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I had a discussion with my mother regarding surveillance and privacy and how they relate to safety. I feel like she understands that surveillance when used in a

I had a discussion with my mother regarding surveillance and privacy and how they relate to safety. I feel like she understands that surveillance when used in a nefarious manner can be detrimental to individual freedoms, but is pro surveillance regardless. This is because she believes that the benefits of keeping others safe outweighs the potential for misuse. How can I help her understand why people fight for privacy?

PopsiclePete 9y ago
You can't. Most people will choose safety over freedom every single time.
- dgllghr 9y ago
  I completely understand where you're coming from, and I share some of that cynicism. But there are many contrary examples. Abolitionists fought in the US Civil War to end slavery. Russian journalists and politicians are killed left and right but continue to challenge Putin's dictatorship. The Kurds, though they have never had their own state, continue to resist both Turkey and ISIS. Protesters were attacked and killed for protesting the neo-nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA just last year. I think it's as Thomas Jefferson said: "...all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Perhaps in this case, the suffering is not great and the vision of privacy is not strongly supported. But I disagree that people will choose safety over freedom every time.
  - javajosh 9y ago
    American slaves weren't safe, so there wasn't a trade-off there.
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  Which is why you have to help explain to her that the police state has absolutely nothing to do with keeping you safe.
- Panino 9y ago
  This is a common fallacy, that freedom and safety are in opposition, that increasing one decreases the other, that freedom puts you in danger and a lack of freedom saves you. In this debate people often say there is perfect safety in prison, but if I imagine myself a prisoner, versus my daily life right now, I'd feel a lot less safe in prison. I've read that some prisoners go to the bathroom with one pant-leg undone, just so their legs won't be tangled at the ankles if they get violently attacked. I can't imagine my daily life being this dangerous. Freedom leads to the most security. If you scatter plot graph "free countries" and "safe countries" you'll find an unmistakable positive correlation. Whether the dangers are religious police kidnapping people for "virginity tests," people being disappeared for criticizing the government, or routine industrial accidents in places where expendable people aren't free to demand workers rights, a lack of freedom increases danger. You're pretty safe in Switzerland, not so much in Iraq.
- Animats 9y ago
  The ads for China's "big brother" systems, some of which are corporate/government partnerships, are way ahead of the US.[1] These are from QQ. In one public demo, jaywalkers in a city intersection had their personal details appear on a giant screen.[2] [1] https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/947649480123285505 https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/947649480123285505 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShXKvo6xl6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShXKvo6xl6U
- willstrafach 9y ago
  In the case of 702, as it is for foreign surveillance, it is not even any freedom/security tradeoff because it is not them being surveiled.
znpy 9y ago
Let her realize how monitoring and surveillance can be used to turns our private life, kinks and private stuff against ourselves to prevent is from expressing our freedom and potentially to enslave us.
Someone1234 9y ago
Just phase it this way: Imagine if the party in power used state surveillance to monitor their opponent and the people who support them. The whole infrastructure is turn-key authoritarian, there's literally nothing logistical stopping this, only a handshake agreement not to. This should concern people regardless of their political affiliation or party loyalty.
- jonny_eh 9y ago
  The problem is that people don't want to give up power while they have it, even if it means their opponent gets it next, and even if there's no next-next because your opponent uses it to ensure you never take power again.
- Clanan 9y ago
  There's now substantial evidence that this is exactly what happened with the Obama administration and Trump's campaign. The former used an unverified dossier as an excuse to begin surveillance via FISA. So this isn't even a theoretical issue. Before anyone grabs a pitchfork, focus on the issue at hand and not the current politics. Doesn't matter who's in the White House - friend or foe, would you want them to have this power?
  - kmonsen 9y ago
    Citation please, as far as I know there is zero evidence that this happened. But for the bigger issue, yes it is a thing that needs to be controlled.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/us/politics/carter-page-fisa-warrant-russia-trump.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/us/politics/carter-page-f...
      - daveguy 9y ago
        The second sentence in the linked article is this: "The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August."
tabeth 9y ago
When has an average American been severely and personally harmed from surveillance? If you can't answer that without caveats then you have no chance of convincing her in my opinion. In other words, you have to prove that the harms of surveillance outweigh the nebulous sense of protection an average person already has regarding survillance. It's trivial to come up with examples of how survillance is good for an average person in regular life - - see public camera catching criminals, dash cams, etc.
- bluGill 9y ago
