Distinction without difference: one would have to actually explain how surveillance is applied and leveraged differently across jurisdictions, allowing us to sub-divide into "good surveillance" and "bad surveillance", two different things.
Otherwise, we're talking about the inherit good-or-bad nature of surveillance as a whole and, thus, using the character of those applying it is irrelevant and contradictory.
The fact that many contradictory ideas are widely held or, at least, broadcast from the tallest proverbial hills, doesn't change the fact that they are contradictory. One thing all living generations seem to agree on is that politicians talk out of both sides of their mouth.
> one would have to actually explain how surveillance is applied and leveraged differently across jurisdictions, allowing us to sub-divide into "good surveillance" and "bad surveillance", two different things.
You mean like... having laws written down by elected leaders and then having judges who are accountable to the electorate to evaluate specific instances...?
I mean examples in-practice of such a system being used for anything other than mass surveillance of citizens which flouts their constitutional and human rights.
>having laws written down by elected leaders
The EU commission is not elected by public vote.
>judges who are accountable to the electorate
Judges are not elected by public vote.
edit: neither are the think tanks, NGOs, and array of well-paid experts who tend to both guide legislation and/or justify it to the public. This discussion can go in circles indefinitely as long as you continue to ignore reality and defer back to abstract principles and the _stated_ values & goals of the regime.
There are no cases where slavery is good, regardless of who does it or who it's done to. The same goes for genocide, murder, robbery and so on.
The ethic of reciprocity asks you to accept that "X harms Y" is the same as "Y harms X", while the totalitarian propaganda satirised in 1984 asks you to think of "them" and "us" and justifies immorality by claimimg it will benefit "us" and/or harm "them". The same theme ran through Animal Farm as well ("some animals are more equal than others").
It's still say it's doublethink to want to apply surveillance to some group of people but not others.
> There are no cases where slavery is good, regardless of who does it or who it's done to. The same goes for genocide, murder, robbery and so on.
Have you heard of prisons? We use a different word for it so as to not introduce the (obviously false) semantic "contradiction".
Perhaps if you want to say that forced labor is bad even after conviction, then let's say "kidnapping is bad when done by bad people, kidnapping is good when done by good people [to bad people]". Ta-da, you've invented prison.
"Surveillance-by-bad-people is bad. Surveillance-by-good-people is good."
We accept this for almost everything in society, FWIW. "Enslavement-by-bad-people is bad. Enslavement-by-good-people (i.e. of bad people) is good."
The moral valence of almost everything is conditional upon who is doing the action and why they're doing it.
You need better a better argument than that it's contradictory.