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1) If wiretapping X is illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent only wiretapping X. If wiretapping X and wiretapping Y are illegal, then law enforcement

1) If wiretapping X is illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent only wiretapping X. If wiretapping X and wiretapping Y are illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent both of them, which makes law enforcement harder (not easier as you are saying). 2) Of course there is no point in blindly giving government more surveillance power and hope for improvement. But if government agency claims that with more surveillance power it can significantly reduce spending and significantly reduce number of false arrests while maintaining low crime level - then it might worth to try. If government agency fails to deliver on that promise, then the head of that agency should be replaced, budget shrunk anyway, and wiretapping grant revoked. 3) The difference between "government surveillance" and "limiting freedom of speech"/"false arrests" is that "government surveillance" has much smaller downsides and much higher upsides, while both "limiting freedom of speech"/"false arrests" have almost no upside and very painful downsides.

dpark 15y ago
1) Your logic only makes sense if you assume that the rate of wiretaps is unchanged by the legal status of wiretapping. This seems a rather implausible situation. If wiretapping X, Y, and Z is legal, then it's easier to hide an illegal wiretap of W. When there are more legal wiretaps, it's easier for illegal wiretaps to slip through. The cost of oversight isn't dominated by the number of illegal wiretaps. It dominated by the number of legal wiretaps, because each of those needs to be reviewed. 2) No, it's not worth trying. Surveillance agencies have been saying that forever, and they've not delivered on their promise. Your beliefs seem to exist in some strange world where agencies are actually held accountable. So long as we don't live in that world, your ideas make no sense. 3) We will not agree on this. You simply don't value privacy. I do, and I think you're really naive about this.
- dennisgorelik 15y ago
  1) Why review every single wiretap? Only wiretaps that resulted in problems need to be reviewed (e.g. some of my private info was used against me, so my lawyer would be reviewing if the wiretap was legal and would file civil suit for damages against wiretapping agency if it was illegal). 2) Are you saying that agencies without surveillance capabilities would be performing no worse than they are performing now? 3) I wish you could show me real dangers of limited privacy. But so far all your examples of surveillance abuse included government agencies doing something illegal.
  - dpark 15y ago
    1) So basically no oversight at all until someone sues? I'm sure that will go well. 2) No. I'm saying that "more surveillance" does not imply "more effective". It's true that intelligence gathering is useful. It's not true that arbitrarily spying on everyone is useful. If you do 10 targeted wiretaps and get 5 actionable leads, that's useful. If you do 10000 arbitrary wiretaps and get 5 actionable leads, it's a pointless loss of privacy and an abuse of power. 3) I wish you would show me real dangers of limited right to travel.... Putting that aside, I'm not sure why you're so dismissive of illegal abuses. That's kind of like saying you don't understand gun laws, because the only problems are with people doing something illegal. You might disagree with gun laws, but if that's the only reason why, then your opinion is rather shallow. Abuses are a significant issue. You should be worried about abuses happening, and you should be worried about them going unpunished. We see this stuff all the time already. It's borderline delusional to think this doesn't or won't happen with wiretaps. Beyond that, privacy is in many ways protected for the same reasons as speech. If you can speak against a government, you can fight it (at least in theory). Likewise, private communication can be necessary to effectively fight the government. Want to stage a surprise protest? You'll probably be more effective if you aren't being listened to by the police. Or if speaking publicly is dangerous (because the government is restricting speech or because fellow citizens find your views unpalatable) privacy will allow you to speak at least to a select audience. For one more reason, when you have the NSA mining everyone's communications for keywords, do you think there are no false alarms? Do you think that wiretaps always result in only "bad guys" getting caught? There are always going to be false positives. If 1% of wiretaps result in false positives (I'd wager the number is quite a bit higher), how many people get unjustly arrested, detained, or otherwise hassled? If only 10 people get wiretapped, possibly none. If 10000 people get wiretapped, then 100 will be unjustly interrogated. Honestly, if you can't think of any reasons why privacy is important, then you're not trying very hard. You could probably plug "why is privacy important" into any search engine and get a lot more reasons than the ones I listed.
    - dennisgorelik 15y ago
      1) No wasting effort on oversight until somebody complain. 2) 10000 wiretaps are likely to generate some leaks and complaints, and dealing with these complaints costs effort and money. So smarter agencies would avoid pointless wiretaps or would shred wiretaps soon after it's clear that they don't produce anything useful. Dumber agencies would be dissolved. 3) I personally don't suffer much from limited right to travel. Especially now, when Internet communications are so efficient. But I know that for many businesses and political organizations travel is important. Limited travel makes such organizations less efficient. That said, limited travel is also not the top issue unlike freedom of speech and freedom from false arrests. 4) Now, to the core of your lapse in judgement: It's a serious mistake to assume that percent of false positives does not depend on amount of surveillance. With zero surveillance, percent of false positive arrests is indistinguishable from percent of innocent citizens in the society (that is ~99%). Massive and effective surveillance allows to move that percent of false positives down to almost zero. The constant here is the number of arrests (e.g. 100), and not percent of false positives as you claim. So if percent of false positives declines, then number of false arrests declines too. Regarding your suggestion to use privacy as a tool to cripple government - that does not make much sense, because if you want to cripple government, just don't give it money and it will weaken to the level of your desire. However the consequence here is that crippled government cannot properly deliver what it was designed to deliver (e.g. law enforcement). 5) Searching for "why is privacy important" shows that major concerns about privacy are not really related to government.