  [cynic] The public camera catching a random criminal doens't really matter to me unless that criminal actually stole from me.[/cynic] Fortunately we don't have to look to that. More than once the public road surveillance cameras have aided my decision to work from home. They have also helped me decided to take/not take an alternate route around bad traffic. Those are real benefits to surveillance that help me. I understand your worries, and they are real. However there are also benefits that you cannot discard.
  - seanp2k2 9y ago
    >public This is a big part of the difference between traffic cameras and unchecked surveillance of individuals.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  when they stomped down their own curiosity by refusing to search for more information on the internet because it'd get them on a list.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  How would we even know? Parallel construction, etc. The burden of proof should go the other way.
- chongli 9y ago
  Requiring an average American is setting the bar a little too high. Ask almost any Jewish American and they're likely to have relatives who died in the Holocaust. How did the Nazis carry that out? They leveraged a large surveillance network and a central database built with census data. Was this personal harm from surveillance? I would argue yes. Similarly, you could ask anyone who experienced life (or had a relative who did) in the Soviet Union or East Germany under the thumb of those overwhelming surveillance networks. Finally, to prematurely head off an objection you might have: are these events (Nazi, Soviet, East Germany) outliers? Yes. Does that disqualify them? No. [0] [0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an-outlier-story/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an...
anon11082016 9y ago
Just show her what they did to Donald Trump. Via a BS dossier, they wire tapped him and his associates.
- pdx 9y ago
  That was classic, and nobody would have ever known about it if the impossible hadn't occurred and he actually won. How many times did it happen before Obama did it and how many times in the future will it happen? Regardless of whether you're red or blue, this is not the path you should wish the country to follow.
- rev_bird 9y ago
  This isn't what happened at all, and I suspect you know that. For starters, the dossier wasn't the beginning of the investigation, as we've seen in multiple articles that came out over the last few weeks. Also, Trump was NEVER "wire tapped," unless you are privy to information the rest of the world doesn't have, and the only reason his "associates" were caught up in surveillance reports is because they called criminals who were already under surveillance. It's like if the FBI is wire-tapping Al Capone, and you called Al Capone. Sure, you'd get listened to, but they aren't tapping YOU.
  - StanislavPetrov 9y ago
    In reality, we don't know if Trump - or anyone else - was "wire tapped" - and we won't ever know thanks to the passage of this bill. One of the crucial elements of the Amash amendment was that those who were unconstitutionally spied upon via 702 authorization would have to be eventually notified that they were spied on - now they don't. That's one of the many things that's so awful and frightening about these police-state powers. There is no oversight and no notification.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      We do know: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-government-wiretapped-fisa-russians/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-governm...
TearsInTheRain 9y ago
I think a poignant explanation of the detriments of surveillance is Glen Greenwald's TED talk 'Why privacy matters'. Basically surveillance causes people to self censor, which is incredibly detrimental to society.
shmerl 9y ago
> How can I help her understand why people fight for privacy? Give her 1984 to read.
ballenf 9y ago
Agreed. We need talented sales and marketing people to help re-connect privacy to freedom. You literally cannot have the latter without the former, but that truth has been blurred and mostly lost. It started with the war on drugs and is now the war on terror. One big catastrophic terrorist attack perpetrated via computer networks and the internet will be all it takes to wipe out any vestige we have left of privacy and anonymity. Could easily see TOR and the like being outlawed worldwide.
NoGravitas 9y ago
Maybe this isn't the best example for your mother, but it works for some people: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dick-pics/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dic...
bzbarsky 9y ago
One fundamental problem you may be running into is that generally the older people get the more they value "safety". So it's possible that you and your mother simply attach different utilities to "keeping others safe" and "potential for misuse" even if you agree on all the facts and conditional probabilities and whatnot... I really wonder how much changing demographics (population aging) account for the shifts in public opinion on issues like this.
rconti 9y ago
It sounds like she DOES understand, you're just trying to convince her that privacy-fighters are right, which she may simply not agree with. In other parts of society, there's a tradeoff behind what's good for society and what's good for individual freedoms. Some people (say) don't want mandatory health insurance or helmet laws or whatever because they think freedom to choose is paramount. Others think it's insane that you'd EVER be opposed to something that might save even one life (what about the children??) Sometimes these arguments are couched in terms of personal responsibility, the nanny state training us to rely on it and creating worse overall outcomes, etc etc.
rasz 9y ago
Dig something embarrassing from her computer/old emails, post it on her FB page. /s People who never experienced large scale oppression, eastern Europe pre nineties for example, will have a hard time grasping the repercussions.

