Problem is history has shown that the mere existence of such information is too much of a temptation to resist. The "extraordinary" circumstances used to justify getting this data has a way of expanding over time until it becomes almost any routine reason being justification enough. The only way to combat this is for the information to not exist.
Yes, in some cases this means a guilty person will go free but we have a long standing belief in western legal culture that it is better for some of the guilty to go free than to punish the innocent for the actions of the guilty. Invading everyone's privacy in the name of catching the small minority that engage in criminal activities is punishing the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.
I hate this crime, but having said that, your argument doesn't hold water.
As another commenter pointed out, they can't even keep their own stuff secure. In addition, if politically it's useful, you can bet that somehow it'll find a way to get out: the Justice Department aren't the only folks able to do parallel construction. Plus folks in government agencies leak confidential stuff all the time on deep background, or as a way of scoring political points.
This is a terrible thing, but it's a terrible thing because people procuring and owning massive datasets on other people is wrong. I understand that society's morals haven't caught up with that yet, but that's the only solution that makes any sense: I own my data, I store my data, under certain conditions I may lease/lend you my data for a limited time only -- and all other uses of it, whether by private or governmental bodies -- is theft.
There are at least 3 scary factors in this.
1 - What will be next crime that is big enough that justify using this? File sharing? Drinking in public? Jaywalking? Driving above the speed limit?
2 - The data is collected forever! Our current law system is not just in a situation which the prosecutors can dig your past to find problems! Imagine you do some graffiti (ok, I know it is vandalism) to express your indignation, now, if you are ideologically an enemy of the state, they can dig for crimes your whole life...!
3 - The collected data can be used to prosecute you but it can not be used to innocent you.
My argument would be that they need to find a way to access info on specific individuals as opposed to grabbing data indiscriminately from the pipes. I don't know if this is possible but it's the job of the IC to come up with a solution compatible with the law and human rights.
My point on warrants wasn't well thought out. You make some good points there.
As for the USA being in the dark I think my points are relevant to most countries so the idea is not to disadvantage anyone but that there is a level playing field that respects everyone's rights. Obviously some countries are going to violate human rights but it shouldn't be highly developed democratic nations just because the right is less glamorous than others.
It's very hard to have a useful debate on this when we don't actually have data showing how useful bulk data collection is. If we were able to say 'x' lives have been saved because of it I might more readily be willing to cede some privacy. I think that number would have to be quite high though as I believe privacy is fundamental to a democratic society and should be treated more seriously than it generally is.
The point is that the risks are much lower if there's not a database storing this information to be leaked in the first place.
The whole "if you don't want to go to jail, don't commit crimes" line of thinking really falls apart when you realize that the legal system is well beyond the ability for a layman to navigate on a day to day basis and gets even worse when you have a perfect surveillance state capable of seeing and storing massive amounts of data.
I guess my view of the situation is that the massive collection of data only becomes a problem in situations where we can absolutely not trust our government, and if things get that bad then we have much bigger problems than the government having a lot of data about us. At that point they don't need evidence of wrongdoing to drag people into the street and shoot them, so it doesn't matter to me if they have it.
The idea that someone who has been wronged by the criminal justice system should then be required to understand the consequences and make a special application just to have the record set straight is invidious, to say the least.
No normal organisation processing personal data gets to keep whatever they feel like, however unjustified, and only remove it under sufferance and on specific request. That wasn't even appropriate before the GDPR came into effect, and it's clearly prohibited by law now if there was any doubt before.
So why should governments get special privileges in this respect? There could hardly be a more serious case of processing personal data than a database used by police and security services that have exceptional legal powers with the potential to destroy someone's life. The argument that it's necessary for any sort of legitimate policing or security purpose when we're talking specifically about individuals who were not charged or who were acquitted at trial is tenuous at best.
Our governments and courts are on the wrong side of this issue. They're so blinded by some combination of fear, paranoia and the power of modern technologies that they seem to have forgotten the moral imperatives that everyone should be treated fairly and equally before the law and that we are supposed to be living in a free country.
This only considers the current state of 3rd parties, governments, and laws. The gigantic issue with all this is that everything is stored indefinitely. Also, laws and governments change. What's to stop you from suffering tomorrow for seemingly innocuous actions you performed today? And I'm not just talking about getting prosecuted for some specific crime. This data is used as a means of proactive prosecution and profiling. This means that the powers that be are actively looking for signals in the noise that indicate crime(and most likely just things they don't agree with, illegal or not). If the profile created off your various seemingly innocent actions and "meta-data" over the course of many years puts you within the error bars, you could become a false positive. With secret courts, secret prisons, and indefinite detention all possible, what's to stop you from simply disappearing? Or, at the vary least, what's to stop all of this from ruining your life even if you are never convicted of anything(e.g. months of detention and interrogation without prosecution, inability to travel, holds placed on bank accounts, calls to employer, etc...)?
That said, the focus shouldn't be on the companies that collect this data. They are simply doing the best they can to make a profit within the bounds of the law. No, the issue is government. There should be strict laws regulating how data is collected and stored(even non "PII") and even stricter laws around how 3rd parties are allowed to consume, store, and use this data, especially governments. But alas, this is asking the police to police themselves, so I guess this will never happen.
If the government has devolved to the point that we have to worry about them framing people unjustly, we have FAR, FAR bigger problems than a database of location information. Hiding the information in that scenario is, at best, a temporary band aid. The appropriate fix is limiting the power of the government and requiring strict and transparent conditions on when and why someone can be arrested.