dpark 15y ago

1) Your logic only makes sense if you assume that the rate of wiretaps is unchanged by the legal status of wiretapping. This seems a rather implausible situation. If wiretapping X, Y, and Z is legal, then it's easier to hide an illegal wiretap of W. When there are more legal wiretaps, it's easier for illegal wiretaps to slip through. The cost of oversight isn't dominated by the number of illegal wiretaps. It dominated by the number of legal wiretaps, because each of those needs to be reviewed. 2) No, it's not worth trying. Surveillance agencies have been saying that forever, and they've not delivered on their promise. Your beliefs seem to exist in some strange world where agencies are actually held accountable. So long as we don't live in that world, your ideas make no sense. 3) We will not agree on this. You simply don't value privacy. I do, and I think you're really naive about this.

dennisgorelik 15y ago
1) Why review every single wiretap? Only wiretaps that resulted in problems need to be reviewed (e.g. some of my private info was used against me, so my lawyer would be reviewing if the wiretap was legal and would file civil suit for damages against wiretapping agency if it was illegal). 2) Are you saying that agencies without surveillance capabilities would be performing no worse than they are performing now? 3) I wish you could show me real dangers of limited privacy. But so far all your examples of surveillance abuse included government agencies doing something illegal.
- dpark 15y ago
  1) So basically no oversight at all until someone sues? I'm sure that will go well. 2) No. I'm saying that "more surveillance" does not imply "more effective". It's true that intelligence gathering is useful. It's not true that arbitrarily spying on everyone is useful. If you do 10 targeted wiretaps and get 5 actionable leads, that's useful. If you do 10000 arbitrary wiretaps and get 5 actionable leads, it's a pointless loss of privacy and an abuse of power. 3) I wish you would show me real dangers of limited right to travel.... Putting that aside, I'm not sure why you're so dismissive of illegal abuses. That's kind of like saying you don't understand gun laws, because the only problems are with people doing something illegal. You might disagree with gun laws, but if that's the only reason why, then your opinion is rather shallow. Abuses are a significant issue. You should be worried about abuses happening, and you should be worried about them going unpunished. We see this stuff all the time already. It's borderline delusional to think this doesn't or won't happen with wiretaps. Beyond that, privacy is in many ways protected for the same reasons as speech. If you can speak against a government, you can fight it (at least in theory). Likewise, private communication can be necessary to effectively fight the government. Want to stage a surprise protest? You'll probably be more effective if you aren't being listened to by the police. Or if speaking publicly is dangerous (because the government is restricting speech or because fellow citizens find your views unpalatable) privacy will allow you to speak at least to a select audience. For one more reason, when you have the NSA mining everyone's communications for keywords, do you think there are no false alarms? Do you think that wiretaps always result in only "bad guys" getting caught? There are always going to be false positives. If 1% of wiretaps result in false positives (I'd wager the number is quite a bit higher), how many people get unjustly arrested, detained, or otherwise hassled? If only 10 people get wiretapped, possibly none. If 10000 people get wiretapped, then 100 will be unjustly interrogated. Honestly, if you can't think of any reasons why privacy is important, then you're not trying very hard. You could probably plug "why is privacy important" into any search engine and get a lot more reasons than the ones I listed.
  - dennisgorelik 15y ago
    1) No wasting effort on oversight until somebody complain. 2) 10000 wiretaps are likely to generate some leaks and complaints, and dealing with these complaints costs effort and money. So smarter agencies would avoid pointless wiretaps or would shred wiretaps soon after it's clear that they don't produce anything useful. Dumber agencies would be dissolved. 3) I personally don't suffer much from limited right to travel. Especially now, when Internet communications are so efficient. But I know that for many businesses and political organizations travel is important. Limited travel makes such organizations less efficient. That said, limited travel is also not the top issue unlike freedom of speech and freedom from false arrests. 4) Now, to the core of your lapse in judgement: It's a serious mistake to assume that percent of false positives does not depend on amount of surveillance. With zero surveillance, percent of false positive arrests is indistinguishable from percent of innocent citizens in the society (that is ~99%). Massive and effective surveillance allows to move that percent of false positives down to almost zero. The constant here is the number of arrests (e.g. 100), and not percent of false positives as you claim. So if percent of false positives declines, then number of false arrests declines too. Regarding your suggestion to use privacy as a tool to cripple government - that does not make much sense, because if you want to cripple government, just don't give it money and it will weaken to the level of your desire. However the consequence here is that crippled government cannot properly deliver what it was designed to deliver (e.g. law enforcement). 5) Searching for "why is privacy important" shows that major concerns about privacy are not really related to government.