To make it short: Privacy is about protecting Democracy!
As the newest information, we see that we are not only spied on, but there are also stealth techniques to mute bothersome people. It can go thus far, that you will become jailed for something you did not do.
This way, anybody that becomes bothersome to mighty people (and I don't speak about any president here) can become a target. People that are against atomic plants or against chemical fertilizers, or against ... you name it.
This thing can become worse to the democratic nations than killing random people by drones.
Fact: the worlds biggest and most spectacular privacy-breaching operation is being run by veritably democratic states, the "west". It's not some evil dictator who dictates this, it's the majority of citizens who demands spying on the rest. Another fact is that there are no major (think, ukraine-size) protests about this anywhere.
My conclusion is that even democracy demands some privacy breach. Privacy may be protecting individual rights but it's not a prerequisite for democracy.
Given that many of these democracies arose in conditions of substantial individual privacy, your conclusion is unproven.
It could be equally true that democracies die from insufficient privacy, but it just takes more than a decade or so of massive invasive snooping. In particular, the surveillance apparatus may not yet have been sufficiently corrupted to be used as a source of political power.
I should note that the US had a previous wave of improper snooping [1] which was seen as a threat to democracy and fought off. It provided a lot of the legal restrictions that prevented massive surveillance up until 9/11 got Washington's undies in a bunch.
You follow two fallacies: The fallacy, that democracies will stay forever and that people in a democracy act democratic. Democracy is no virtue of its own.
"We can keep a Republic, or we will eventually end up with an Oligarchy - a tyranny of the elite." — Benjamin Franklin
Your best quote, because it shows, where we are today.
I am fully aware, that when we talk democracy in such forums as here, we all have our own artificial picture of democracy in mind, that is not the same as democracy in its genuine sense.
I would be very interested in seeing the source of the quotations from Jefferson and Franklin. "Mob rule" and "elite" do not at all sound like the expression of their day.
For the latter yes, why call it a democracy if the majority of people people don't act democratically, the opposite would be absurd. I didn't claim the former at all.
Now, I hate to invoke this, but... Hitler was democratically elected.
And, to be fair, he did completely follow through on his pre-election promises. He might be the only democratically elected leader to not waver from the plan he laid out before he got elected to power.
That still doesn't mean it was a good idea.
Edit: I don't mean "the sheeple will elect whoever has better PR"; I mean that under specific social and economic conditions electing Hitler starts to seem like a good idea to normal, rational individuals. Same as with taking away privacy.
Except he wasn't, at least not in the usual sense of a party winning the majority of votes in an election. NSDAP was insignificant in the parliament, and Hitler became the chancellor through backdoor deals with industrial tycoons. His coming to power is great example of how to subvert parliamentary process (and in fact how it's regulary subverted only without the catastrophic consequences that it had in Germany's case) in a legal way.
He didn't waver from the plan, that's true, but the thing is, no significant number of people ever voted for the plan either.
"no true scotsman" only applies when you are attempting to continually redefine something after the fact, it has nothing to do with the claims made here.
There are very few (if any) states that practice true democracy in its purest form (i.e. every decision is voted on by every person in the state). It is an ideal like pure capitalism that you can get very close to but not emulate.
The problem here is that there's no such thing as a "fundamental right". All we have is government and our legal framework; nothing about what we can or can't do exists outside of that[1]. Philosophers have looked at this many times[2], and none have managed to come up with a satisfactory definition of 'rights' that works. Consequently all we have to work with when it comes to saying what we can do, what we have the 'right' to do, and perhaps more importantly what the government can do, is the law. Really, the problem is that governments are tasked with limiting their own power over us; surrendering power is something that very few people are good at.
[1] There's morals and ethics, but that's what you should do rather than what you can do.
