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"one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? " I h

"one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? " I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not. Giving total control to Stalin meant hundred of millions of Russians got murdered in terror, giving total power to Hitler or Mussolini from democracies meant the total destruction of Germany and Italy with millions dead.

hershel 13y ago
Stalin is a bad example. By forcing industrialization on the ussr, he has increased average life span of the population by something like 15 years ( measures in 1958) and enabled the ussr to defend itself against the Germany which saved countless lives, and increased living standards, education, female equality greatly. In his case, and the case of Chinese communism, it somewhat debatable whether a strong government is preferable.
- blub 13y ago
  Uh, Stalin is responsible for more suffering than possibly anyone in recent history. He probably killed more russian people than the german soldiers. His policies screwed up a significant part of the world for decades.
  - Theodores 13y ago
    He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism. These systems of government did not have all of the answers, however we now have free market economics everywhere with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo. We have not a lot of diversity in government, government is nowadays about managing a country rather than anything ideological. Some diversity is better even if other systems are not how one would want to live.
    - tspiteri 13y ago
      with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo This is not true, at least not in Europe. Most countries have some form of universal health care, and there are benefits for people who do not work, etc. That is more than vaguely socialist, and is definitely not taboo.
      - joshuapants 13y ago
        Those things are not inherently socialist, which is why you see capitalist countries embracing them. Socialism isn't a group of government policies, it's an economic system where there is not a profit motive and generally implies public or cooperative ownership. What you see in Scandinavia is not socialism, it's capitalism with welfare.
    - Touche 13y ago
      > He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism. You should read the things Lenin did, and the many more things he advocated doing. Read his pre-revolution material as well, he was one of the leading theorists. > These systems of government did not have all of the answers That's not true, read anything by Marx, Engels, Trotsky, or Lenin and not only did they have an answer for almost everything, they (especially the latter two) believed maximally that there is "only one way".
      - Theodores 13y ago
        I appreciate where you are coming from, however, from my childhood reading of Das Kapital I cannot recall a great deal about Peak Oil, the merits of a surveillance state and much else that is pertinent to today's world. That is what I mean by 'not having all the answers'.
- x0054 13y ago
  As someone borne in the USSR, I am sad that Stalin lived to an old age and died without suffering. If there is hell, I hope he is in it right now. I would further never trust any statistics from the old USSR. For instance, the communists were able to dramatically "reduce" infant mortality by simply not recording births until the first birthday, when the child became one. If you think Stalin was good for USSR you are an ignorant idiot. I am sorry to be so touchy on the subject, but Stalin killed more of my people than Hitler.
  - darkbot 13y ago
    While this might be true, as a European I'm eternally thankful for USSR saving us from the claws of nazi tyranny.
    - x0054 13y ago
      Soviet people laid down their lives to win WWII, then, after WWII a lot more Soviet people lost their lives due to the tyrannical rule of a completely insane and evil man. I don't even want to dive into the pros and cons of communism. The only point I am making is that Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head.
      - Ntrails 13y ago
        > Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head. ...as many important historians have said
    - blub 13y ago
      As a West European I presume. Because as a East European you would have ended up in the claws of Soviet tyranny for 50+ years and they made the nazis look like amateurs when it came to abuses and persecution.
  - hershel 13y ago
    I didn't mean no disrespect to the great pain that stalin inflicted. And my view is based upon this thread in reddit /r/askhistorians which is managed by professional historians and is generally a reliable source for historical analysis : http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxp7k/russia_historians_was_stalin_a_benefit_or_a/ce2cmft http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxp7k/russia...
- MaysonL 13y ago
  You ignore the damage Stalin did to the Russian armed forces with his paranoid purges. Russian defences would have been stronger, and fewer would have died, if Stalin had died a few decades earlier.
netcan 13y ago
I don't even think you need to go that far, with extreme examples of totalitarianism. I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on it is that the US is not under any meaningful threat of terrorism. 9/11 was big, but on the scale of decades it is still far down the likelihood list of violent ways an American may be harmed. Murder, Rape and other assaults are a reality too, a far more likely reality. The real "solution" is "ignore terrorism, it's not a big threat." That's contrary to human nature, but I think it is the most rational response.
- infruset 13y ago
  Even better: use all that money and intelligence, not to hunt down and kill people, not to invade countries, but to help make the world a better place. Then less people might dedicate their lives to killing American civilians.
- digitalengineer 13y ago
  Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN’s Samuel Burke. http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-killed-by-guns-than-by-terrorists/ http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-kill...
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument. Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizations. There are tens of thousands of people being killed every year in Syria, for example, at the hands of al qaeda or other terrorist aligned soldiers. There have been about ten thousand people killed every year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels in what is effectively a weird kind of civil war happening there. During the Iraq war and during the war in Chechnya terrorists and terrorist aligned fighters killed tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians. Moreover, very few people die every year from jet crashes. However, that low figure is due to a truly enormous amount of effort and resources put forth, probably in the trillions of dollars per year range, to keep air travel safe and reliable. That's the danger of using naive statistics and straight death-toll comparisons the way you are doing. Sure, more people are going to die from cheeseburgers than likely will ever die from terrorism. But A: overall that's a good thing, and B: it's not necessarily meaningful. More importantly, there are much more direct and more substantive attacks against NSA surveillance effectiveness, TSA screening, etc. For example, with regard to TSA screening it's notable that the TSA has not thwarted even one terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11. However, there are many documented accounts of TSA failures to prevent weapons of various sorts (knives, guns, even bombs) from getting on planes. And there have been attempted attacks on planes which the TSA did not stop but which passengers did. The case with regard to the ineffectuality of the NSA's surveillance efforts is even stronger. They put out a list of foiled plots where the NSA surveillance had some role and it is wall to wall bullshit. Most of the "plots" are little more than entrapment, and there appears to be no case at all where surveillance was the lynchpin that made the difference between shutting down a plot when that plot would have gone undetected without the surveillance data. Worse yet, there are several examples of cases, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, of outright incompetence where the FBI/NSA et al had a case handed to them on a golden platter and they screwed the pooch and let someone they were warned about end up murdering American civilians. And one has to wonder if those sorts of failures, which vastly outweigh the vast majority of phony "successes", happened because federal law enforcement agencies were too focused on this high-tech bullshit instead of actually doing their fucking jobs.
this_user 13y ago
> "I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not." You seemingly don't understand this abstract trade-off the correct way. Nowhere did anybody state that giving total power to the government would be the way to gain total security. You could just as well create a giant prison run by a private corporation and put every single citizen permanently in a cell. Then you'd have basically no freedom and almost total security without any government involvement.

