[astrea]

> I don't think the two most cmmon criticisms hold up. The first one is that surveillance affects many people adversely. I don't think that's true. Nobody has an interest in eaves-dropping on average citizens, it's simply a waste of resources. The second one is the slippery slope line of argument you brought up. I don't think there is a lot of evidence that, in states of law, surveillance has been abused or employed illegaly.

What about in the current case of the Nicaraguan government? https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/nicar...

[Barrin92]

I think the Ortega government falls far outside the scope of something we can call a state of law, which I qualified my comment with.

I think it's valid to say that governments like these do abuse surveillance, but my problem with this as an argument in these discussions is that it also equally applies to anything else. They abuse the power of police, of the military, of state owned enterprises and anything else, but yet in other nations we still rely on all of these facilities to a large degree.

So I think there should be a distinction between problems intrinstic to surveillance, and bad actors using surveillance as a tool for abuse.

[astrea]

Well we can qualify things to our argument's benefit all day, but the underlying point of trusting that a government will always be a "good actor" is a proven flawed premise.

[Barrin92]

I don't think one needs to believe tha the government is always a good actor. The question is if the benefits of surveillance to say, public safety and order will outweigh the likelyhood of bad outcomes or abuse. That's not a trivial question, and it differs strongly depending on which country we're talking about.