[2] If you're interested, I highly recommend reading about Jeremy Bentham who wrote about the topic more than 200 years ago: http://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/#SH5b
This runs contrary to how modern governments claim the origin of their power (at least the USA). It's largely based on the work done by John Locke in "Two Treatises of Government", as well as other enlightenment thinkers. The theory is that one man has no absolute domain over another in a state of nature because one can always find a way to kill anyone else, even if we have to wait for them to sleep. A social contract is essentially the pooling of your right of self defence and some property, which allows some in society to focus on defence (government), leaving the rest free to participate in social and economic engagements. However, the government can only claim the rights you've consented to handing over (explicitly or tacitly). In the US, we explicitly consented to representatives through elections who ratified the Constitution with that consent. Therefore, every action the federal government takes MUST have foundation in the Constitution. Anything without that foundation is a violation of your rights (eg, Obama can't order a citizen to shine his shoes, because there is no origin of that power in the Constitution).
Are there holes? Sure. But to say that none have come up with a satisfactory definition is subjective, and many would strongly disagree.
I am not interested in, what philosophers say or what the government says, or even what the law books say.
It is just obvious to me, that living together (and that is basically what laws, governments etc. are all about) is only possible and can last, when some fundamentals are respected. One of them is privacy (this becomes more and more obvious in the digital age).
I absolutely agree with you - that's the same society that I want to live in. The notion of 'rights' won't get us that society though. The only way to get there is to elect governments that understand what we want, respect what we want, pass laws to make what we want happen, and ultimately realise that those laws also apply to what the government itself does.
While people believe that they have privacy by virtue of something outside of the law and government, they're never actually going to have privacy.
The problem is, that from time to time, people have to stand up for their rights -- either by voting or by other means -- to change the behavior of governments.
What did Benjamin Franklin write:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
That is not only an inheritance for governments but also for all societies that want to be free. Freedom is not something to be inherited or some "virtue" you have by be born in the right country, but something that must be fought for in daily practice ... by everybody. Else, we will loose it. And we in the western countries are at the verge.
John Locke (who hugely influenced Jeremy Bentham) makes a strong case for the existence of certain universal, inalienable natural rights, entirely independent of any particular legal system, government, or culture.
They're not particularly strong arguments unless you are already convinced of the conclusions. "Natural law" (constraints) can be demonstrated to be necessary for societal functioning, but they don't extend to "natural rights". That is, a societal necessity to prohibit unsanctioned killing of its members does not in any way imply a right to life. And the idea that the natural state of humanity is the lone savage is entirely unfounded (and contrary to all evidence dating back as far as we can manage it); it's merely a convenient way to begin an argument that ends up "proving" its own unfounded premises.
> There's morals and ethics, but that's what you should do rather than what you can do.
Ethics is also in the realm of what one can do. Civil disobedience is critical in rejecting tyranny. First comes mental freedom. Then comes knowledge. Then comes action. This is how systems are destroyed, changed, and built anew. It's detrimental to the human mind to stay mentally incapacitated by a particular system's arbitrary framework of laws at a point in time. The extent of a person's thought need not be limited and shall always supersede everything external (e.g. governments).
Fundamental rights don't exist in a tangible sense. I'd agree. However, they're healthy intellectual notions that exist. They compel people to dismantle or change current societal models in ways that demand going beyond the suppression of a "legal" realm.
Privacy in this case can be replaced with "anonymity", too. The less free speech a country has, the more important anonymity is. But even in super free speech-friendly countries anonymity can be important to hide from the judgement of the masses who might "not get it" because of the status quo culture or whatever.
Sometimes ideas can take years to develop and make their way into a culture. If a person is attacked the moment he wants to plant the seed of an idea, either by the status quo-loving crowd or his or her own government, then progress will happen much more slowly.
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.
Anonymity is a special case of privacy. Privacy is the ability to control how much you reveal about yourself to others and the circumstances of how you reveal that information. Anonymity is simply the choice to reveal no information about your identity.
To some extent they are the same, and to other extents they are not. That is why they are two different words, with some conceptual overlap. Anonymity is a type of privacy, and privacy (in the US at least) is a concept that appears in the US constitution and in subsequent jursiprudence.
Privacy laws also protect the people who don't think about privacy. Those are the ones most susceptible to being manipulated by people tracking their activities.
