I never said that. I’m not sure you understand responsibility for your actions. If you do it, own it. Don’t want to own it? Don’t do it. Don’t want to get caught cheating on your wife, then don’t cheat on your wife or divorce her. A tool like this shouldn’t be used for such mundane things anyways, but if someone wishes to do so, then be willing to answer why you were dressed up as a Furry chasing your other Furry friends through the woods in public last Saturday.
Nice hand waving to ‘rescue victims’. They get to suffer so that you can meet your girlfriend at the cafe.
I’ve already addressed this. Implementing logging and tracking isn’t rocket science. You paranoid types would have us using horses again as fancy technology like cars are dangerous.
And yet I have repeatedly demonstrated that controls can be put in place. A system that would also monitor the police in those activities that people are most concerned about currently. This idea that no one is trustworthy ever is baffling to me.
It is pointless. I can’t convince the paranoid types that the benefits outweigh the negatives because they perceive that some nebulous right they think they have is more important than someone else’s life.
While understanding the objections to it and the potential pitfalls, I would like to at least test it out on a trial basis. Our culture’s thoughts about sci-fi level technology generally fall into one of two categories of sci-fi movies: the pessimistic category with movies like Terminator, I Robot, Eagle Eye, etc. and the optimistic category with movies like Star Trek and Contact. Unfortunately, our society is dominated today by the pessimistic category, causing much of our culture to instinctively fall into the pessimistic category. Combined with the historical American distrust of centralized power, it is understandable why many people feel that the bad outweighs the good or that no amount of good outweighs the fact that this power is held by anyone that has anything to do with government activities.
The same is true of having a fair trial with compulsion of witness testimony, being compelled to give testimony against yourself, or even being tortured.
Since you aren’t going to break any laws, none of those things will do you any harm. These constitutional limitations are only protections for bad guys, and phooey on them: they shouldn’t have any protections.
Until the day comes that someone gives perjured testimony against you, and you find yourself wrongfully accused.
Then, all of a sudden, these protections, which you have happily denied to others, would have seemed very pleasing to have for yourself.
But, hey, too bad: someone’s rights – even yours – aren’t as important as someone else’s life.
Ben Franklin had something to say about that, but since all the libraries were burned and we’re only allowed to read Chairman Mao’s little book of shining thoughts, I guess it doesn’t matter much anymore.
All political power comes from the short barrel of a machine pistol.
Then I’d request access to the system proving I was no where near the area at the time of the crime, or that person perjuring himself wasn’t there to see me. You think that only the bad people have access to the system or that it can’t be used to help prove your innocence?
Not exactly. My stance is based on a half-remembered SCOTUS case from what must have been a year or two ago. In it, the alleged criminal won the case by arguing that while his driving was in public and therefore subject to public forms of surveillance or undercover tailing, the fact that the police put a GPS on his car and monitored a long period of all of his trips crossed a line. The whole cumulative data on his trips was protected, he said, and if police wanted to see where he went, they should have put on a disguise and followed him in an unmarked car. That bit of effort was a line that divided what was legal to what was not.
I may have gotten some details wrong, but how I remember the case is what I base my opinion on. So with regards to this topic, an Eye of Sauron type device is much less intrusive, indeed it seems completely unobtrusive to me, compared to attaching a device on someone’s car. Because of that, I don’t feel that it crosses the line, and would support such a monitoring system
I don’t think that’s too odd, as you cannot reasonable articulate harm to you other than you don’t like it and vague “freedoms” being violated. Compared to such a device, I’m much less sympathetic to people who think that such a security device is too much a violation to our rights. Considering we’re talking about trying to save real people’s lives and livelihoods, I’m willing to give such a device a pass
What is pointless is repeating for about the fifteenth time in this thread that we aren’t talking about “nebulous” rights. We’re talking about rights that are written down and roughly similar questions having been decided by the Supreme Court as being intrusions on the rights of Americans. And yet, you keep using such loaded language, simply in order to disparage a point you have no rebuttal for.
Can I ask you a serious question? This point about US law has been made over and over again. Either you are ignoring it or you’re intentionally misrepresenting the substance of your opponents’ arguments in order to make those points seem irrelevant. What enjoyment do you get out of a debate where you resort to either ignoring your opponents or twisting their words beyond recognition?
