One troubling issue I have about dealing with things like privacy and security is what level of comprimise is appropriate?
Would a nation which never bats an eyelash at any of its citizens be open for terrorism more than a ‘police state’ arrangement?
Yes.
I was thinking about this the other day, actually, and came to the conclusion that in a perfect world/state, we’d have the ability to know almost everything about what everyone did in public. At least.
Of course, then you get into the problem of defining “public.” I guess I would define it as being outside on public property (roads, mainly, but also parks, lakes, etc.) or in any public building (schools, courts, etc.).
So, I believe a perfect system would be total monitoring, audio and visual (no visual in bathrooms and other such areas, even if they’re in public buildings/areas) in all public areas.
HOWEVER, I believe that a system like that would only be acceptable if it was somehow possible to reduce corruption to zero, possibly by using voice/shape recognition software.
Garfield: Who’s we? Why not make the monitoring system open and transparent, and let everyone use it?
Depends what you mean by “use.” (yeah, yeah, shades of Bill Clinton…)
I don’t think some bored government employee should be able to use the system to track his ex-wife, or potential SO, or political opponet, or whatever. In this way, I don’t think the general public should be able to use it either.
However, if able to prove need (as in defense for a trial) or for some other reason (such as a university research project or something), I don’t think there’d be a problem.
I just think there’s huge potential for abuse (which is why a system like this would never work in the real world), both by the government and by civilians.
If you can’t tell, I haven’t done tons of thinking on the subject and this seems to be a largely opinion-based topic, so if some of my ideas seem a bit off-kilter, they may need revision.
I was listening to the NPR program “Speaking of Faith” a few weeks ago and they were discussing German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer had a few things to say on the topic of freedom and the one that stuck in my mind is that freedom is never safe. I’m all for maximizing our civil liberties and other personal freedoms, even though I know that at some level, those selfsame freedoms might be used to commit acts such as those that occured on 9/11.
cj
That would be the thing, right there. People with privelage (as defined by the ability to hire a private detective, say) are already able to track all those people. More importantly, if said people are in public, then they have no right not to be tracked. Given this, why not just make an open security system that anyone can log onto, and let everyone know everything about everyone?
Really, if my public doings are so public to the extent that they can be tracked and recorded on a public monitoring system, I fail to see why said system itself wouldn’t be public.
The problem is that the relationship between privacy and security isn’t linear.
At first, giving up small amounts of privacy (and freedom) results in large gains in security. Everyone accepts a low level of societal involvement in their lives, and everyone’s a whole lot safer and better off.
But as privacy and freedom are reduced even more, the benefits don’t keep pace. Eventually it takes a huge loss in privacy and freedom to achieve even a slight increase in safety.
I don’t know where the break-even point is.
There is no break-even point. You cannot babysit all babysitters, and the babysitters are not a static set of people.
The more monitoring that is done, the more you need to monitor those that do the monitoring to ensure things aren’t being misused. Thus, for every bit we want to pry into people’s lives, the more people that we need to trust with this activity. Given ever-increasing monitoring, eventually we would reach a point where we are trusting so many people with information to begin with that we might as well have never started monitoring and just trusted people in the first place. Once you reach that point, though, good luck getting those with access to that information (and hence power) to give it up.
Granted, that’s taking monitoring to the extreme, but I think it illustrates the fallacy of security by adding more cops/ cameras/ laws/ and so on.
As long as we have private property, we should have absolute privacy on it, unless evidence of law-breaking on said property becomes public. I would go so far as to say that even if a cop saw you smoking a joint on your property that is not necessarily a public act even though it is in principle available for public viewing. But I’m wierd like that.
This may sound hard line, but there is NO compromise that I am willing to entertain that abridges the freedoms guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. Those are the freedoms for which we are supposedly fighting, and they may not be taken away without rescinding the amendments. We cannot allow government to arbitrarily decide when intrusion into our private lives is appropriate and when it is not without due process. The McCarthy hearings should have taught us all that lesson.
We don’t have any compelling security issues at the moment, so it’s a pretty much academic debate. There was some terrorist incident a couple years back down at the south tip of the island, but nothing worthy of mention since then.
I say we draw the line in favor of maximum freedom and privacy.