Based on their whim, your privacy can be completely invaded, and you can be thrown in jail. This happens ALL the time.
What is the NSA going to do? Bring you ("meddlesome kids") into court based non-admissable evidence from PRISM? Never heard of it happening once. Please cite a case if you disagree.
And bothersome people working way outside the law like Deepthroat, LulzSec, etc. already do take enormous steps to preserve their anonymity in communications. NSA changes nothing for me.
Here is how it can go down, the cops are chasing Bill, because Bill is able to demonstrate that fracking is causing cancer, and all the politicians knew about it and were bribed. PRISIM intercepts bill talking to his dealer, and knows that he will have a small amount of weed on his person for sciatica because his state doesn't have medical marijuana. Send the cops an "anonymous" tip, and are instructed to make an example of this guy, and throw the book at him. Any hard documents are now confiscated as part of the arrest, and the state simply declares the documents to have been tampered with, but include sensitive data, so the public will never see it.
Life is often convoluted as much as it is simple, also that story details an example of parallel construction which is a technique that has been shown to be in current use, while yours seems more of a description of a movie you saw while too drunk to be really paying attention.
Do you really need me to link to all the times cops shot people they didn't like, for no reason other than the cop didn't like that person?
Bad cops shoot people for no reason all the time, relatively speaking, so this story has plenty of precedence, unlike the above story, which is pure conjecture.
Both stories have plenty of precedence, I just thought the first was perhaps slightly more illuminating considering the context.
Someone killing someone they don't like, purely because they do not like them, and then getting away with it because they hold a position of influence or power of course happens, and is nothing to do really with whether or not anyone involved is a cop. That situation has been playing out a lot longer than there have been cops in existence and also has very little to do with the current discussion.
edit -
also, in the simple version of your story, where 'a cop shoots someone they don't like, the end', the story is actually too simple to be about corruption.
You need the rest of the story to know if that particular cop is corrupt. As it stands it is just plain murder.
Now if the cop doesn't then hand themselves in and starts planning on how to get away with the killing, then you are into corruption, but also the story gets more convoluted.
Both stories do not have plenty of precedence. The original story is conjecture - as told, it's never happened. My story (we can add, "and was not punished in any way", for clarity's sake - I thought that was implied), however, has happened many, many times.
Both stories as told never happened, the first invents a character who is then killed to make a point in the second.
Both stories are about things that occur in the real world, however one is about the subject of privacy and surveillance and one isn't, so given the thread I think the one on topic is possibly more constructive.
My story actually has happened, multiple times. Happens fairly often, in fact. During the civil rights movement, all sorts of injustices were actually happening to blacks (not just non-consequential murder), for example.
Yet there are no examples of the story being told in the above comments. It's literally fiction, and it hurts the conversation.
The beauty of the example I provided is it would be almost almost impossible to prove. Shooting a guy in the head, as opposed to arresting him raises more questions, and investigations. Your solution is a product of an unskilled mind. Though the competency of government is weak, the competency of the TLA's is anything but.
> Bill gets shot in the head because the cop doesn't like him.
I assume that cops while having great leeway in how they frame their story, still have to explain such incidents and have a risk to their career if they don't do a good job of it.
So at the very least the cop has to hate Bill enough to go through the pain of explaining away Bill's death and dealing with any administrative consequences.
> PRISIM intercepts bill talking to his dealer, and knows that he will have a small amount of weed on his person for sciatica because his state doesn't have medical marijuana.
Forget the state; possession of marijuana is a federal crime rendering the possessor eligible for jail time in all 50 states, including the states where it is regarded by the general public as "legal".
This strikes me as an incredibly dangerous development that most seem to ignore. Selective enforcement of laws broken by everyone, all the time, is just as terrifying as the loss of privacy.
Wrong. If the Feds try to prosecute someone from Colorado for pot they have now created standing to overrule the Federal law. They can cut their own throats if they like, but that is not in their interest, they are fighting against a rising tide and they want to hold on as long as they can.