YogSothoth - the Supreme Court case you somewhat remember was cited in this thread already. Your memory is pretty accurate.
Hokay. Let’s try testing it on Congress for the next fifty years or so and see how it works out.
That’s actually an excellent mechanism for drawing the line. Making it significantly difficult and expensive to conduct surveillance forces the government’s agents to carefully pick and choose cases based on actual need rather than just snooping on everyone willy-nilly.
(The same principle can be applied to the government’s current round of pissing and moaning about the spread of strong encryption – they can get what they legitimately need on a case-by-case basis through techniques such as Van Eck phreaking, but they’ll just have to give up their wish to spy on communications in general.)
I should have added that your memory of the case is good, but your application of the court’s reasoning is waaaaay off. The court basically found that such GPS tracking constitutes a search. To track everyone in a city isn’t less intrusive, it’s intruding on everyone in the city by the same reasoning: you can’t automate police surveillance to a degree that presents police with such a comprehensive picture of a person’s activities.
Yes, I remember, but as **Ravenman **says, I think you’re sailing clean past the gist of the decision. The notion wasn’t that *physically *planting a tracker was the line that was crossed, but that collating his entire driving history (i.e. the cumulative data on his trips) was - absent a warrant, that is. SCOTUS ruled that accumulating this much metadata amounted to a search. Whether it’s done with a GPS, nano-drones, an Eye in the Sky or an intern on a bicycle with a map and a compass doesn’t significantly alter the argument.
I have made a rebuttal. I posted it up thread by naming how many cases could be potentially solved by using this tool. I’ve yet to see any form of rebuttal with enough weight to counter this benefit.
Removing freedom of speech may mean we can’t have these sorts of discussions.
Peaceful assembly, free press, I understand why they are needed and what could happen if they are removed. There are clear consequences if these rights are violated.
What is being taken from you by this form of general surveillance? I get answers like your dignity. So, I ask specifically, how does this cause you to lose your dignity? The answers I get are essentially fluff.
You think I’m using loaded language when I ask for specifics and get a little pissed when I don’t get them? Especially when I’ve given very good reasons why this can be a useful tool and then have them ignored? So, here I am again, for the fifteenth odd time, asking how does your dignity (whatever that is) measure against finding a lost family member?
It’s a question of values. If you want to surrender your freedom, in order to obtain security, that’s a value you hold, and we do not.
If you have sufficient faith in the power of the government to wield this power of surveillance wisely, fairly, and without misuse, very well for you. But don’t disparage those of us who do not have that trust for engaging in “fluff.”
The real answer is that privacy is a value too. If you don’t admire it, or admire it little enough to sacrifice it in order to solve crimes that depend upon it, that’s your opinion and value. To many of us, the loss is real and concrete: we lose the ability to mind our own business, because we would have a government that is always minding it for us.
We can’t give you “specifics” of the kind you imagine, because those aren’t the values we hold that are being violated. We’re holding to a more abstract view of the proper limitations of the power of government, in the spirit of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
And…the Supreme Court, in its limitations on the government’s power of surveillance. Their reasoning is largely the same as ours. We would lose our privacy and certain of our freedoms if the state had the power to observe us at all times. Read the Supreme Court rulings to get a more formalized idea of where our values – and theirs – differ from yours.
(And…what if the lost family member doesn’t want to be found?)
It isn’t about dignity. It’s about civil rights. If the government watches you every moment, your Fourth Amendment rights and the whole principle of limited government is destroyed. That isn’t fluff.
If autocratic countries like China want to eliminate civil rights, well, that’s why there no no real civil rights in China.
Let’s get this straight. I am not surrendering any freedom. None. At any point in time anyone could be watching what I am doing including the government. I act accordingly. The privacy you think of exists only in your head. I advocate bringing surveillance out into the light where it can be managed.
I don’t trust anyone. A tool that makes no differentiation between monitoring the government and me is a good thing. They can be watched as well.
