3 ms·

By your logic, why shouldn't Americans worry much more about E. coli than NSA surveillance? What evidence do we have from Snowden (or elsewhere) that NSA survei

By your logic, why shouldn't Americans worry much more about E. coli than NSA surveillance? What evidence do we have from Snowden (or elsewhere) that NSA surveillance has killed or even harmed anyone in the US? You can feel "terrorized" that the NSA might use its powers for great evil, but to the average voter that probably seems less likely than one or a series of high casualty attacks by foreign nationals. I don't want to get into an argument about how we're all deeply harmed whenever laws are violated, and especially when the powerful can violate them at will. Sure. But the mortality rate argument is a loser: The public and policy makers will never make these kinds of serious decisions based only on a death toll. If they did, we'd have banned passenger cars decades ago.

mikeash 13y ago
I think people should, in fact, prioritize e. coli over NSA overreach. Worrying about being spied on is the sort of high-end top-of-the-Maslow-hierarchy luxury you can indulge in after you have reliable access to good food and such. That's not to say that I don't think it's serious. But food safety is much more fundamental. No, decisions will not be made based purely on death toll. But we must demand some sort of rational basis, and when it comes to terrorism, there is none.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  You can't come up with half a dozen ways in which Verizon's phone records would be useful to prevent or analyze terrorist attacks? #1 for me would be training pattern recognition and social graph generation algorithms on real data. That sounds like a pretty rational basis for getting that data to me. Whether its value is a good tradeoff vs. the resulting privacy concerns is a good debate to have, but surely the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events? The Marathon bombings alone caused more havoc than a typical e. coli outbreak, even if everyone had stood up, shrugged, and gone about the rest of their Monday afternoon business without a care for their attackers.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Why does the government have a responsibility to prevent mass casualty events more than preventing lots of individual casualty events? And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized.
    - twoodfin 13y ago
      Why does the government have a responsibility to prevent mass casualty events more than preventing lots of individual casualty events? I think most citizens would like it to do both when the tradeoffs required make sense. And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized. I don't understand how you expect a bomb going off in a large crowd to fail to cause havoc, no matter how sanguine people are about it. If something like the Boston bombing were happening once a month, people would rightfully be pretty agitated. Yes, more people are killed and maimed daily by automobiles, but people are not being irrational when they fail to be "terrorized" and demand the government ban automobiles. They understand perfectly well that banning automobiles would have a cost greater than the benefit. They support NHTSA's role in making automobiles safer, because that tradeoff makes sense. Another tradeoff that makes sense to a lot of people is letting the NSA run data analysis on phone call databases to try to identify attackers both before and after the fact. The cost to them seems minimal vs. preventing or capturing the perpetrators of even one attack.
      - mikeash 13y ago
        You sure sound like you agree with me here. If I understand you correctly, you're basically saying that people have decided, based on the information available and the priorities they have, that the government's reaction to terrorism is what they want. They think the tradeoffs in terms of civil liberties and government spending are worthwhile. And I agree, they DO think that! But that does not translate into "the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events". If the people decided that policy for terrorism should be more like policy for cars than policy for threatening foreign powers, then the government should follow suit. There's no implicit responsibility to treat some causes of death differently. As I said way up in my original comment, the problem here is the people themselves. We must convince the public to take a more rational approach to terrorism, one in which the effort expended in countering it compared to the potential threat it poses is more in line with the ratio dedicated to other threats. One part where we disagree is where you say that people would "rightfully be pretty agitated" with one Boston bombing a month. Would people be "rightfully agitated" if a similar number of deaths and injuries was happening in Boston every month, but spread out across the entire month? Because I'm pretty sure that's the case, but most people don't get agitated, and we tend to think that those who do get agitated at the daily grind of death and mayhem that makes up life are a bit insane.

mikeash 13y ago

I think people should, in fact, prioritize e. coli over NSA overreach. Worrying about being spied on is the sort of high-end top-of-the-Maslow-hierarchy luxury you can indulge in after you have reliable access to good food and such. That's not to say that I don't think it's serious. But food safety is much more fundamental. No, decisions will not be made based purely on death toll. But we must demand some sort of rational basis, and when it comes to terrorism, there is none.

twoodfin 13y ago
You can't come up with half a dozen ways in which Verizon's phone records would be useful to prevent or analyze terrorist attacks? #1 for me would be training pattern recognition and social graph generation algorithms on real data. That sounds like a pretty rational basis for getting that data to me. Whether its value is a good tradeoff vs. the resulting privacy concerns is a good debate to have, but surely the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events? The Marathon bombings alone caused more havoc than a typical e. coli outbreak, even if everyone had stood up, shrugged, and gone about the rest of their Monday afternoon business without a care for their attackers.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Why does the government have a responsibility to prevent mass casualty events more than preventing lots of individual casualty events? And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    Why does the government have a responsibility to prevent mass casualty events more than preventing lots of individual casualty events? I think most citizens would like it to do both when the tradeoffs required make sense. And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized. I don't understand how you expect a bomb going off in a large crowd to fail to cause havoc, no matter how sanguine people are about it. If something like the Boston bombing were happening once a month, people would rightfully be pretty agitated. Yes, more people are killed and maimed daily by automobiles, but people are not being irrational when they fail to be "terrorized" and demand the government ban automobiles. They understand perfectly well that banning automobiles would have a cost greater than the benefit. They support NHTSA's role in making automobiles safer, because that tradeoff makes sense. Another tradeoff that makes sense to a lot of people is letting the NSA run data analysis on phone call databases to try to identify attackers both before and after the fact. The cost to them seems minimal vs. preventing or capturing the perpetrators of even one attack.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      You sure sound like you agree with me here. If I understand you correctly, you're basically saying that people have decided, based on the information available and the priorities they have, that the government's reaction to terrorism is what they want. They think the tradeoffs in terms of civil liberties and government spending are worthwhile. And I agree, they DO think that! But that does not translate into "the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events". If the people decided that policy for terrorism should be more like policy for cars than policy for threatening foreign powers, then the government should follow suit. There's no implicit responsibility to treat some causes of death differently. As I said way up in my original comment, the problem here is the people themselves. We must convince the public to take a more rational approach to terrorism, one in which the effort expended in countering it compared to the potential threat it poses is more in line with the ratio dedicated to other threats. One part where we disagree is where you say that people would "rightfully be pretty agitated" with one Boston bombing a month. Would people be "rightfully agitated" if a similar number of deaths and injuries was happening in Boston every month, but spread out across the entire month? Because I'm pretty sure that's the case, but most people don't get agitated, and we tend to think that those who do get agitated at the daily grind of death and mayhem that makes up life are a bit insane.