There are more than enough examples of people jailed without trial/representation for things they've said on Facebook under the name of national security or terrorism or whatever. Law enforcement doesn't need admissible evidence to wreck someone's life.
This article has been posted before, but I'm glad it's come up again. Personally, it puts into words something I struggle to put into words myself, especially when I am trying to argue against massive breaches of privacy by governments. Thanks for the reminder.
This is a good argument, but, by now, the practical good of privacy is stone cold obvious. The same agencies that rob us of privacy engage in dirty tricks campaigns against dissidents. As if to prove this point in one neat package.
I find it interesting people are all for protecting their privacy and against NSA intrusions, yet the US just handed over millions of people's health records to a government who clearly doesn't care about their privacy.
Who is "people"? The average US citizen doesn't express much concern about the NSA & GCHQ intrusions. Many suffer from celebrity-ism and fantasize about having paparazzi follow and photograph them everywhere. Even after admitting blanket spying occurs on elected Senators, there are no indictments or criminal sanctions.
What is a little stranger to me are those on hacker news that want the government to gain complete control over their personal autonomy with a "basic income." While they insist that the income would be unconditional, it would be from a government which currently revokes many rights -- voting, free speech, and even life from citizens and non-citizens alike.
The federally-run exchanges, euphemistically called “new health insurance marketplaces,” are accompanied by collection of a wide variety of personal data, which can now be legally shared numerous faceless government agencies — agencies which previously had to snoop, steal, or spy to get it. No longer will any of our intimate medical details be reasonably considered either private or protected.
To facilitate this forfeiture of individual privacy, the Department of Health and Human Services has created a massive, comprehensive database to record and store Americans’ personal information called the Federal Data Services Hub. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that the purpose of the Data Hub is to provide “electronic, near real-time access to federal data” and “access to state and third party data sources needed to verify consumer-eligibility information.” No longer will any of our intimate medical details be reasonably considered either private or protected.
OK, now I better understand. As I am not an US citizen, I am not affected by it, but you are right, that this seems to be a scandal of its own. But you also can see it complementary to all the surveillance stuff. It just seems, that the Obama gov. does not care to much about the privacy of US people.
I think, this road taken, by the country, that once was the big model for many countries like the one I live in, is a really bad omen for freedom in the whole world.
I don't currently know. The socialized medicine is not the problem. We once had a system, that the full records where hidden from the health funds. But I think, recently this principle was weakened -- but not because of "socialized medicine" but just because of the infamous "electronic health card" -- governments like to play with new technical gadgets (that bring more costs and bureaucracy and no gain).
This sounds less like a complaint about breach of privacy, but more of complaint about information asymmetry -- where the powerful have access to the data, while the commoners have not.
An obvious way to level the field is privacy, so that nobody has access to anybody else's information; another way would be transparency, so it's difficult for the power to hide their abuse of power.
No, that isn't a viable strategy. This Hacker News thread is evidence that transparency of some kind exists, and that public scrutiny is completely, 100% inconsequential for the elite.
Information asymmetry exists as a continuum and less as definitive states. Say, what if the avg person could boot up an NSA terminal to be able to search (and everyone know that they are logged in and searching) the database? That, to me, would seem to be on the other side of the spectrum than it is now, and I highly doubt that would be 100% inconsequential for the current elite. Would something like this possibly enable a future elite, possibly (as all systems seem be good at doing eventually), but at least it will be a change of the status quo where the few can leverage an information advantage against the masses.
And if the startup I've founded with a friend and been working on for two years is any proof of concept of something like that working (yes we are revenue generating as of a month ago, and growing with plenty of things in the pipeline), I beg to differ. We have managed to get people who never would have heard of/or read Hacker News to care (because we made it relevant to their everyday lives in ways they can see the manifestation of their collective behaviors these past decades) about mass surveillance/data collection and acknowledge that as a society if we have collectively let things get to this point, to think that a roll back of the technical capabilities of governments/corporations/other organizations through political pandering will placate, is naive at best. Here's a post I made before the Snowden leaks[0]. I think about these things everyday, and work on ways to show that the emperor of mass surveillance is naked for everyone to see if they remove their hands from their eyes and plugs from their ears because perhaps at the end of the day, we will only see ourselves in front of the mirror reflecting upon our individual and collective actions we make everyday.
