable disagreement' things from the position of an anonymous coward which makes me think that maybe you do realize the value of your privacy after all.
- snydly 11y ago
  > Potentially criminal groupls: everybody. While this may be true, certain crimes are seen as worse than others. And, as un-PC as it may sound, certain demographics are many times more likely to commit certain crimes. Homicide: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm Also, some government monitoring can be "for your own good": Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5704a1.htm http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5704a1.htm But, maybe the CDC is different than the NSA.
  - dkersten 11y ago
    Government monitoring "for your own good" is pretty scary. We already have situations where people are attacked by the government or its agents because they did something that only harms themselves. For example [1]. Mass surveillance, if left unchecked, will eventually expand for whatever purposes the government wishes. Power is easy to incrementally grow (or in the case of the NSA, they simply ignore the laws) and very difficult to shrink again. We shouldn't think that this wouldn't be used against us sometime in the future and who can truly say that they never did anything harmless-but-illegal (take drugs? gambling? copyright infringement?) and as [1] shows, people have died for these "crimes". [1] https://www.google.ie/search?q=sal+colusi&oq=sal+colusi&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.2235j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8#q=sal+culosi https://www.google.ie/search?q=sal+colusi&oq=sal+colusi&aqs=...
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis That's one of my favorite author quotes. The greatest evil in this world is done by those who can see their own work and tell themselves that it is good.
SomeStupidPoint 11y ago
> You're saying, "We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn't agree with in the past". This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to. A better paraphrase would be "We should suspect that the US government will act in a way similar to how it has acted repeatedly over the span of decades." I think this is a perfectly fair standard, and actually am held to that standard all the time, including professionally. If I had a continual, systemic habit of flaws in my work, for instance, I would be fired. Your phrasing suggests that these are things that "just happen", instead of a pattern of decades of intentional programs with the same kinds of aims and behaviors. > But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere. I actually think you're insincere because you're minimizing and denying a pattern of sustained behavior as a few mistakes, rather than an intentional, continuing program. That insincerity can be directly seen above when you switch from "did things I didn't agree with" to "made mistakes". No one is talking about the US government making mistakes, and decades of intentional programs operated with similar strategies is hardly "making mistakes". Your entire analogy was insincere and meant to elicit an emotional response. > If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it. Will we? I'm actually very skeptical that we'll deal with it in any meaningful way, and find it much more likely that we'll surrender a great deal of control over the country to an autocratic government with a good social control program, precisely because people like you don't want to sincerely discuss the likelihood of that happening by stages.
cryoshon 11y ago
Not trusting the government because they have a perpetually anti-freedom mindset is completely fair. Are we supposed to take their every action as piecemeal and then be constantly surprised when they do the wrong thing? They don't just monitor criminals-- that's why the anti-surveillance folks are anti surveillance! They monitor everyone, and create criminals as needed, and nobody can question them for fear of ending up on the chopping block. They are currently very far out of hand, and "we the people" are doing somewhere between jack and shit because of how little the people understand the problem.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
> You're saying, "We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn't agree with in the past". This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to. I would be unhappy if people said "I think that karmacondon has made mistakes in the past, so he shouldn't be trusted to do his job ever again." Yes, you would be unhappy. But this is not about whether you are unhappy, but whether you should have control over military, police, our tax money, and thus everyone's lives. It simply is a very well established fact that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous, and that they are extremely hard to break up once you recognize they are heading in the wrong direction. Just look at what the problem is in countries where people are doing badly, both historically and right now, and why things are so extremely hard to improve once they have gone bad. Which is why we have built structures that try to prevent such concentrations of power from forming. That is essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers: To build distrust into the system. Dictatorships are the opposite of that (only one power, and no mechanism to remove the person in office). Yes, democratically elected officials certainly are unhappy when they are voted out - but that is the price we pay to prevent concentrations of power from forming. And surveillance is undermining democratic decisionmaking. Having a democracy now does not guarantee you a democracy tomorrow if you aren't careful in who and what you vote for. > If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it. Yes, "we" will. If history can teach us something, we can expect that it will take about a decade at least, with many unhappy lives, maybe millions of deaths, until foreign military gets into it to "deal with it". Sure, maybe that won't happen. But given the prospects, wouldn't it be wise to use our experience from history, to try and make predictions where things will lead, and to then try and prevent things from happening in the first place? You are aware, for example, that Hitler was democratically elected into office, and all his powers were given to him democratically? And you are aware what it took to remove him from office afterwards?