hershel 13y ago

Stalin is a bad example. By forcing industrialization on the ussr, he has increased average life span of the population by something like 15 years ( measures in 1958) and enabled the ussr to defend itself against the Germany which saved countless lives, and increased living standards, education, female equality greatly. In his case, and the case of Chinese communism, it somewhat debatable whether a strong government is preferable.

blub 13y ago
Uh, Stalin is responsible for more suffering than possibly anyone in recent history. He probably killed more russian people than the german soldiers. His policies screwed up a significant part of the world for decades.
- Theodores 13y ago
  He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism. These systems of government did not have all of the answers, however we now have free market economics everywhere with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo. We have not a lot of diversity in government, government is nowadays about managing a country rather than anything ideological. Some diversity is better even if other systems are not how one would want to live.
  - tspiteri 13y ago
    with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo This is not true, at least not in Europe. Most countries have some form of universal health care, and there are benefits for people who do not work, etc. That is more than vaguely socialist, and is definitely not taboo.
    - joshuapants 13y ago
      Those things are not inherently socialist, which is why you see capitalist countries embracing them. Socialism isn't a group of government policies, it's an economic system where there is not a profit motive and generally implies public or cooperative ownership. What you see in Scandinavia is not socialism, it's capitalism with welfare.
  - Touche 13y ago
    > He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism. You should read the things Lenin did, and the many more things he advocated doing. Read his pre-revolution material as well, he was one of the leading theorists. > These systems of government did not have all of the answers That's not true, read anything by Marx, Engels, Trotsky, or Lenin and not only did they have an answer for almost everything, they (especially the latter two) believed maximally that there is "only one way".
    - Theodores 13y ago
      I appreciate where you are coming from, however, from my childhood reading of Das Kapital I cannot recall a great deal about Peak Oil, the merits of a surveillance state and much else that is pertinent to today's world. That is what I mean by 'not having all the answers'.
x0054 13y ago
As someone borne in the USSR, I am sad that Stalin lived to an old age and died without suffering. If there is hell, I hope he is in it right now. I would further never trust any statistics from the old USSR. For instance, the communists were able to dramatically "reduce" infant mortality by simply not recording births until the first birthday, when the child became one. If you think Stalin was good for USSR you are an ignorant idiot. I am sorry to be so touchy on the subject, but Stalin killed more of my people than Hitler.
- darkbot 13y ago
  While this might be true, as a European I'm eternally thankful for USSR saving us from the claws of nazi tyranny.
  - x0054 13y ago
    Soviet people laid down their lives to win WWII, then, after WWII a lot more Soviet people lost their lives due to the tyrannical rule of a completely insane and evil man. I don't even want to dive into the pros and cons of communism. The only point I am making is that Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head.
    - Ntrails 13y ago
      > Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head. ...as many important historians have said
  - blub 13y ago
    As a West European I presume. Because as a East European you would have ended up in the claws of Soviet tyranny for 50+ years and they made the nazis look like amateurs when it came to abuses and persecution.
- hershel 13y ago
  I didn't mean no disrespect to the great pain that stalin inflicted. And my view is based upon this thread in reddit /r/askhistorians which is managed by professional historians and is generally a reliable source for historical analysis : http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxp7k/russia_historians_was_stalin_a_benefit_or_a/ce2cmft http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxp7k/russia...
MaysonL 13y ago
You ignore the damage Stalin did to the Russian armed forces with his paranoid purges. Russian defences would have been stronger, and fewer would have died, if Stalin had died a few decades earlier.