Interesting idea. But not practical, I think. The mighty will always find ways to hide their doings and as you can see at the current state, those with the bigger resources will always win in such a battle.
if you think about this like an inductive proof, you will see that giving up privacy to catch 'bad guys' will lead to a very scary Orwellian life for all of us. I would say most everyone I know does something illegal every day, certainly all of my friends in NYC jaywalking as a way of life and it is scary to think of the ways that computer systems can be used to enforce all of the shitty laws that serve no real purpose. Red light cameras for example are proven to cause more accidents than they prevent but they pay the bills.
I agree that privacy is a fundamental right. However, has anyone thought about how we haven't seen any real terrorist attacks in the past decade? There are people out there wanting to hurt the US. And it's not difficult to do. It really isn't. Clearly the NSA is doing something right.
Like I said, I wholeheartedly agree that privacy is a fundamental right. But, I would like to see more people acknowledging the flip side of the argument.
1) All the public ones they have published on their website are false, made-up bullshit. You'd expect the NSA bringing forward some credible evidence of thwarting terrorist plots in light of incredibly heavy criticism, yet they can't.(the article says 13, but it was later proved that it was exactly 0.)
2) From that, we can infer that, if your assumption of people wanting to hurt the U.S. is true, only old fashioned ways of countering terrorism work e.g. human intelligence.
3)"There are people out there wanting to hurt the US" sounds rather naive fox-news-like.
What about the children and non-combatants who have incorrectly been killed due to drone strikes? What is the correct number of non-terrorists that should be killed per terrorist who is killed?
After September 11th some Americans thought a mass termination of people in Afghanistan would be a good idea (you had to be an adult or teenager at the time, people spoke this, they certainly did not print it in the NYTimes.)
The point is, once you begin making judgements solely on outcomes, those judgements become amoral. That can be ok when its an amoral activity, like optimizing server architecture, but when the activity involves who to kill and not to kill, the decisions last forever.
Unfortunately, there's no way to independently verify this statement. Only those inside the security apparatus have any data to examine this but they have a clear incentive to make themselves look indispensable (and indeed, get more funding).
Poor choice of words. What I'm saying is that there have undoubtedly been thwarted terrorist attacks. I would like more transparency from the government on what led to those. That way, we can at least have an intelligent debate.
They claimed 52 or 53 at first, then lowered that number to 1.
Then to zero.
There is no evidence whatsoever that this dragnet surveillance has been useful in any way whatsoever in fighting terrorism.
I think you might also be seriously overestimating how many people actually want to attack the US. Terrorists have more or less become a boogeyman at this point, the chances of anyone in the west experiencing a terrorist attack are so ridiculously small.
I don't think anyone has cited specific cases of thwarting terrorist attacks. There's been quotes about some number (52?) of terrorist attacks thwarted, but so what? Which ones?
I agree that more transparency is necessary, and that we must have an intelligent debate, leading, ultimately to dismantling the current mass-surveillance apparatus. But I disagree about the "undoubtedly" part. If you'd said "maybe" I might have agreed, but there's just no evidence. There is evidence of abuses, but no evidence of successes.
> "...there have undoubtedly been thwarted terrorist attacks."
We don't know this. In any case, it's the wrong question as we have to ask ourselves what the cost really is. The gov could just implement a curfew, lock everyone up in their homes and then we'd all be 'safe'. This the fodder of many a scifi movie and it would certainly thwart the plans of 'bad guys'.
As the newest information, we see that we are not only spied on, but there are also stealth techniques to mute bothersome people. It can go thus far, that you will become jailed for something you did not do.
This way, anybody that becomes bothersome to mighty people (and I don't speak about any president here) can become a target. People that are against atomic plants or against chemical fertilizers, or against ... you name it.
This thing can become worse to the democratic nations than killing random people by drones.