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There are a couple different arguments that have been developed to counter the government requests/propaganda for access to our data. Here, Moxie works on one

There are a couple different arguments that have been developed to counter the government requests/propaganda for access to our data. Here, Moxie works on one I don't think has been popularized yet- To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws. That is an argument against allowing the government to have total information awareness, because that access would allow the government to enforce laws perfectly, which would make some unjust laws permanent. I believe that is the weak bit of the argument- although it's true, there is a big gap between how the government could move from information awareness to perfect enforcement. Instead, I'd take the argument in the direction that a database of the criminal behavior on every citizen would create the prefect tool for the suppression of dissent. Anyone who became politically inconvenient would have their entries combed for wrongdoing, and their life destroyed. The weakness with THAT argument is that it assumes a conspiratorial, immoral federal government. Many of us may be able to imagine that, but it's an idea at the periphery of the Overton window. Which brings me to my point. We need a reference detailing historic government abuses of data. It should focus on: How data was collected The original purpose of collection The benign intentions of the original collectors How the data moved from the collecting administration to the abusive administration It seems like there should be a wealth of historical examples. What data did the Stasi have, Mao's china, the purges of intellectuals in russia and SE Asia. I bet there are even records of Torquemada's Inquisition. I want us to make the posibility of a good administration collecting data, and then that data being captured or inherited by a bad administration, a part of the mental vocabulary of the US population. Yeah it's ambitious, but I think that is the best chance we have at fighting the Government here. And, I believe that an earnest civil servant could understand the danger, and want to limit his own power, once this was properly explained.

