> It was still possible then to track you as easily as it is now given the right amount of manpower or attention.
You realize that you contradict yourself in the same sentence? That's the kind of thing I tell people who ask me "Is so-and-so (technically very hard) possible?": "Most things are possible with enough time and money".
The fact is, technology makes previously impossible things possible, and previously difficult things easier. The law should absolutely account for that.
> But they can still do this [...] attach a tracker
I was responding to somebody who wanted it to be "mathematically impossible for them to abuse their power". Attachable trackers aren't sufficient to achieve that.
>> "If warrantless surveillance becomes technologically impossible, then we are going to have to pay a lot more salaries to have all our laws enforced."
Completely agree, cost would rapidly get out of control without warrantless surveillance and criminal activities would surge. In fact, why even use tech like this when everyone by law should just wear a device to broadcast their location, all their communications, etc. All the data collected should be admissible in court too.
> Before, authorities could get a warrant to wiretap phones
So basically, before the invention of phones, no criminal was ever caught?
Clearly that's not true. It is entirely possible to follow and spy on people in person and that's how it was always done before the 20th century.
Just because new technologies exist does not justify using them to inifinitely augment surveillance powers of the state.
> a big deal if your job is say, stopping and apprehending human trafficking rings or organized crime
You don't succeed at human trafficking or organized crime if you never leave the house and spend all your day just chatting on signal. You have to actually go out into the real world and do the crimes. As soon as you step out of the house you can be followed and monitored and caught in the act.
> Is it unreasonable to want, or even expect, an incognito window to disable all forms of tracking?
> Ask what the layperson would think tracking is!
No. No no no no no. There is a serious problem with this line of thinking. Lay people cannot dictate how technology must work. Because they don't understand what is possible.
This post is like the famous quote from that Australian politician
> The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia
It's simply not appropriate to assume that just because a lay person wants something to be true, that it must somehow be possible to actually do.
I think this is the whole crux of everything. Trying to look back on past analogues really don't make much sense in my opinion. The fact is the old decisions were made in the past environment they were a part of. That environment has changed dramatically. The surveillance possible today simply wasn't possible in the past. Sure someone could setup a wiretap or a directional microphone, but the shear ubiquity of easy surveillance by so many different actors makes the environment fundamentally different at the application of past analogues pretty much pointless (in my opinion anyway).
I understand that legal precedent is built into the US legal system, but I think its applicability is often over emphasized. These are new times. Trying to apply past logic when the game has so completely changed is a fool's errand.
> With that statement of mine I was mostly trying to convey how some things shouldn't be easy.
I agree completely. I think attempts to paint this as a "reversal" of hundreds of years of governmental warrant procedure is ignoring that these new devices and this new data didn't exist hundreds of years ago. If we're going to put a huge amount of valuable data about our lives in one place, we'd better protect that place better than we've ever protected anything before.
> If the tech is cheap enough, there are a lot of hypothetical upsides to constantly tracking every multi-ton machine on the road. Observe, for comparison, the FAA requirements for flight plans and running a broadcasting transponder to safely operate an airplane.
If the tech is cheap enough, you could argue that there are hypothetical upsides to having a tracker implanted inside every citizen as well. After all those citizens are capable of illegal behavior and must be monitored.
> Hmmmm, now I wonder if the actual problem is efficiency. We mere humans are pitted against technology we simply have no sporting chance against.
Efficiency is exactly the problem: there are many examples of laws which the public would not tolerate with 100% enforcement – the most basic example being things like speeding or jaywalking but it applies to more serious things as well: imagine if the penalties against, say, gay or interracial sex had been enforced against every activist possible because the government was tapping everyone's phones.
> It will soon become impossible to commit the smallest of crimes without law enforcement being notified.
If it was that simple, I would applaud the new era of surveillance. Unfortunately, some people will be above the law, while others will be subjected to it.
If privacy laws were actually repealed, and everyone saw what everyone else was doing, it might not be so bad. It’s the unfairness of it that really stinks.
> If [country-wide private surveillance] shouldn't exist at all, a bad version of it also shouldn't exist.
While I’m on the side of less surveillance in general, I don’t think I like this logic: it seems to me that the crucial point that distinguishes the systems of the last couple of decades from what came before is convenience. “No expectation of privacy” means very different things when someone needs to physically follow you around or even make a lucky guess as to which CCTV to look at compared to making a query from the comfort of their desk. It’s one thing for a passing cop to memorize your license plate number and then have to thumb through paper files in order to know that’s you; it’s another for them to have a full map of every car and owner name on it. (I don’t think the latter extremes are available in most countries yet, FWIW.) The bland “expectation of privacy” wording seems to miss this sliding scale of effort for a given amount of tracking.
I actually half suspect that this argument is wrong for some dumb reason I’m missing, because I don’t have a source for it (even though it seems to be in the air somehow) and even supposed experts like EFF lawyers don’t seem to be making it. But I haven’t yet found that reason.
