- In practice, we as a society value stopping fraud and terrorist funding quite a bit more than rooting out every last Jeffrey Dahmer
- Looking through financial metadata is a couple orders of magnitude less invasive than physically searching everyone's closet every week
All I'm saying here is there is actually a tradeoff between privacy and law-enforcement effectiveness. Of course we should think of ways to have both, but it is not always possible in every case. As engineers, that should be easy to understand.
If we're being honest with ourselves, we should admit that we're willing to pay a cost (perhaps even a substantial one) for greater privacy. We should then have a discussion about which costs we're willing to pay, for which particular forms of privacy, and how to get the most bang for our buck.
We should not simply pretend that the cost of upholding our liberal values is zero, as tempting as that might be rhetorically.
Would you mind educating me as to when "we as a society" made the decision to shift away from valuing the privacy of an individual to the point that it is a foregone conclusion that we should eschew those liberties and implicitly throw away the protections of due process rather than improve and reform the judicial system whose inefficiency is the real bottleneck?
Yes, there are tradeoffs to be made, but existing due process, including warrants, is the legal manifestation of those very tradeoffs.
Specific to American Legislation, and for those who may be unfamiliar: look into the passing of the USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T Act passed shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a bill of over 2000 pages which was rushed through congress in span of a few days from finalization to ratification under the prosumtion of necessity to provide the tools to combat terrorism. It stripped away many powers of the judicial branch to provide oversight, and provisions intended to be 'temporary' have been continually extended by presidents (executive branch) on both sides of the aisle since. (edited: misspelled patriot acronym)
I never posited that, and of course we should not throw away our liberties. I just happen to think that defending your liberties requires a healthy dose of realism about how the police and judicial system actually work. As difficult as that may be to accept, that also requires some level of trust in those institutions and in what the leaders of those institutions say.
When police or FBI say that current laws and processes are insufficient to deal with a changed environment and they need help, I've seen that the left tends to demonize them, question their motivations (like of course cops want to set up a surveillance state), and then give a hand-wavy argument that 'well, getting a warrant worked in the past, so it must work fine today'. Basically accusing cops of lying about having problems, or lying about needing new tools and processes.
That doesn't seem very fair, and it's certainly not a way to have a constructive discussion. I mean, these two statements are basically the same:
1. You can't any trust climate scientists, because of course all they want is to scare you into giving them more funding and power
2. You can't any trust cops and the intelligence services, because of course all they want is to scare you into giving them more funding and power
IMHO both these statements are false. Even though they're imperfect, our cops and intelligence agencies by and large try to do right, and it'd be better to understand challenges from their perspective and come up with innovative, privacy-protecting ideas that work, rather than to blindly accuse them of malice when they suggest something that we disagree with.
If you think people are doing things wrong, first try help them do right.
- "We as a society" claims, painting your opponent as out of touch with society. I'd say instead that the ecosystem of recent U.S. politics has been favorable to actors gaining power on those grounds.
- Equating opposing surveillance to pretending the costs of liberty are zero. I didn't see anyone else claim that above, though maybe I should go back and reread it all.
> In practice, we as a society value stopping fraud and terrorist funding quite a bit more than rooting out every last Jeffrey Dahmer
You say "we as a society" but then posit something ridiculous. Regular everyday murderers kill orders of magnitude more Americans than terrorists. They are monsters of the same order and there are more of them. How is it that we have stood to tolerate them for centuries, but now this new threat (which is not actually new at all) suddenly requires a departure from our longstanding principles?
Terrorism isn't new, it isn't unique, it doesn't require an extraordinary response unlike that of every other category of bad in the world. It's just the boogey man du jour that has recently become highly profitable for a wide variety of fear mongers and demagogues.
Don't fear the terrorists. You're letting the terrorists win.
Regular everyday murderers kill orders of magnitude more Americans than terrorists.
Jeffrey Dahmer wasn't a regular everyday murderer, he was a serial killer - a category which does not kill orders of magnitude more Americans than terrorists, and a distinction which is entirely apropos in this discussion because unlike regular everyday murderers, serial killers are generally quite hard to identify with usual police investigatory methods.
You're trying to narrow the category but the distinction you're trying to make isn't there. A huge proportion of the "regular everyday murderers" are committed by gang members in communities with the "snitches get stitches" ethos. As a consequence they go unsolved given the usual police investigatory methods.
A cynic might speculate that politicians care more about terrorism because gangs kill predominantly poor people while terrorists often kill bankers and government officials.
- Looking through financial metadata is a couple orders of magnitude less invasive than physically searching everyone's closet every week
All I'm saying here is there is actually a tradeoff between privacy and law-enforcement effectiveness. Of course we should think of ways to have both, but it is not always possible in every case. As engineers, that should be easy to understand.
If we're being honest with ourselves, we should admit that we're willing to pay a cost (perhaps even a substantial one) for greater privacy. We should then have a discussion about which costs we're willing to pay, for which particular forms of privacy, and how to get the most bang for our buck.
We should not simply pretend that the cost of upholding our liberal values is zero, as tempting as that might be rhetorically.