nothrabannosir 11y ago
Dutch municipalities had comprehensive files on every citizen, including religion. Germany invaded, Holland capitulated in 5 days, and the files proved an organizational treasure trove for rounding up jewish families and deporting them. "Also, the civil administration was advanced and offered the Nazi-German a full insight in not only the numbers of Jews, but also where they exactly lived." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Netherlands#The_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Net... It wasn't immediately obvious what, exactly, was happening to the Jewish families when Germany took over. But even if it had been, destroying all those files in 5 days would have required extraordinary coordination and determination. And that is assuming you make the decision to scorch the earth the second Germany attacks; not exactly a move which would inspire confidence. Underground resistance forces spent the following five years trying to burn down as many town halls as they could.
mojuba 11y ago
It's a very good point. Moreover, an abusive administration will almost definitely take over soon, because the scope of data the current one has will attract all kinds of "evil forces", including (but probably not limited to) powerful corporations.
542458 11y ago
You don't even have to leave the US - COINTELPRO is a great example of this. In the 50s and 60 the FBI used surveillance data of questionable legality to target a number of groups deemed "undesirable". This included trying to convince Nobel peace prize winner Martin Luther King Jr to literally kill himself via harassing anonymous letters that threatened the release of embarrassing personal details. Here's a key quote from the letter: "No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. . . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record." Nice, eh? When that failed, his marriage was attacked instead, and anonymous audio recordings (again, questionable legality) were sent to his wife. This continued in various forms up to MLK jr's eventual assassination. You don't even need the entire government to be corrupt and malicious - a single bad department or group can cause an enormous amount of damage, which won't be found out about until decades later (if at all!). Edit: Source https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...
pdkl95 11y ago
> How data was collected Previously collected census data of Amsterdam. > The original purpose of collection > The benign intentions of the original collectors The usual reasons any state pays to count their citizens. This particular census data included the religious affiliation. > How the data moved from the collecting administration to the abusive administration In 1941, when the Nazis occupied Amsterdam, they commissioned the local civil servants this map of a particular subset of their census data: https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/uploads/archive/museum/topstukken/stippenkaart_1633.jpg https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/uploads/archive/museum/topstuk... Each black dot represents 10 Jews. 3/4 of those dots were efficiently rounded up and eventually murdered in the camps.
mc32 11y ago
The weakness in the argument is that privacy or secrecy will minimize one's exposure to unjust laws. I don't think that's the case. It only makes it harder for an unjust system to effect its goals in other words, it introduces delay not necessarily avoidance altogether. For example, if an unjust government didn't have access to or there didn't exist data at oblique or proximate collection points, they'd go about and find alternative methods. They would set up systems of popular reporting and surveillance as they did in Vietnam where it was beneficial and of self interest to report abnormal behavior or behavior contrary to that sanctioned by the government. So, yes, privacy and secrecy can delay "the bad things" but they will not prevent it. Moreover, with less than perfect information, a bad government or actor will simply widen the net and accept more false positives. Privacy may defeat the mildly bad but not those intent on real bad.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > It only makes it harder for an unjust system to effect its goals in other words, it introduces delay not necessarily avoidance altogether. ...which is what it's supposed to do. There is nothing that makes totalitarianism impossible, what is necessary is to put up as many roadblocks in its way as we can so the people fighting the good fight stand a chance.
cookiecaper 11y ago
>To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws. Absolutely false. There are many bad or just silly laws on the books today that are scarcely if ever enforced. The problem with that is that no one will really put any effort into dealing with those "dormant" laws since they don't affect them in any way, but the state will drudge up such a law when they have to if they have it out for someone in particular. Laws that everyone ignores and are constantly violated because they aren't reflective of public morality can become a nightmare for the people that get prosecuted under them. They won't usually try this with high-profile people because the silliness would be obvious, but if you don't have media attention on yourself and they hate you, they will most certainly do this. The best way to repeal a bad law is to have it strictly enforced. Once it starts affecting peoples' lives, especially powerful people, it will change pretty fast. I'd love to see a US attorney issue arrest warrants for Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt due to Google's continuous flagrant violations of the CFAA and copyright law (though I acknowledge that their personal responsibility for such acts is now well outside the respective 2 and 5 year statutes of limitation). In my opinion, when a big shot violates a law, they should be locked up right away. They should be re-arrested every time the law is broken. In this way, each bad law would be cleaned up within a year or two.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  Mandatory enforcement is a good theoretical construct but it has an immediate practical problem. There are so many bad laws that it would require literally everyone to be brought up on charges. There would be no one to prosecute or judge cases because all the prosecutors and judges would be too busy defending themselves from their own charges. The only way to even consider strict enforcement is to fix the bad laws first, so before we can even discuss strict enforcement we would need a different way to eliminate bad laws. At which point you probably don't need it anymore.
dclowd9901 11y ago
> The weakness with THAT argument is that it assumes a conspiratorial, immoral federal government. Many of us may be able to imagine that, but it's an idea at the periphery of the Overton window. As a matter of fact, the US government was established with this basis in mind. You can see this through the checks and balances system, as well as the representative democracy, and the first ten "rules" of the Constitution, which are rules to protect the people. The creators anticipated the worst kind of people inhabiting the government and set it up to protect us from them. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
- icebraining 11y ago
  From what I've read of the process, the 10 amendments were not only not the first ten rules, as they were originally voted down, and only later added as amendments because of a few critics of the Constitution who refused to ratify it.

nothrabannosir 11y ago

Dutch municipalities had comprehensive files on every citizen, including religion. Germany invaded, Holland capitulated in 5 days, and the files proved an organizational treasure trove for rounding up jewish families and deporting them. "Also, the civil administration was advanced and offered the Nazi-German a full insight in not only the numbers of Jews, but also where they exactly lived." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Netherlands#The_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Net... It wasn't immediately obvious what, exactly, was happening to the Jewish families when Germany took over. But even if it had been, destroying all those files in 5 days would have required extraordinary coordination and determination. And that is assuming you make the decision to scorch the earth the second Germany attacks; not exactly a move which would inspire confidence. Underground resistance forces spent the following five years trying to burn down as many town halls as they could.

mojuba 11y ago

It's a very good point. Moreover, an abusive administration will almost definitely take over soon, because the scope of data the current one has will attract all kinds of "evil forces", including (but probably not limited to) powerful corporations.

