> Some of the "better" arguments i've seen are obsoleting/maintaining anything that is quasi public record. Think all sorts of land/legal transactions where it's basically "once x and y and z have said yes, process transaction from x to z"
The validity of any transaction can only be determined and guaranteed by the state, so honestly just having the state host a central database seems much easier
> That data is already centralized and interlinked.
Not in all countries. Germany used to have explicit laws against combining state and federal record bases, they were only recently eroded to "fight terrorism".
Control, transparency and check-and-balance are all inconveniences though. Having to ask a judge for warrant is definitely inconvenient, same as proving beyond reasonable doubt (instead of just, let's say probable doubt).
I didn't say that inefficiency should be the goal for the government. However, for certain scenarios, that's the trade off we have to make.
> Going the other way - allowing them full and uncontrolled access provided they just jump through a few arbitrary hoops to get the data
Fortunately, most of the time those "hoops" involves a human in it, hopefully being able to stop bad things from happening. Again, there is no silver bullet, and shitty paper stamping process won't be helping either.
Sure, if your point is that centralized government databases are inherently bad because the government could use them, I can't argue against that because you simply will not risk whatever they could do however low that risk is (if it's even quantifiable).
>if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB
Yes, it will be much easier to gain access to a compromised government DB if you want to have bulk access to such information a la shadowbrokers et al.
> There will always be a trail for someone to follow, but as long as you don't have someone with the resources of the government looking for you, the trail will be very hard to follow.
I think you vastly underestimate private, paid access to these databases. Lexis-Nexis comes to mind, for one.
> it's orders of magnitude easier for any government agency to get that data consolidated.
I don't buy that; if the government (UK or otherwise) wanted a consolidated view of all transactions (at what stage: acquired, captured or cleared ?) then they could get it from a low double-digit number of sources.
Building their own payments processing system is hard, perhaps as hard as getting feeds from all of those.
>Every American is in a whole myriad of government databases form the federal level on down...
The park might be full of needles but that's no justification for further litter.
Why do we need yet another database? People have enough problems with the no fly list and that's a short list. A DB that has 1/3 of the country flagged would cause mayhem from false positives and inconsistent data.
> tighter restrictions on the access that law enforcement has on this data
I get your point here, but once someone has already lost trust in the government, having the government regulate itself isn't really a viable counter to that person's concerns.
There's a huge difference between the effort required to get one person's records from wherever they are now and the effort required to trawl through a centralized database.
Put all the data in one place and make it easy to access and LEOs are going to treat it the same way they do their other data sources - abuse it up to the point they can get away with. It happens every single time.
They are made to look like they work, in practice, its unenforceable, and backups including software still dont have any easy way to delete an individuals records, mostly because its a database that is backed up and you'd have to restore the database in order to clear the individuals data.
Secondly, nobody has to wipe data if its being used for law enforcement or scientific purposes. Those are two loaded parameters, but look at what wiki says because its hard to get access to case law and the legislation search facilities in various countries is absolutely despicable; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement
"Law enforcement is the activity of some members of government who act in an organized manner to enforce the law by discovering, deterring, rehabilitating, or punishing people who violate the rules and norms governing that society."
Discovering means hacking people's computer systems as Edward Snowden highlighted, so the security services will take everything they can find and when they dont have the tools, they have the search engines to fall back on via court orders if need be!
Other point is anyone who is not the police can make records and say they are for law enforcement purposes as well! Neighbourhood watch is a voluntary law enforcement scheme engaged by the public. Its even listed on wiki in the UK Law enforcement index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Law_enforcement_in_th...
The other parameter is scientific purposes, again what exactly is scientific purposes?
Is it training an AI, would all the tech companies like facebook, MS, Apple & Google et al be justified in retaining all and any data they can get their hands on in order to further develop AGI? They would be, but recently the UK data commissioner seemed to ignore the law and fined US based Clearview AI a facial recognition company £7.5 million for collecting 20billion images of people.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10845123/Orwellian-...
Now the fact that UK Police authorities are reportedly using their services, would suggest the Police are happy with what Clearview AI have done, no criminality whatsoever, but the data commissioner thinks otherwise. The other misdirection is the fine is not that much money. Whilst it will effect a behaviour change in Clearview AI, that behaviour change may well include putting up the prices because the data commissioner gave them a free advert which police and law enforcement agencies elsewhere in the world will sit up and notice. As they are also US based, any UK enforcement notices are just hot air. This imo is nothing more than an advert and a way to make Clearview AI charge more.
Some of the Northwest Passage is classed as international waters, the US coastguard using it instead of Panama (usage fees) gave Canada the reason to take the US to some international court and whilst getting a fine levied on the US coastguard also happened to get the Northwest Passage recognised as Canadian waters so that Canada could start charging fees for ships using it! It also advertised the waterways as open for business because of the lack of arctic ice, ironically Russia also helped Canada out here as well by recognising the Canadian waters so there is now an alternative to using the Panama canal for some journeys.
If you are a soccer player, this is kicking the ball out of play for the other team.
I did say both of these things. Because there are upshots and downsides to each. Both are true.
You can't escape the shittiness of this problem by running your own server. It's a bad situation either way.
The root of the problem as i read it is overly zealous law enforcement and a judge that is not acting as a proper check on their power. It's a political problem. It can't be escaped with purely technical solutions like who stores the data.
Everything you wrote is indeed true, the one key point you miss is that while we should plan for dealing with the worst-case scenario that should not stop us from holding our government a higher standard than that worst-case scenario.
In fact we can do both - develop tools to make centralization of collected data harder and develop laws that make that centralization harder. Neither will ever be perfect, but the effort is still vitally important.
And I'm sure that database is already being abused by all manner of federal agencies in ways it isn't supposed to be, so I don't see any reason to make it even easier for them.
This is the main reason I'm skeptical of central government databases. Not because of the miniscule chance of them enabling a police state, but because of the very great chance that the data will not be properly safeguarded.
If data like this requires a bureaucracy to generate, you might be able to protect it with a bureaucracy. If it's collected automatically and stored in one place, it is considerably harder to protect.
So are you arguing that this won't be abused? That seems extreme. There is a large probability that government databases will eventually be hacked, that the people using them will do a look-up for personal reasons, that police will use it excessively on some case, or use it to enforce bad laws, etc.
You can say the benefit of it makes it worth it, but I don't see how you can believe these things won't happen at all.
This is a solid effort, but the root cause is unregulated data brokers and their ability to aggregate, store, and sell this data. It’s not that the government should require a warrant; these companies should not exist.
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.
The validity of any transaction can only be determined and guaranteed by the state, so honestly just having the state host a central database seems much easier
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