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The sad answer is that the great majority of voters are ignorant and/or apathetic about privacy - at least in comparison to things like taxes and health care. T

The sad answer is that the great majority of voters are ignorant and/or apathetic about privacy - at least in comparison to things like taxes and health care. The population that is willing to vote against party lines for privacy is trivial, whereas the government (at every scale) is heavily incentivized to invade privacy. Before we can change the government, we need to make people care - and while recent debacles (see: Facebook) have helped, there's a long way to go yet.

dd36 7y ago
Corporations and their largest beneficiaries will use their media companies and donation/lobbying dollars to spread propaganda within one or more parties to create enough doubt that nothing will happen. That's what needs to be attacked. They got a lot right in the early 20th century around media consolidation and antitrust.
andrewla 7y ago
The not sad answer is that the great majority of voters understand that there has to be a tradeoff between the ability of the police to detect and enforce the law and our personal privacy. Generally, transparency, rather than privacy, could be reasonably said to be the driving function of government -- things like arrest records, court records, marriage records, real estate transactions, are all public records, with exceptions being made only for cases where the harm of the record itself exceeds the public benefit. To facilitate credit markets we've even gone so far as to make personal credit information semi-public. If you want something to be private, it's your responsibility to keep it private. And all privacy goes away in the face of a lawful search and seizure, accompanied by probable cause. The (very wiggly) privacy line is only crossed when another party goes to unreasonable lengths to violate situations where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
_archon_ 7y ago
If only we could devise a system under which all voters wouldn't have to be informed about every topic. A system of, say, representatives to whom the citizens would delegate their power. These representatives would then use their proxy and be responsible for learning and implementing policy about whatever topic comes up. A populace which is passionate about a topic is more likely to see legislation about it. But it's not the only way.

dd36 7y ago

Corporations and their largest beneficiaries will use their media companies and donation/lobbying dollars to spread propaganda within one or more parties to create enough doubt that nothing will happen. That's what needs to be attacked. They got a lot right in the early 20th century around media consolidation and antitrust.

andrewla 7y ago

The not sad answer is that the great majority of voters understand that there has to be a tradeoff between the ability of the police to detect and enforce the law and our personal privacy. Generally, transparency, rather than privacy, could be reasonably said to be the driving function of government -- things like arrest records, court records, marriage records, real estate transactions, are all public records, with exceptions being made only for cases where the harm of the record itself exceeds the public benefit. To facilitate credit markets we've even gone so far as to make personal credit information semi-public. If you want something to be private, it's your responsibility to keep it private. And all privacy goes away in the face of a lawful search and seizure, accompanied by probable cause. The (very wiggly) privacy line is only crossed when another party goes to unreasonable lengths to violate situations where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

_archon_ 7y ago

If only we could devise a system under which all voters wouldn't have to be informed about every topic. A system of, say, representatives to whom the citizens would delegate their power. These representatives would then use their proxy and be responsible for learning and implementing policy about whatever topic comes up. A populace which is passionate about a topic is more likely to see legislation about it. But it's not the only way.