jacquesm 11y ago

> I would be unhappy if people said "I think that karmacondon has made mistakes in the past, so he shouldn't be trusted to do his job ever again." It's not about mistakes. Mistakes are - usually - a sign that someone needed to learn. They do not as a rule include wanton intent. And if a person were to make too many mistakes then they probably should not be trusted. > I understand what you're saying, and I think I get where you're coming from. But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere. No, that's the opposite. You have beliefs that you state are so correct that they stand on their own, in spite of a bunch of historical evidence to the contrary, starting roughly at the time that we invented writing going all the way into the present. That's a pretty gullible position. > I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the government monitoring potentially criminal groups or building databases. That's what we pay them to do. If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it. Potentially criminal groupls: everybody. You're apparently one of the people where the 'fear' button has been pressed, don't let your fear get the better of you. Btw, I note that you write all these 'reasonable disagreement' things from the position of an anonymous coward which makes me think that maybe you do realize the value of your privacy after all.

snydly 11y ago
> Potentially criminal groupls: everybody. While this may be true, certain crimes are seen as worse than others. And, as un-PC as it may sound, certain demographics are many times more likely to commit certain crimes. Homicide: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm Also, some government monitoring can be "for your own good": Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5704a1.htm http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5704a1.htm But, maybe the CDC is different than the NSA.
- dkersten 11y ago
  Government monitoring "for your own good" is pretty scary. We already have situations where people are attacked by the government or its agents because they did something that only harms themselves. For example [1]. Mass surveillance, if left unchecked, will eventually expand for whatever purposes the government wishes. Power is easy to incrementally grow (or in the case of the NSA, they simply ignore the laws) and very difficult to shrink again. We shouldn't think that this wouldn't be used against us sometime in the future and who can truly say that they never did anything harmless-but-illegal (take drugs? gambling? copyright infringement?) and as [1] shows, people have died for these "crimes". [1] https://www.google.ie/search?q=sal+colusi&oq=sal+colusi&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.2235j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8#q=sal+culosi https://www.google.ie/search?q=sal+colusi&oq=sal+colusi&aqs=...
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis That's one of my favorite author quotes. The greatest evil in this world is done by those who can see their own work and tell themselves that it is good.

SomeStupidPoint 11y ago

> You're saying, "We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn't agree with in the past". This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to. A better paraphrase would be "We should suspect that the US government will act in a way similar to how it has acted repeatedly over the span of decades." I think this is a perfectly fair standard, and actually am held to that standard all the time, including professionally. If I had a continual, systemic habit of flaws in my work, for instance, I would be fired. Your phrasing suggests that these are things that "just happen", instead of a pattern of decades of intentional programs with the same kinds of aims and behaviors. > But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere. I actually think you're insincere because you're minimizing and denying a pattern of sustained behavior as a few mistakes, rather than an intentional, continuing program. That insincerity can be directly seen above when you switch from "did things I didn't agree with" to "made mistakes". No one is talking about the US government making mistakes, and decades of intentional programs operated with similar strategies is hardly "making mistakes". Your entire analogy was insincere and meant to elicit an emotional response. > If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it. Will we? I'm actually very skeptical that we'll deal with it in any meaningful way, and find it much more likely that we'll surrender a great deal of control over the country to an autocratic government with a good social control program, precisely because people like you don't want to sincerely discuss the likelihood of that happening by stages.

cryoshon 11y ago

Not trusting the government because they have a perpetually anti-freedom mindset is completely fair. Are we supposed to take their every action as piecemeal and then be constantly surprised when they do the wrong thing? They don't just monitor criminals-- that's why the anti-surveillance folks are anti surveillance! They monitor everyone, and create criminals as needed, and nobody can question them for fear of ending up on the chopping block. They are currently very far out of hand, and "we the people" are doing somewhere between jack and shit because of how little the people understand the problem.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago

> You're saying, "We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn't agree with in the past". This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to. I would be unhappy if people said "I think that karmacondon has made mistakes in the past, so he shouldn't be trusted to do his job ever again." Yes, you would be unhappy. But this is not about whether you are unhappy, but whether you should have control over military, police, our tax money, and thus everyone's lives. It simply is a very well established fact that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous, and that they are extremely hard to break up once you recognize they are heading in the wrong direction. Just look at what the problem is in countries where people are doing badly, both historically and right now, and why things are so extremely hard to improve once they have gone bad. Which is why we have built structures that try to prevent such concentrations of power from forming. That is essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers: To build distrust into the system. Dictatorships are the opposite of that (only one power, and no mechanism to remove the person in office). Yes, democratically elected officials certainly are unhappy when they are voted out - but that is the price we pay to prevent concentrations of power from forming. And surveillance is undermining democratic decisionmaking. Having a democracy now does not guarantee you a democracy tomorrow if you aren't careful in who and what you vote for. > If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it. Yes, "we" will. If history can teach us something, we can expect that it will take about a decade at least, with many unhappy lives, maybe millions of deaths, until foreign military gets into it to "deal with it". Sure, maybe that won't happen. But given the prospects, wouldn't it be wise to use our experience from history, to try and make predictions where things will lead, and to then try and prevent things from happening in the first place? You are aware, for example, that Hitler was democratically elected into office, and all his powers were given to him democratically? And you are aware what it took to remove him from office afterwards?