4 ms·

1) No wasting effort on oversight until somebody complain. 2) 10000 wiretaps are likely to generate some leaks and complaints, and dealing with these complaint

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) This means no oversight, which means that abuse is unbounded. Your idea would result in an eventual scandal when one detected abuse resulted in thousands more coming to light. Really, what you're saying is that wiretaps should be unlimited, because that's what a lack of oversight implies. 2) You live in a fantasy world. Sure, in a perfect world, agencies would be smart, but in a perfect world we wouldn't be debating which rights are most important, because a perfect government wouldnt be taking them away. In our real world, 1000 wiretaps probably mean 2000 or more weeks of wasted government employee time. 3) Ugh. Let's try again. Why is freedom of speech so important? What can you realistically say that restricted speech does to you? 4) This is just dumb. Your argument here is that everyone is presumed guilty until a wiretap proves otherwise. That's not how our legal system works. As for your "just don't give them money", why don't you try that and let me know how it goes. 5) You can't be serious. How are concerns about governmental privacy invasions not about the government?
- dennisgorelik 15y ago
  1) You are now saying that if government does not constantly watching you then your potential abuse is unbounded. Isn't it ironic? 2) It does not make sense to count number of agencies wiretaps in order to save budget. In order to save budget you just give less money to the agencies that do not deliver. 3) Freedom of speech is important, because without such freedom society tends to make wrong decisions (such as supporting abusive totalitarian governments). 4) I'd suggest you to think about how email spam detection works and what improves detection ratio. Dragging "innocent until proven guilty" principle into such detection system is incorrect, because decision if person is innocent or guilty is made after initial arrest, not before. 5) Most privacy concerns are about Facebook etc., not about government. BTW, I wasn't able to find a good answer to the question "why privacy is important". Were you able to?
  - dpark 15y ago
    1) That's not what I said at all. For someone who likes to throw the term "straw man" at others, you certainly seem to enjoy constructing them. First, I did not say constant. There's a lot of ground between no oversight (as you paropose) and constant oversight (which you pretend is the only alternative). Second, I was talking about oversight of government wiretaps, not oversight of citizens' lives. There's a rather significant different between eavesdropping and making sure that no one is eavesdropping. Third, the government does provide oversight for mine and everyone else's actions, and they do it even without wiretaps. They call it police work. The police provide oversight so that abuses are not unbounded. When you say that there should be no oversight for wiretapping until someone complains, the civilian parallel is that police should take no actions except in the face of reported crime. AKA, no crime prevention. Fifth, no, it's not ironic. 2) It's not an either-or situation. This is like saying that if you run a company, you shouldn't attempt to improve your divisions directly. Sure, if you've got a consistently-underperforming division, the right thing might be to let it go entirely. But that doesn't mean that acceptably-performing or even exceptionally-performing divisions cannot perform better. If a division is wasting money on stupid things, you can and should simply say "stop doing that". Firing everyone is not a net gain most of the time. (Especially in a world where every division is doing stupid things. Firing every government agency that wastes money is the same as disbanding the government.) 3) Wait, am I to understand that in your fantasy world where the government never abuses private information, they do restrict speech? The government that never blackmails because it's "illegal" will forbid speech, which is apparently not "illegal"? How do you seriously reconcile these views? How to you simultaneously believe in a government that will always do the right thing with respect to privacy and also a government that will restrict speech and enforce a totalitarian state? 4) If you want to compare email spam mitigation to wiretapping, then maybe you should realize that without spam filtering, false positives do not happen. Mail is not "presumed spam" in the case where no spam filtering takes place. On the other hand, with spam filtering, false positives are inevitable. And that's okay, so long as 1) the rate of false positives is sufficiently low, and 2) it's emails going in the spam folder and not humans going to jail. 5) You haven't tried looking very hard if the only privacy issues you can find are with Facebook. More to the point, if you dig in even a little bit, you'll see that many of the privacy concerns with Facebook are based on the fact that after Facebook collects everything possible about your personal life, the government can subpoena that info. And yes, I found many answers, some of which I already listed. If you land on the no-fly list because of something the government heard you say, that's an important problem. If a government agent blackmails you because of something they intercepted about you, that's an important problem. If you can't speak publicly against the government out of fear that they will leak sensitive information about you, that's an important problem. Stop pretending that privacy is not important. Or at least prove that you believe what you claim by publicly posting your full name, address, date of birth, employer, social security number, mother's maiden name, credit and debit card numbers with expiration dates and security codes, driver's license number, bank account numbers (with routing info, please), online account usernames and passwords, your present and past sexual partners, any diseases you or your immediate family have, and the last 5 years of tax returns. Absent that, I'm afraid your claim that privacy is not important is rather an obvious sham.