542458 11y ago

You don't even have to leave the US - COINTELPRO is a great example of this. In the 50s and 60 the FBI used surveillance data of questionable legality to target a number of groups deemed "undesirable". This included trying to convince Nobel peace prize winner Martin Luther King Jr to literally kill himself via harassing anonymous letters that threatened the release of embarrassing personal details. Here's a key quote from the letter: "No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. . . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record." Nice, eh? When that failed, his marriage was attacked instead, and anonymous audio recordings (again, questionable legality) were sent to his wife. This continued in various forms up to MLK jr's eventual assassination. You don't even need the entire government to be corrupt and malicious - a single bad department or group can cause an enormous amount of damage, which won't be found out about until decades later (if at all!). Edit: Source https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...

pdkl95 11y ago

> How data was collected Previously collected census data of Amsterdam. > The original purpose of collection > The benign intentions of the original collectors The usual reasons any state pays to count their citizens. This particular census data included the religious affiliation. > How the data moved from the collecting administration to the abusive administration In 1941, when the Nazis occupied Amsterdam, they commissioned the local civil servants this map of a particular subset of their census data: https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/uploads/archive/museum/topstukken/stippenkaart_1633.jpg https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/uploads/archive/museum/topstuk... Each black dot represents 10 Jews. 3/4 of those dots were efficiently rounded up and eventually murdered in the camps.

mc32 11y ago

The weakness in the argument is that privacy or secrecy will minimize one's exposure to unjust laws. I don't think that's the case. It only makes it harder for an unjust system to effect its goals in other words, it introduces delay not necessarily avoidance altogether. For example, if an unjust government didn't have access to or there didn't exist data at oblique or proximate collection points, they'd go about and find alternative methods. They would set up systems of popular reporting and surveillance as they did in Vietnam where it was beneficial and of self interest to report abnormal behavior or behavior contrary to that sanctioned by the government. So, yes, privacy and secrecy can delay "the bad things" but they will not prevent it. Moreover, with less than perfect information, a bad government or actor will simply widen the net and accept more false positives. Privacy may defeat the mildly bad but not those intent on real bad.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> It only makes it harder for an unjust system to effect its goals in other words, it introduces delay not necessarily avoidance altogether. ...which is what it's supposed to do. There is nothing that makes totalitarianism impossible, what is necessary is to put up as many roadblocks in its way as we can so the people fighting the good fight stand a chance.

cookiecaper 11y ago

>To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws. Absolutely false. There are many bad or just silly laws on the books today that are scarcely if ever enforced. The problem with that is that no one will really put any effort into dealing with those "dormant" laws since they don't affect them in any way, but the state will drudge up such a law when they have to if they have it out for someone in particular. Laws that everyone ignores and are constantly violated because they aren't reflective of public morality can become a nightmare for the people that get prosecuted under them. They won't usually try this with high-profile people because the silliness would be obvious, but if you don't have media attention on yourself and they hate you, they will most certainly do this. The best way to repeal a bad law is to have it strictly enforced. Once it starts affecting peoples' lives, especially powerful people, it will change pretty fast. I'd love to see a US attorney issue arrest warrants for Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt due to Google's continuous flagrant violations of the CFAA and copyright law (though I acknowledge that their personal responsibility for such acts is now well outside the respective 2 and 5 year statutes of limitation). In my opinion, when a big shot violates a law, they should be locked up right away. They should be re-arrested every time the law is broken. In this way, each bad law would be cleaned up within a year or two.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
Mandatory enforcement is a good theoretical construct but it has an immediate practical problem. There are so many bad laws that it would require literally everyone to be brought up on charges. There would be no one to prosecute or judge cases because all the prosecutors and judges would be too busy defending themselves from their own charges. The only way to even consider strict enforcement is to fix the bad laws first, so before we can even discuss strict enforcement we would need a different way to eliminate bad laws. At which point you probably don't need it anymore.

dclowd9901 11y ago

> The weakness with THAT argument is that it assumes a conspiratorial, immoral federal government. Many of us may be able to imagine that, but it's an idea at the periphery of the Overton window. As a matter of fact, the US government was established with this basis in mind. You can see this through the checks and balances system, as well as the representative democracy, and the first ten "rules" of the Constitution, which are rules to protect the people. The creators anticipated the worst kind of people inhabiting the government and set it up to protect us from them. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

icebraining 11y ago
From what I've read of the process, the 10 amendments were not only not the first ten rules, as they were originally voted down, and only later added as amendments because of a few critics of the Constitution who refused to ratify it.