Defending American liberties often result in uncomfortable situations. For instance, defending free speech. To defend free speech, we often find ourselves having to seemingly defend truly awful things (depending on your personal ethics), because the principle of free speech overrides our feelings on a particular bit of speech; hate speech aside.
It’s not like the people against mass surveillance all want their kids to live in unsafe neighborhoods, or be blind to terrorist plots. But everything must be balanced within our set of liberties — and the American way of due process, etc, is purposefully skewed to protect individual rights and liberties.
This is why gun rights is such a hot button issue — some would like to see stricter regulations, because they feel unsafe sending their kids to school in a world of mass shootings. Others feel those restrictions place an undue burden on individual liberties afforded by the constitution.
When it comes to law enforcement, there is a lot of abuse of Power present in the system, which disproportionately affects people of color. Thus, there’s a very valid argument to be made that some of this tech is too dangerous in the hands of law enforcement, despite how much people of all political stripes want their families to be safe.
My aim here is to illuminate the differences in the arguments. I’m not trying to force my (admittedly liberal) point of view on the conversation, because HN isn’t really for politics. My goal here is to show how, despite politics, people can all desire safety for their family, and personal liberties, but have honest disagreements about the best way to achieve that.
It’s not like the people against mass surveillance all want their kids to live in unsafe neighborhoods, or be blind to terrorist plots. But everything must be balanced within our set of liberties — and the American way of due process, etc, is purposefully skewed to protect individual rights and liberties.
This is why gun rights is such a hot button issue — some would like to see stricter regulations, because they feel unsafe sending their kids to school in a world of mass shootings. Others feel those restrictions place an undue burden on individual liberties afforded by the constitution.
When it comes to law enforcement, there is a lot of abuse of Power present in the system, which disproportionately affects people of color. Thus, there’s a very valid argument to be made that some of this tech is too dangerous in the hands of law enforcement, despite how much people of all political stripes want their families to be safe.
My aim here is to illuminate the differences in the arguments. I’m not trying to force my (admittedly liberal) point of view on the conversation, because HN isn’t really for politics. My goal here is to show how, despite politics, people can all desire safety for their family, and personal liberties, but have honest disagreements about the best way to achieve that.