dpark 15y ago

1) This means no oversight, which means that abuse is unbounded. Your idea would result in an eventual scandal when one detected abuse resulted in thousands more coming to light. Really, what you're saying is that wiretaps should be unlimited, because that's what a lack of oversight implies. 2) You live in a fantasy world. Sure, in a perfect world, agencies would be smart, but in a perfect world we wouldn't be debating which rights are most important, because a perfect government wouldnt be taking them away. In our real world, 1000 wiretaps probably mean 2000 or more weeks of wasted government employee time. 3) Ugh. Let's try again. Why is freedom of speech so important? What can you realistically say that restricted speech does to you? 4) This is just dumb. Your argument here is that everyone is presumed guilty until a wiretap proves otherwise. That's not how our legal system works. As for your "just don't give them money", why don't you try that and let me know how it goes. 5) You can't be serious. How are concerns about governmental privacy invasions not about the government?

dennisgorelik 15y ago
1) You are now saying that if government does not constantly watching you then your potential abuse is unbounded. Isn't it ironic? 2) It does not make sense to count number of agencies wiretaps in order to save budget. In order to save budget you just give less money to the agencies that do not deliver. 3) Freedom of speech is important, because without such freedom society tends to make wrong decisions (such as supporting abusive totalitarian governments). 4) I'd suggest you to think about how email spam detection works and what improves detection ratio. Dragging "innocent until proven guilty" principle into such detection system is incorrect, because decision if person is innocent or guilty is made after initial arrest, not before. 5) Most privacy concerns are about Facebook etc., not about government. BTW, I wasn't able to find a good answer to the question "why privacy is important". Were you able to?
- dpark 15y ago
  1) That's not what I said at all. For someone who likes to throw the term "straw man" at others, you certainly seem to enjoy constructing them. First, I did not say constant. There's a lot of ground between no oversight (as you paropose) and constant oversight (which you pretend is the only alternative). Second, I was talking about oversight of government wiretaps, not oversight of citizens' lives. There's a rather significant different between eavesdropping and making sure that no one is eavesdropping. Third, the government does provide oversight for mine and everyone else's actions, and they do it even without wiretaps. They call it police work. The police provide oversight so that abuses are not unbounded. When you say that there should be no oversight for wiretapping until someone complains, the civilian parallel is that police should take no actions except in the face of reported crime. AKA, no crime prevention. Fifth, no, it's not ironic. 2) It's not an either-or situation. This is like saying that if you run a company, you shouldn't attempt to improve your divisions directly. Sure, if you've got a consistently-underperforming division, the right thing might be to let it go entirely. But that doesn't mean that acceptably-performing or even exceptionally-performing divisions cannot perform better. If a division is wasting money on stupid things, you can and should simply say "stop doing that". Firing everyone is not a net gain most of the time. (Especially in a world where every division is doing stupid things. Firing every government agency that wastes money is the same as disbanding the government.) 3) Wait, am I to understand that in your fantasy world where the government never abuses private information, they do restrict speech? The government that never blackmails because it's "illegal" will forbid speech, which is apparently not "illegal"? How do you seriously reconcile these views? How to you simultaneously believe in a government that will always do the right thing with respect to privacy and also a government that will restrict speech and enforce a totalitarian state? 4) If you want to compare email spam mitigation to wiretapping, then maybe you should realize that without spam filtering, false positives do not happen. Mail is not "presumed spam" in the case where no spam filtering takes place. On the other hand, with spam filtering, false positives are inevitable. And that's okay, so long as 1) the rate of false positives is sufficiently low, and 2) it's emails going in the spam folder and not humans going to jail. 5) You haven't tried looking very hard if the only privacy issues you can find are with Facebook. More to the point, if you dig in even a little bit, you'll see that many of the privacy concerns with Facebook are based on the fact that after Facebook collects everything possible about your personal life, the government can subpoena that info. And yes, I found many answers, some of which I already listed. If you land on the no-fly list because of something the government heard you say, that's an important problem. If a government agent blackmails you because of something they intercepted about you, that's an important problem. If you can't speak publicly against the government out of fear that they will leak sensitive information about you, that's an important problem. Stop pretending that privacy is not important. Or at least prove that you believe what you claim by publicly posting your full name, address, date of birth, employer, social security number, mother's maiden name, credit and debit card numbers with expiration dates and security codes, driver's license number, bank account numbers (with routing info, please), online account usernames and passwords, your present and past sexual partners, any diseases you or your immediate family have, and the last 5 years of tax returns. Absent that, I'm afraid your claim that privacy is not important is rather an obvious sham.