So the idea that citizens should be monitored, but not gov’t officials, is intuitive from this point of view
Shouldn't it be the other way round? If I have the power to do something that will affect others, I would want someone to monitor my actions to keep me in check. For example, if I had access to production boxes, I would absolutely want to have some processes/checks and balances in place so I don't mess up, even unintentionally. So why should these govt officials not be monitored, when they go around poking other people's lives, often without any permission and repercussions? Not only their access be controlled/monitored, they should be subject to more scrutiny than normal Joe.
Even trusted governments can't guarantee that bad actors cannot access the data captured by the surveillance system.
If a government need total surveillance, it is because the government don't trust its people, which is because the people does not trust the government.
This cannot fix trust issues with surveillance, you must solve this with more/better democracy, not police.
You need to make sure the people in charge won't do that indefinitely. Even one particularly bad politician can cause some serious harm. If you limit their ability to monitor everyone, it limits their ability to round up dissenters. Given that surveillance doesn't seem to have much other use, it's reasonable to oppose it.
I have a problem with surveillance on any criteria that's only marginally more specific than 'people the government doesn't like' or 'people who don't like the government'.
1) Where did you even get that idea of unfettered government snooping?
Did anybody suggest it to you?
2) Government agency should be able to act on the intelligence it gathers. But if that act limits people's freedom without good reason - that agency should be punished for that (cut funding, fire abusing government employee, disassemble agency, send responsible agents to jail - depending on the severity of the violation).
If I'm the only watched, then I would probably lose more than gain.
But if everyone is watched then I would probably gain more than lose.
3) I now see where the root of your mistake is.
You are assuming, that by giving government more watching power government would become more powerful.
But that does not have to be that way.
Let assume that governments need X amount of power to be efficient in law enforcement.
Where X = WatchingPower + ActingPower.
That means that if we keep government power at X and increase WatchingPower, then ActingPower of government would decrease.
That's what I'd like to see happen: government watches more and acts less (avoiding awkward actions).
Would you prefer to take WatchingPower away from government and replace it with dumb ActingPower?
I don't understand what difference it makes whether they are already monitoring certain part of something or not? The effect is still the same. You could also argue that some phones or comm lines provide a way to monitor or get alerts for certain cases such as terrorism etc, but not all lower level crimes.
And governments monitor people in the public, yet they are unable to prevent all crimes of happening. Should governments then not exist at all or the society in general? Should people not exist?
If the surveillance is continual --- none of your examples appear to be but presumably continual surveillance is the desire of the government -- then it isn't practical, as we have seen historically, to have policy prevent bad uses.
Some tools enable such terrible things that whatever good they may also do is inconsequential.
You said that government monitoring would make you safer, and that privacy was a barrier to the free flow of information. If you don't favour unhindered powers of surveillance, where are you drawing the line, and why should a line be drawn?
This is the problem with allowing the government to have invasive surveillance powers - they use them not only to prevent legitimate threats but also to try to prevent the social changes that naturally should occur over time.
You keep making this point across the thread about actual harm being invoked. The tools available to governments today should be sufficient to stop a number of crimes. Yet time and time again we see that increased surveillance doesn't really correlate to the elimination of crime.
Why not push this energy into making your government agencies more efficient with what resources they have? The UK has tons of CC TVs in public -- still seems to have a high issue with shoplifting, pickpocketing, and other crime in public places.
Doesn't it alarm you to keep giving an inefficient potentially malicious actor more tools it can abuse?
It doesn't have to work in the sense of stopping an invasion of privacy. Name your governmental - or even non-governmental - organization will always be able to read any individual. The question is one of effort. In an optimal world Government would have some set of checks on who it monitors - there would be judges, warrants and probable cause. As things stand that's seeming less and less the case. In a slightly less better world the effort to monitor would be great enough that governments would be forced to pick and choose just who they're monitoring. Ideally that'd be picking bad people.
It doesn't have to work in the sense of stopping an invasion of privacy. Name your governmental - or even non-governmental - organization will always be able to read any individual. The question is one of effort. In an optimal world Government would have some set of checks on who it monitors - there would be judges, warrants and probable cause. As things stand that's seeming less and less the case. In a slightly less better world the effort to monitor would be great enough that governments would be forced to pick and choose just who they're monitoring. Ideally that'd be picking bad people.
It would be moral and fair for them to use their practically-unlimited budget and power on slurping up public data — licence plate readers, regular cameras on planes (without the power to see into private domiciles), public twitter feeds, public facebook feeds — and fight crime based on that.
There is no moral and fair reason for the government to secretly break their own laws, eavesdrop on private and privileged communications of their own citizens, and peer into areas previously designated as off-limits without a warrant. So mass surveillance itself isn't a huge problem, but the current implementation and the way it was put into place is.
i disagree with the assumption that it's a solvable problem. people remain fallible and the correct solution is to mitigate our downside by minimizing state power. not disagreeing with the idea that we also need to work on lots of other ways to reduce its power and ability to track people btw.
Government monitoring "for your own good" is pretty scary. We already have situations where people are attacked by the government or its agents because they did something that only harms themselves. For example [1]. Mass surveillance, if left unchecked, will eventually expand for whatever purposes the government wishes. Power is easy to incrementally grow (or in the case of the NSA, they simply ignore the laws) and very difficult to shrink again. We shouldn't think that this wouldn't be used against us sometime in the future and who can truly say that they never did anything harmless-but-illegal (take drugs? gambling? copyright infringement?) and as [1] shows, people have died for these "crimes".
government monitoring people by itself is not a problem, government monitoring people to harm people is the problem.
What need to be fixed is the usage of tools to harm people, not the tool itself.
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