4 ms·

Trying to play the devil's advocate. 1) Security is just more important than privacy. 2) Individual freedom is about not restricting your actions, not about d

Trying to play the devil's advocate. 1) Security is just more important than privacy. 2) Individual freedom is about not restricting your actions, not about defending you from others. 3) Privacy is something of the past anyway. In a 100 years we will know every word you say, every thing you buy, every breath you take. You're defending the right to spit tobacco on the street. 4) In a few years when something happens everybody is gonna turn around and blame the government about not knowing enough. It is good for PR for that reason. "We tried, you didn't want to."

astrodust 10y ago
"We're all going to die of old age eventually, so I'm having cyanide for breakfast today." These are really terrible counter-arguments.
- MrQuincle 10y ago
  I will try to counter your counter-counter arguments. 1) Security versus privacy is a trade-off and should be respected as such. There can be lives at stake. If I can save 1000 lives by having a border patrol guy reading my email I would immediately sign up and travel to the US for it. The difficulty is that in reality this trade-off is not transparently made. However, this does not mean that there is no such trade-off. 2) To protect someone from others can be done in multiple ways. You can create laws that protect someone from having others reading his/her letters, protect someone from having others entering their home, protect someone from others saying bad things about them, protect someone from others stealing from them. Although recommendable, all these laws are restrictive and not necessarily promoting individual freedom. 3) In the future there are so many sensors in the (virtual) world that they will find it ridiculous that people in the past thought that there were things private. Are you an owner of the photons that bounce of you? Are you an owner of the audio waves generated by those neurons formed by interactions with you? The concept of privacy is arcane and in certain situations criminal. 4) Blaming the government is gonna happen. This is a cynical argument. However, the political parties that have political fitness will survive. In the end a party should reflect would its majority want. If that is enough data collection to prevent 9/11s, then that is what it should try to do.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    1. "If I can save 1000 lives by having a border patrol guy reading my email..." So we're going to train all the border patrol people to be intelligence analysts? That sounds really expensive. If we're not going to do that, then they're not going to have the training required to make sense of that material. It's a pointless invasion of privacy. They're going to put innocent people in jail and be completely oblivious to actual bad actors who know how to hide their tracks. Remember, September 11th was avoidable but because the information channels were clogged with too much garbage the real threat information got lost in the noise. The real priority here should be to collect less information and ensure it's of a very high quality.

astrodust 10y ago

"We're all going to die of old age eventually, so I'm having cyanide for breakfast today." These are really terrible counter-arguments.

MrQuincle 10y ago
I will try to counter your counter-counter arguments. 1) Security versus privacy is a trade-off and should be respected as such. There can be lives at stake. If I can save 1000 lives by having a border patrol guy reading my email I would immediately sign up and travel to the US for it. The difficulty is that in reality this trade-off is not transparently made. However, this does not mean that there is no such trade-off. 2) To protect someone from others can be done in multiple ways. You can create laws that protect someone from having others reading his/her letters, protect someone from having others entering their home, protect someone from others saying bad things about them, protect someone from others stealing from them. Although recommendable, all these laws are restrictive and not necessarily promoting individual freedom. 3) In the future there are so many sensors in the (virtual) world that they will find it ridiculous that people in the past thought that there were things private. Are you an owner of the photons that bounce of you? Are you an owner of the audio waves generated by those neurons formed by interactions with you? The concept of privacy is arcane and in certain situations criminal. 4) Blaming the government is gonna happen. This is a cynical argument. However, the political parties that have political fitness will survive. In the end a party should reflect would its majority want. If that is enough data collection to prevent 9/11s, then that is what it should try to do.
- astrodust 10y ago
  1. "If I can save 1000 lives by having a border patrol guy reading my email..." So we're going to train all the border patrol people to be intelligence analysts? That sounds really expensive. If we're not going to do that, then they're not going to have the training required to make sense of that material. It's a pointless invasion of privacy. They're going to put innocent people in jail and be completely oblivious to actual bad actors who know how to hide their tracks. Remember, September 11th was avoidable but because the information channels were clogged with too much garbage the real threat information got lost in the noise. The real priority here should be to collect less information and ensure it's of a very high quality.