>And what better way to prove it than to cherry-pick examples.
Examples are always cherry picked. The other option is called "exhaustive enumeration", and I don't think it's possible.
Let's just say that 50 years ago,
1) nobody could track your exact position 24/7,
2) there was not fingerprint matching,
3) you could still dissapear in a remote place with much fewer chances of people finding you
4) your friends didn't post pictures of you for all the world to see
5) people were not required to carry some sort of ID cards
6) your purchases could not be tracked in real time (cach or cachiers check's, no credit cards)
7) all your (snail then) correspondence was not automatically and efficiently read
8) CCTV wasn't prevalent
9) radio couln't track what you were listening to (as Pandora etc)
10) nobody kept track of what movies you watched (like Netflix, Youtube, etc)
11) They could track cars by reading their plates of some camera.
etc etc. And tons of other stuff besides.
It's nice living in a dream bubble, but all these do exist, and are a real tendency in a higher technological society. After all bureacracy and control with expand given the chance (and with the lack of any counter tendency), and technology is a huge enabler for it to expand.
> I see no reason it should be arbitrarily limited or expensive to do things that technology can do for cheap.
When you hand a powerful tool to a powerful organization you must make sure that there are safeguards in place to limit the damage that can be done when parts of that organization use that tool for evil.
For the past couple of decades, the US has been having a painful conversation about the just what this proper privacy/LEO-convenience balance should be. LEO rhetoric notwithstanding, it's abundantly clear that it has never been easier to perform surveillance than it is today.
I expect that not many people would object to temporary placement of an ALPR system at a place of interest when all data from that system that is not _clearly_ directly related to a person of interest is purged before it ever gets into the hands of law enforcement.
I expect that many (but far too few) people would object to blanketing an entire metro area in ALPR cameras, RFID toll tag readers, DRT boxes, and the like and retaining all of that information forever, just in case it was needed to speed an investigation along later.
> I don't want my tax money wasted on police sitting around watching for speeders.
Thing is, I do. I want police to have to choose to pay a meatbag to do this sort of scutwork because in way too many cases, those laws are enforced to enrich the department's coffers or to target disfavored people.
I totally 100% agree that we should have sane laws that are applied evenly across the board. I would LOVE for prosecutor and police discretion, as well as plea bargaining to be removed, forever. This will not happen in my lifetime, if it ever does.
So -for now- we limit the damage evil people can do with the power tools that they have available to them. This makes policing more expensive. That's okay with me.
Yes. Tor, and like technologies. There are some mathematical limitations on total surveillance, there is a point at which the technological costs of tracking everyone 24/7 are beyond budgets or even physical possibilities.
> I feel like the real problem is the technology not the law.
In the end you don't propose changing the tech at all only the procedure for getting the data (the law). It's not a bad idea to be honest.
In my opinion the problem is the mass surveillance of Americans in the first place. End that, and suddenly they can't look into their co-worker's lives or stalk women. They'd only have foreign intelligence information available. You'd also get the benefit of government upholding the people's constitutional rights for a change.
> It's easy "you can't hire employees" and enforce it
I wouldn't say that's "easy" by any measure. It requires(/d) a large shift of public opinion and awareness, enforcement is in many ways harder because there's less visibility.
> I'm quite fine with the government knowing where my government registered, government licensed, government plated car is going.
You're right. Most of us are. Are you ok with them implanting chips into you as a baby to track your every move? Assuming your response to that is "no" then you realize that the issue at hand is scope. There are limits to what we'll accept.
> Do you have a phone? You're leaving records on every tower your phone connects to. Do you use WiFi? You're leaving records.
Again you're confusing the principle at large and the scope at which it's applied.
> Are you an illegal immigrant or a human/drug/weapon trafficker that is under investigation using a specific vehicle to commit your crimes? Yes? Then don't go to the mall.
This is a reductive argument. When I talk about the scope above I'm talking about the impact it has on everyone.
>> They could always tap your phone, read your mail, follow you, find out some secret about you ...
I think this is a false equivalency. It was the case that you could be targeted, but this would be one case and a lot of resources were bound by this one case. Now, the process can be automated in such a way that everyone can be targeted simultaneously without much overhead.
The main problem is not that you could be targeted (like you said, that was always the case), but that everyone could be a target.
> That said, I still don't see from a practical point, how we can expect to keep privacy and progress?
I don't follow. How are the two mutually exclusive? Your false dichotomy between license plate readers and medieval times isn't very convincing to me.
> Laws are weaker than technology
Really? So since it is technologically possible for me to remove my license plates from my car, no judge will be able to make me put them back?
And, since it is technologically possible, it is ok for others to clean out your bank account, and you would have no redress other than to hack your money back to you?
You realize that you contradict yourself in the same sentence? That's the kind of thing I tell people who ask me "Is so-and-so (technically very hard) possible?": "Most things are possible with enough time and money".
The fact is, technology makes previously impossible things possible, and previously difficult things easier. The law should absolutely account for that.
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