PopsiclePete 9y ago

You can't. Most people will choose safety over freedom every single time.

dgllghr 9y ago
I completely understand where you're coming from, and I share some of that cynicism. But there are many contrary examples. Abolitionists fought in the US Civil War to end slavery. Russian journalists and politicians are killed left and right but continue to challenge Putin's dictatorship. The Kurds, though they have never had their own state, continue to resist both Turkey and ISIS. Protesters were attacked and killed for protesting the neo-nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA just last year. I think it's as Thomas Jefferson said: "...all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Perhaps in this case, the suffering is not great and the vision of privacy is not strongly supported. But I disagree that people will choose safety over freedom every time.
- javajosh 9y ago
  American slaves weren't safe, so there wasn't a trade-off there.
StanislavPetrov 9y ago
Which is why you have to help explain to her that the police state has absolutely nothing to do with keeping you safe.
Panino 9y ago
This is a common fallacy, that freedom and safety are in opposition, that increasing one decreases the other, that freedom puts you in danger and a lack of freedom saves you. In this debate people often say there is perfect safety in prison, but if I imagine myself a prisoner, versus my daily life right now, I'd feel a lot less safe in prison. I've read that some prisoners go to the bathroom with one pant-leg undone, just so their legs won't be tangled at the ankles if they get violently attacked. I can't imagine my daily life being this dangerous. Freedom leads to the most security. If you scatter plot graph "free countries" and "safe countries" you'll find an unmistakable positive correlation. Whether the dangers are religious police kidnapping people for "virginity tests," people being disappeared for criticizing the government, or routine industrial accidents in places where expendable people aren't free to demand workers rights, a lack of freedom increases danger. You're pretty safe in Switzerland, not so much in Iraq.
Animats 9y ago
The ads for China's "big brother" systems, some of which are corporate/government partnerships, are way ahead of the US.[1] These are from QQ. In one public demo, jaywalkers in a city intersection had their personal details appear on a giant screen.[2] [1] https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/947649480123285505 https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/947649480123285505 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShXKvo6xl6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShXKvo6xl6U
willstrafach 9y ago
In the case of 702, as it is for foreign surveillance, it is not even any freedom/security tradeoff because it is not them being surveiled.

znpy 9y ago

Let her realize how monitoring and surveillance can be used to turns our private life, kinks and private stuff against ourselves to prevent is from expressing our freedom and potentially to enslave us.

Someone1234 9y ago

Just phase it this way: Imagine if the party in power used state surveillance to monitor their opponent and the people who support them. The whole infrastructure is turn-key authoritarian, there's literally nothing logistical stopping this, only a handshake agreement not to. This should concern people regardless of their political affiliation or party loyalty.

jonny_eh 9y ago
The problem is that people don't want to give up power while they have it, even if it means their opponent gets it next, and even if there's no next-next because your opponent uses it to ensure you never take power again.
Clanan 9y ago
There's now substantial evidence that this is exactly what happened with the Obama administration and Trump's campaign. The former used an unverified dossier as an excuse to begin surveillance via FISA. So this isn't even a theoretical issue. Before anyone grabs a pitchfork, focus on the issue at hand and not the current politics. Doesn't matter who's in the White House - friend or foe, would you want them to have this power?
- kmonsen 9y ago
  Citation please, as far as I know there is zero evidence that this happened. But for the bigger issue, yes it is a thing that needs to be controlled.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/us/politics/carter-page-fisa-warrant-russia-trump.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/us/politics/carter-page-f...
    - daveguy 9y ago
      The second sentence in the linked article is this: "The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August."

tabeth 9y ago

When has an average American been severely and personally harmed from surveillance? If you can't answer that without caveats then you have no chance of convincing her in my opinion. In other words, you have to prove that the harms of surveillance outweigh the nebulous sense of protection an average person already has regarding survillance. It's trivial to come up with examples of how survillance is good for an average person in regular life - - see public camera catching criminals, dash cams, etc.