I’m not disparaging you, I’m asking for concrete reasons why this is a bad thing. People can’t seem to answer other than with theoretical answers. It is annoying for someone like me who tends to think at that level as well, but I wouldn’t just say here is the theory, I’d add proof to support it. If I can’t then I have to discard it. I feel like I’m talking with a god believer. No amount of evidence against or lack of evidence for seems to shake their opinion. I think I’m in that twilight zone area here.
Geez. Then they should have the balls to tell you to get lost and stop looking. Or get a restraining order that could be managed with this tool.
Others here, including myself, disagree. You’re taking away a freedom we have of not having government agents watching our every movement. The freedom to go about our business and know that it’s none of anyone else’s business. The right to open a letter and not have someone else read it.
Even the largest corporations in the world – let alone private individuals – do not have the resources to accomplish what governments can, because governments have the advantage of the power of force to back up their operations.
You could not surveil me in the way the NSA might.
That’s correct. This is a question of the philosophy of government, and the powers we do, or do not, wish to bestow upon them. It’s a question of what rights we’re willing to concede.
Some rights we have conceded happily. I can’t drive on the left side of the street, or urinate on the sidewalk.
Some, for some of us, are to be surrendered more reluctantly. You have every right to argue for the loss of those rights, but don’t imagine your viewpoint is the only valid one.
The fact that you don’t get it doesn’t make our viewpoint wrong.
A country in which people have to justify their freedoms, rather than one in which the government has to justify intrusions, is one which has its priorities ass-backwards. To the extent that people have virtually no guarantee against government excesses, they have no liberty which can be depended on.
We are talking about a technology that is entirely indiscriminate in what it collects. You’ve made a reasonable suggestion that the government should acquire a warrant to query the system, but in the end, the everyday movements of huge numbers of people are in fact being collected and stored for no reason whatsoever. Millions of people will be subject to monitoring when they have done literally nothing to justify the government starting a database on every single movement they make.
It is even more extreme an idea than the government recording every conversation anyone has on the telephone. Ultimately, this technology records children riding bikes in a playground. That’s pretty much the definition of an indiscriminate fishing expedition.
Then I’m at a loss to explain why you have this perception only about Americans. When I lived in Beijing, there was certainly a fixation with taking Americans down a peg. But if one doesn’t have a particular axe to grind, one would surely know that many European countries have conceptions of privacy that go far, far beyond what the vast majority of Americans find acceptable. For example, several away countries are experimenting with a legal concept described as the “right to be forgotten.” For example, if a newspaper wrote an unflattering article on you, you may have a legal right in several countries to get a court order directing Google not to show that article in its search results for you.
So if you take a country like that on one end of the spectrum, and authoritarian countries like Iran and China toward the other end, the U.S. is probably about three-quarters of the way toward France and Germany in terms of privacy protections. The idea that Americans view everyone else in the world as having no rights is yet another ridiculous conclusion that, given how this thread has progressed, will probably be repeated another twenty times without any reasonable basis to do so.
I just thought of something: you may be trying to argue against my comment that there are no real civil rights in China by making a pointed statement calling American ignorant.
Having watched the Chinese government do things like bulldoze a neighborhood in order to drive undesirable Uighyr elements from the capital, I’m not exactly pulling my opinion from thin air. ETA: and that action was done in the name of law and order, too.
A freedom you can’t justify isn’t anything but fluff. How do you know when it is being violated and for what reasons it can be? We have thrown around the word ‘warrant’, but what levels have to be met for the granting of one? This shouldn’t be arbitrary, it should be quantifiable.
The reason is to solve crimes and save lives. The fact that you at the cafe is being recorded along with a kidnapper isn’t relevant. No one will care about you unless you were there when the kidnapping took place.
Sure, if they want to catch kids playing on the grass when they shouldn’t be. I’d hope they use it to catch the perv giving candy to kids from the back of his van.
And this is the basis of my argument. You don’t want people watched playing in the playground, whereas I want people caught for doing things they quite clearly shouldn’t be doing. I am not concerned about the government watching the kids playing anonymously, I am concerned about the kids molested before the cops finally catch a break and snag a repeated molester. Especially when you being monitored affects you in no quantifiable way you can express.