> Why can't the powers that be just leave the people to live their lives in peace without being snooped on by the surveillance apparatus?
The very microsecond that some tragedy befalls the populace, the very first thing people start screaming about is how pathetic the government is for not knowing about the tragedy in advance and preventing it.
We don't live in 1923. We live in 2023. You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram. We, the tech nerds and libertarians obsessed with privacy and the freedom to do whatever we want, have been fermenting a technological arms race for decades. The more bullet-proof encryption we create, the more the government has to encroach on our privacy to do the thing we require them to do: keep us safe from the real threats that do actually exist in the world, and hide among us.
If you want more privacy, paradoxically, the best thing would be to actually give up some privacy. Telephones and letter mail have been automatically scanned for like 50 years, and this doesn't seem to concern us, and was good enough for intelligence services that they didn't need to collect anything more. So we could stop sending all our communications with bulletproof encryption. We could give the federal government a bypass. Allow the security services to peek under the covers. If we give them some leeway, they won't feel the need to compromise all privacy and security. But if you give them nothing, they literally have no other recourse but to compromise everything, because they don't know where to look and they have no leads.
Nobody wants the government snooping on them. But if you really can't handle any level of surveillance at all, tell your elected officials you no longer want any federal or state intelligence services, and deal with the consequences. When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it. You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.
> You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram.
So you... put some secret agents on Telegram to infiltrate the terrorists. In the same way as you got into the room with them before people had portable phones. You bug their phones in the same way as you used to bug their rooms -- through physical access. Which is effective but expensive, and so it works against terrorists and serious criminals but not for mass surveillance.
> When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it.
If we actually had sufficiently secure communications to ward off our own intelligence agencies, why would some other country's have any more luck? Preventing theirs from working against us is good.
Technically shouldn't be happening? Also, probably shouldn't be happening period. Every time it does, Stuff Goes Wrong (tm).
I think the relevant Franklin quote was: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
> When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it.
I don't quite understand your logic. My naive intuition says that applying the strongest possible security posture in all aspects of society will lead to the society being at its most secure.
I'm aware that sometimes seemingly counter-intuitive things hold. If you state that weakening civilian security might somehow strengthen overall security, you may somehow be correct. But you're not quite connecting the dots for me here yet?
> The very microsecond that some tragedy befalls the populace, the very first thing people start screaming about is how pathetic the government is for not knowing about the tragedy in advance and preventing it.
I agree with you that is true but is there any proof that even if all telecommunications were open completely to the governments, it would be possible to stop every incoming attacks/tragedies?
Because that is the current justification that is being used now. Oh if only we could see your Whats-app messages, then we'll be able to stop these horrors. I am not inclined to agree that this would solve anything at all.
Notwithstanding the umber of false positives that this system would generate, there is no risk zero.
> We don't live in 1923. We live in 2023. You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram. We, the tech nerds and libertarians obsessed with privacy and the freedom to do whatever we want, have been fermenting a technological arms race for decades. The more bullet-proof encryption we create, the more the government has to encroach on our privacy to do the thing we require them to do: keep us safe from the real threats that do actually exist in the world, and hide among us.
This argument does not make sense.
We accept a certain level of risk that is inherent to living in a modern civilization.
We don't ban cars even though the damage they do to people each year is infinitely greater than terrorist attacks. How many people have died of terrorist activities in the last year vs the number of people who have been killed/maimed by reckless/ drunk drivers?
So on this basis alone, if we aim at reducing the global number of preventable deaths, then banning cars would be the best thing to do.
> If you want more privacy, paradoxically, the best thing would be to actually give up some privacy. Telephones and letter mail have been automatically scanned for like 50 years, and this doesn't seem to concern us, and was good enough for intelligence services that they didn't need to collect anything more. So we could stop sending all our communications with bulletproof encryption. We could give the federal government a bypass. Allow the security services to peek under the covers. If we give them some leeway, they won't feel the need to compromise all privacy and security. But if you give them nothing, they literally have no other recourse but to compromise everything, because they don't know where to look and they have no leads.
This solution only works if the government that is doing the monitoring decides to keep it's pinky promise that it won't use this info to get rid of political dissidents or groups of people that are not acceptable/needed anymore.
Is there any reason to believe that a government that gets all this data would use it only for the good of its citizen and not to target certain populations?
Is there any reason to believe that this data would be kept from being shared without consent?
If we look at the last century of history, any time a government has been granted such access, it used it to the detriment of it's citizen and kept themselves in power trough coercion and threats targeting any one who dared resist them.
So forgive me for not wanting to share even more of my private life with someone would may use it later against me.
Finally, we both know that there is no such thing as backdoor for the good guys only, if it exist it will be exploited by foreign actors as soon as possible.
> Nobody wants the government snooping on them. But if you really can't handle any level of surveillance at all, tell your elected officials you no longer want any federal or state intelligence services, and deal with the consequences. When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it. You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.
This is straw-man argument. Just like the argument about saving the children now. So you don't want to have the government read all your messages, and watch your private conversations, surely you must be a child abuser or a friend of the terrorists. Give me break.
More to the point of your comment, how would opening my private life to the government protect my country from being targeted by a foreign government?
> You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.
And that was exactly my point about the coming out with it already. It seems that the governments in the Western world are hellbent on making sure that they are perceived as freedom loving, democracy loving states. This stance comes with all the posturing regarding China and Russia when in fact they dream to have the same access.
So why the charade? Let's call a spade a spade.
If you want access to every thing I read, every single thing I type, every image I share, then this is not freedom. This is a digital prison and I would very much appreciate it if they could stop lying to our faces and be honest about it.
The very microsecond that some tragedy befalls the populace, the very first thing people start screaming about is how pathetic the government is for not knowing about the tragedy in advance and preventing it.
We don't live in 1923. We live in 2023. You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram. We, the tech nerds and libertarians obsessed with privacy and the freedom to do whatever we want, have been fermenting a technological arms race for decades. The more bullet-proof encryption we create, the more the government has to encroach on our privacy to do the thing we require them to do: keep us safe from the real threats that do actually exist in the world, and hide among us.
If you want more privacy, paradoxically, the best thing would be to actually give up some privacy. Telephones and letter mail have been automatically scanned for like 50 years, and this doesn't seem to concern us, and was good enough for intelligence services that they didn't need to collect anything more. So we could stop sending all our communications with bulletproof encryption. We could give the federal government a bypass. Allow the security services to peek under the covers. If we give them some leeway, they won't feel the need to compromise all privacy and security. But if you give them nothing, they literally have no other recourse but to compromise everything, because they don't know where to look and they have no leads.
Nobody wants the government snooping on them. But if you really can't handle any level of surveillance at all, tell your elected officials you no longer want any federal or state intelligence services, and deal with the consequences. When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it. You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.