bluGill 9y ago
[cynic] The public camera catching a random criminal doens't really matter to me unless that criminal actually stole from me.[/cynic] Fortunately we don't have to look to that. More than once the public road surveillance cameras have aided my decision to work from home. They have also helped me decided to take/not take an alternate route around bad traffic. Those are real benefits to surveillance that help me. I understand your worries, and they are real. However there are also benefits that you cannot discard.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  >public This is a big part of the difference between traffic cameras and unchecked surveillance of individuals.
cryoshon 9y ago
when they stomped down their own curiosity by refusing to search for more information on the internet because it'd get them on a list.
abecedarius 9y ago
How would we even know? Parallel construction, etc. The burden of proof should go the other way.
chongli 9y ago
Requiring an average American is setting the bar a little too high. Ask almost any Jewish American and they're likely to have relatives who died in the Holocaust. How did the Nazis carry that out? They leveraged a large surveillance network and a central database built with census data. Was this personal harm from surveillance? I would argue yes. Similarly, you could ask anyone who experienced life (or had a relative who did) in the Soviet Union or East Germany under the thumb of those overwhelming surveillance networks. Finally, to prematurely head off an objection you might have: are these events (Nazi, Soviet, East Germany) outliers? Yes. Does that disqualify them? No. [0] [0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an-outlier-story/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an...

anon11082016 9y ago

Just show her what they did to Donald Trump. Via a BS dossier, they wire tapped him and his associates.

pdx 9y ago
That was classic, and nobody would have ever known about it if the impossible hadn't occurred and he actually won. How many times did it happen before Obama did it and how many times in the future will it happen? Regardless of whether you're red or blue, this is not the path you should wish the country to follow.
rev_bird 9y ago
This isn't what happened at all, and I suspect you know that. For starters, the dossier wasn't the beginning of the investigation, as we've seen in multiple articles that came out over the last few weeks. Also, Trump was NEVER "wire tapped," unless you are privy to information the rest of the world doesn't have, and the only reason his "associates" were caught up in surveillance reports is because they called criminals who were already under surveillance. It's like if the FBI is wire-tapping Al Capone, and you called Al Capone. Sure, you'd get listened to, but they aren't tapping YOU.
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  In reality, we don't know if Trump - or anyone else - was "wire tapped" - and we won't ever know thanks to the passage of this bill. One of the crucial elements of the Amash amendment was that those who were unconstitutionally spied upon via 702 authorization would have to be eventually notified that they were spied on - now they don't. That's one of the many things that's so awful and frightening about these police-state powers. There is no oversight and no notification.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    We do know: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-government-wiretapped-fisa-russians/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-governm...

TearsInTheRain 9y ago

I think a poignant explanation of the detriments of surveillance is Glen Greenwald's TED talk 'Why privacy matters'. Basically surveillance causes people to self censor, which is incredibly detrimental to society.

shmerl 9y ago

> How can I help her understand why people fight for privacy? Give her 1984 to read.

ballenf 9y ago

Agreed. We need talented sales and marketing people to help re-connect privacy to freedom. You literally cannot have the latter without the former, but that truth has been blurred and mostly lost. It started with the war on drugs and is now the war on terror. One big catastrophic terrorist attack perpetrated via computer networks and the internet will be all it takes to wipe out any vestige we have left of privacy and anonymity. Could easily see TOR and the like being outlawed worldwide.

NoGravitas 9y ago

Maybe this isn't the best example for your mother, but it works for some people: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dick-pics/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dic...

bzbarsky 9y ago

One fundamental problem you may be running into is that generally the older people get the more they value "safety". So it's possible that you and your mother simply attach different utilities to "keeping others safe" and "potential for misuse" even if you agree on all the facts and conditional probabilities and whatnot... I really wonder how much changing demographics (population aging) account for the shifts in public opinion on issues like this.

rconti 9y ago

It sounds like she DOES understand, you're just trying to convince her that privacy-fighters are right, which she may simply not agree with. In other parts of society, there's a tradeoff behind what's good for society and what's good for individual freedoms. Some people (say) don't want mandatory health insurance or helmet laws or whatever because they think freedom to choose is paramount. Others think it's insane that you'd EVER be opposed to something that might save even one life (what about the children??) Sometimes these arguments are couched in terms of personal responsibility, the nanny state training us to rely on it and creating worse overall outcomes, etc etc.

rasz 9y ago

Dig something embarrassing from her computer/old emails, post it on her FB page. /s People who never experienced large scale oppression, eastern Europe pre nineties for example, will have a hard time grasping the repercussions.