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There are hidden assumptions in the question "Don't you want your country to be safe?" What the question is really asking is this: "Don't you want your country

There are hidden assumptions in the question "Don't you want your country to be safe?" What the question is really asking is this: "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?" No, I do not. I want my country to be a place where I am proud of living. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to have traditions that are important to me that stay the same over time and try to get better over time. I want my country to stay a place I am happy living in. I can live with some danger much easier than I can a surveillance state. Danger is a situation that is stable over time. Operating a panopticon is not. The second premise is that it is possible to make some universal rules that will make everybody safe. Throughout history we have lots of examples of places where large groups of people were "completely" controlled. Modern prisons in the U.S. are a good contemporary example. These places are not safe. In fact, the tighter we grip a population in order to make them safe, the more we create criminals who are part of the surveillance system itself. These criminals are in many cases impossible to discover. So now you have a lot of control and surveillance with criminals you can't identify or catch. The Chinese deal with this by every now and then sacrificing some of the party apparatchiks to the mob. The jury is still out on whether that actually works over several decades or not. I doubt it. But even if it did, it's still an unstable system. Nations don't exist to extol one virtue over all others. "Safety" is a great thing, but it's not the end of the conversation when it comes to decision-making. It's a complex balance that should dynamically change over time as conditions force. When you systematize things like massive surveillance, you actually hurt the cause of public safety. It gets better for a short while -- then the rebound happens. And it's not pretty.

analog31 8y ago
Indeed, safety also has different aspects. You might be safer from getting mugged, but less safe from getting arrested and tortured, run over by a car, or from breathing polluted air and getting cancer. The same apparatus that makes people afraid to be muggers, will also make them afraid to point out abuses.
dqpb 8y ago
There are way more hidden assumptions than just "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?". What's really happening when you agree to surveillance, is you're agreeing to give power in the form of information asymmetry to people you don't know. You assume those people will use that power for your benefit. In reality, there is very little guarantee that that's true - though there is some statistical likelihood that it's true. At the end of the day, there is no such thing as law and order, no such thing as values and ethics, no such thing as society and civilization. All there really is is groups of people with varying levels of power and cohesion, varying overlap of shared interests, rather predictable human nature, and game theory. If you lose sight of that, you do so at your own peril.
ArrayList 8y ago
I must say this is the sort of quality comment that makes me come back to HN again and again. I've never been fully able to articulate why the "safety" argument is a farce, and I think you've done a cogent, lucid, commendable job here.

analog31 8y ago

Indeed, safety also has different aspects. You might be safer from getting mugged, but less safe from getting arrested and tortured, run over by a car, or from breathing polluted air and getting cancer. The same apparatus that makes people afraid to be muggers, will also make them afraid to point out abuses.

dqpb 8y ago

There are way more hidden assumptions than just "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?". What's really happening when you agree to surveillance, is you're agreeing to give power in the form of information asymmetry to people you don't know. You assume those people will use that power for your benefit. In reality, there is very little guarantee that that's true - though there is some statistical likelihood that it's true. At the end of the day, there is no such thing as law and order, no such thing as values and ethics, no such thing as society and civilization. All there really is is groups of people with varying levels of power and cohesion, varying overlap of shared interests, rather predictable human nature, and game theory. If you lose sight of that, you do so at your own peril.

ArrayList 8y ago

I must say this is the sort of quality comment that makes me come back to HN again and again. I've never been fully able to articulate why the "safety" argument is a farce, and I think you've done a cogent, lucid, commendable job here.