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Kind of funny when you think about it. We all love to complain about how inefficient the government is... and then we love to complain about how efficient they

Kind of funny when you think about it. We all love to complain about how inefficient the government is... and then we love to complain about how efficient they try to be.

roc 13y ago
It's not about the efficiency itself. It's about the constitutional questions that were punted, back when inefficiency made them implausible and thus unnecessary to consider. So it's not the increased efficiency itself, it's that the efficiency has put the problems we tried to ignore directly in front of us. And thus we can't sit back and allow "logical extension of the old system" as justification for allowing it, because, again, the old system was only allowed because the scale necessary for abuse was implausible at the time.
saraid216 13y ago
The government is the enemy. A lot of people couldn't properly live with themselves if they ceased to believe this. There would be a libertarian-shaped hole in their hearts.
noarchy 13y ago
It appears that they excel at bad things (fining us, taxing us, conducting wars, etc).
__--__ 13y ago
That's because in this case and many other cases, "efficient" is another way to say "completely bypass the legal system." People want the government to make itself more efficient, not completely bypass the civil protections we have in place.
- freehunter 13y ago
  A drone giving a ticket in exactly the same manner as a cop giving a ticket is not really bypassing the legal system. As long as you're able to contest it, it's exactly the same.
  - jack-r-abbit 13y ago
    My thought too. If one plane with a person in it is not bypassing the legal system, then 2 should be fine. And 10? Or 100? Scale should not have anything to do with whether the legal system is bypassed or not. Either none can do something or all can do something.
    - tanderson11 13y ago
      The notion that scale is irrelevant in terms of surveillance operations fails to recognize serious issues raised by the advent of new technologies. In the past, actual manpower has been a meaningful limit on the size of surveillance operations. The government simply cannot have every person in the country be monitored and watched. Instead - theoretically - the government only has enough resources to surveil those who it actually suspects of a crime. I direct you to Justice Sotomayor's insightful concurring opinion on United States vs. Jones: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing-10-1259_CONCUR_4 http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing... These quotes, in particular, are extremely releveant. -- "And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: 'limited police resources and community hostility.'" -- "The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may 'alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.'" -- In my view, this opinion sheds much needed light on how the perception that technology and scale does not influence the legality and constitutionality of government practice fails. As a footnote, Sotomayor also discusses privacy in a digital age, and she provides a refreshing outlook on how new technologies can force a society to re-think its beliefs on the expectation of privacy. -- "More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties . . . This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."

Kind of funny when you think about it. We all love to complain about how inefficient the government is... and then we love to complain about how efficient they try to be.

roc 13y ago

It's not about the efficiency itself. It's about the constitutional questions that were punted, back when inefficiency made them implausible and thus unnecessary to consider. So it's not the increased efficiency itself, it's that the efficiency has put the problems we tried to ignore directly in front of us. And thus we can't sit back and allow "logical extension of the old system" as justification for allowing it, because, again, the old system was only allowed because the scale necessary for abuse was implausible at the time.

saraid216 13y ago

The government is the enemy. A lot of people couldn't properly live with themselves if they ceased to believe this. There would be a libertarian-shaped hole in their hearts.

noarchy 13y ago

It appears that they excel at bad things (fining us, taxing us, conducting wars, etc).

__--__ 13y ago

That's because in this case and many other cases, "efficient" is another way to say "completely bypass the legal system." People want the government to make itself more efficient, not completely bypass the civil protections we have in place.

freehunter 13y ago
A drone giving a ticket in exactly the same manner as a cop giving a ticket is not really bypassing the legal system. As long as you're able to contest it, it's exactly the same.
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  My thought too. If one plane with a person in it is not bypassing the legal system, then 2 should be fine. And 10? Or 100? Scale should not have anything to do with whether the legal system is bypassed or not. Either none can do something or all can do something.
  - tanderson11 13y ago
    The notion that scale is irrelevant in terms of surveillance operations fails to recognize serious issues raised by the advent of new technologies. In the past, actual manpower has been a meaningful limit on the size of surveillance operations. The government simply cannot have every person in the country be monitored and watched. Instead - theoretically - the government only has enough resources to surveil those who it actually suspects of a crime. I direct you to Justice Sotomayor's insightful concurring opinion on United States vs. Jones: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing-10-1259_CONCUR_4 http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing... These quotes, in particular, are extremely releveant. -- "And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: 'limited police resources and community hostility.'" -- "The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may 'alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.'" -- In my view, this opinion sheds much needed light on how the perception that technology and scale does not influence the legality and constitutionality of government practice fails. As a footnote, Sotomayor also discusses privacy in a digital age, and she provides a refreshing outlook on how new technologies can force a society to re-think its beliefs on the expectation of privacy. -- "More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties . . . This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."