It's a cost-benefit tradeoff like anything else. Unfortunately, the costs are filtered through fear-mongering and the benefits are trade secrets, so the debate is particularly ineffectual.
The thing I find most aggravating about it is that the standard for harm for data seems to be "What could a totalitarian government do with it?" and there are very few useful things that couldn't be used for very bad things in the hands of a totalitarian government (newspapers, for instance.) Meanwhile, companies can't reveal all the useful things that are consequences of their data because that makes them vulnerable to both competitors and spam.
So we're pretty much stuck with only uninformed opinions and worst-case scenario analysis, which isn't a rational way to approach anything. The only way I can think to improve the debate is for privacy advocates to focus on actual harm that has actually happened to someone to at least keep things grounded in reality.
That's a much stronger argument, that I'm indeed sympathetic to. But I don't think it will ever win in the courts of public opinion or practicality. In general, governments are always going to demand some way to identify and enumerate their citizens, and so making that a deliberate thing rather than an emergent thing allows it to be better constrained. If involuntary storage of personal information were limited to bona fide government purposes then, for instance, we could politically complain when the government wanted to catalog everyone's ethnicity/religion in their databases. As it stands currently, the government itself doesn't need to abuse the vulnerabilities like in your example, because at any time they can get that information from companies who have done so for them.
There are a couple different arguments that have been developed to counter the government requests/propaganda for access to our data.
Here, Moxie works on one I don't think has been popularized yet- To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws. That is an argument against allowing the government to have total information awareness, because that access would allow the government to enforce laws perfectly, which would make some unjust laws permanent.
I believe that is the weak bit of the argument- although it's true, there is a big gap between how the government could move from information awareness to perfect enforcement.
Instead, I'd take the argument in the direction that a database of the criminal behavior on every citizen would create the prefect tool for the suppression of dissent. Anyone who became politically inconvenient would have their entries combed for wrongdoing, and their life destroyed.
The weakness with THAT argument is that it assumes a conspiratorial, immoral federal government. Many of us may be able to imagine that, but it's an idea at the periphery of the Overton window.
Which brings me to my point.
We need a reference detailing historic government abuses of data.
It should focus on:
How data was collected
The original purpose of collection
The benign intentions
of the original collectors
How the data moved from the collecting administration
to the abusive administration
It seems like there should be a wealth of historical examples. What data did the Stasi have, Mao's china, the purges of intellectuals in russia and SE Asia. I bet there are even records of Torquemada's Inquisition.
I want us to make the posibility of a good administration collecting data, and then that data being captured or inherited by a bad administration, a part of the mental vocabulary of the US population. Yeah it's ambitious, but I think that is the best chance we have at fighting the Government here. And, I believe that an earnest civil servant could understand the danger, and want to limit his own power, once this was properly explained.
Saying "it is unfair I can't get away with crime too" is not a defense. And many in fact /are/ already refusing to do so. Witness many privacy laws which explicitly bar storage of citizen data in US jurisdictions - granted some have cynical "so they can access it" motivations. It was why Microsoft of all corporations, one which has been enough of a toady to be caught with NSA in variable names sued hard to demand warrant protection.
And ofcourse the government while it can't collect all that information on its own can sure as hell buy or rubber-stamp warrant their way into these datasets at will in order to side step the 4th amendment all together.
If people are generally willing to accept the axiom that information is power, I am continually baffled as to why they can't understand how reckless it is to allow all of this capture, sale and sharing of the intimate details of their lives.
How can we possibly defend ourselves or have any control over our lives while giving this much power to profit motive corporations?
Is this missing a /s? If every single piece of data related to you is stored and accessible by the government then it only takes a change in the political winds to turn you from a model citizen to an enemy of the state. You even reference Minority Report where half of the movie was the main character being framed for a crime.
Beyond that, if we really did want to make wide spread data collection a part of society it should be a constitutional change in the US at least. The 4th amendment protects against unreasonable searches. Proposing that everyone gets searched all the time is just a way for the government to weasel their way around that restriction. Doing so just degrades the rule of law which has a host of problems.
The only way I could possibly see being ok with everyones information being available all the time is if warrants were for specific information, for example looking for people who bought pressure cookers before the boston bombing, and any evidence found in this dragnet that pointed to other crimes could _never_ be used in any other case. That would at least prevent fishing expeditions from the government
The problem is in arrested vs. convicted. For one, it sets a precedent for future violations of civil liberties. It would cost a fortune. Human error is always a concern, especially dealing with this volume entries and the size of this database. In other countries where they've tried this it hasn't done much to solve crimes (The UK, for example). But the biggest concern is it's yet another example of government overstepping it bounds. Nothing will ever keep us 100% safe and yet this takes away more of our freedom. We have a right to not be subjected to unreasonable government interventions unless there is evidence, backed by a jury of our peers, to say that we've done something wrong.
Nowhere did I say anything about "...nothing to hide". I am saying we need to, via legislation, weaken governmental and corporate authority, and increase personal authority so that the data collected cannot be used to harm us. Because the real fantasy here is that there is some way the data is not going to be collected.
IMO: If they have the data--and they do--eventually they will be forced to release it.
if not for a run of the mill murder it will be done for a terrorist attack, a child kidnapping or something similar. Judges will twist and bend the 4th Amendment and once it's done for that case, it's fair game for all.
Yes, in some cases this means a guilty person will go free but we have a long standing belief in western legal culture that it is better for some of the guilty to go free than to punish the innocent for the actions of the guilty. Invading everyone's privacy in the name of catching the small minority that engage in criminal activities is punishing the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.
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