netcan 13y ago

I don't even think you need to go that far, with extreme examples of totalitarianism. I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on it is that the US is not under any meaningful threat of terrorism. 9/11 was big, but on the scale of decades it is still far down the likelihood list of violent ways an American may be harmed. Murder, Rape and other assaults are a reality too, a far more likely reality. The real "solution" is "ignore terrorism, it's not a big threat." That's contrary to human nature, but I think it is the most rational response.

infruset 13y ago
Even better: use all that money and intelligence, not to hunt down and kill people, not to invade countries, but to help make the world a better place. Then less people might dedicate their lives to killing American civilians.
digitalengineer 13y ago
Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN’s Samuel Burke. http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-killed-by-guns-than-by-terrorists/ http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-kill...
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument. Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizations. There are tens of thousands of people being killed every year in Syria, for example, at the hands of al qaeda or other terrorist aligned soldiers. There have been about ten thousand people killed every year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels in what is effectively a weird kind of civil war happening there. During the Iraq war and during the war in Chechnya terrorists and terrorist aligned fighters killed tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians. Moreover, very few people die every year from jet crashes. However, that low figure is due to a truly enormous amount of effort and resources put forth, probably in the trillions of dollars per year range, to keep air travel safe and reliable. That's the danger of using naive statistics and straight death-toll comparisons the way you are doing. Sure, more people are going to die from cheeseburgers than likely will ever die from terrorism. But A: overall that's a good thing, and B: it's not necessarily meaningful. More importantly, there are much more direct and more substantive attacks against NSA surveillance effectiveness, TSA screening, etc. For example, with regard to TSA screening it's notable that the TSA has not thwarted even one terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11. However, there are many documented accounts of TSA failures to prevent weapons of various sorts (knives, guns, even bombs) from getting on planes. And there have been attempted attacks on planes which the TSA did not stop but which passengers did. The case with regard to the ineffectuality of the NSA's surveillance efforts is even stronger. They put out a list of foiled plots where the NSA surveillance had some role and it is wall to wall bullshit. Most of the "plots" are little more than entrapment, and there appears to be no case at all where surveillance was the lynchpin that made the difference between shutting down a plot when that plot would have gone undetected without the surveillance data. Worse yet, there are several examples of cases, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, of outright incompetence where the FBI/NSA et al had a case handed to them on a golden platter and they screwed the pooch and let someone they were warned about end up murdering American civilians. And one has to wonder if those sorts of failures, which vastly outweigh the vast majority of phony "successes", happened because federal law enforcement agencies were too focused on this high-tech bullshit instead of actually doing their fucking jobs.

this_user 13y ago

> "I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not." You seemingly don't understand this abstract trade-off the correct way. Nowhere did anybody state that giving total power to the government would be the way to gain total security. You could just as well create a giant prison run by a private corporation and put every single citizen permanently in a cell. Then you'd have basically no freedom and almost total security without any government involvement.