[hardly_a_mirage]

> Today many argue the state has a need to access such correspondence to prevent crime, but such a need is like the need of an addict: nothing good can come from it and the people should not enable these institutions to satisfy an ever growing demand for insight into their private lives. One must remember that democracy is founded on the believe that thoughts and words are not crimes and everyone must be free to express them-self in public, but even more so in private correspondence. A society that mistrusts its own citizens to a point where all those that whisper to each other are called criminals, dealers, traitors or terrorists is rotten at its core.

I feel disregarding the usefulness of surveillance is part of the problem. We should not be arguing that that nothing good comes out of surveillance. It provides your opponent an easy strawman for a hollow victory. Because frankly, surveillance is a useful tool for law enforcement.

We need to rather argue that the moral cost and side-effects of public surveillance far outweighs its usefulness.

[TrueDuality]

> I feel disregarding the usefulness of surveillance is part of the problem. We should not be arguing that that nothing good comes out of surveillance. It provides your opponent an easy strawman for a hollow victory. Because frankly, surveillance is a useful tool for law enforcement.

In this regard I recommend you go look into the evidence on mass surveillance. There have been several reports done on the mass surveillance programs that have been operating since 2001 and in report after report, the mass surveillance has been found not only to be ineffective at producing any tips, it commonly just tied up law enforcement resources that could have been spent on their legitimate tips.

Here is a very well sourced article referencing several FBI internal reports, a white house appointed review group, those of non-profits, and local police departments:

* https://www.propublica.org/article/whats-the-evidence-mass-s...

[Vinnl]

Using "it doesn't work" as an argument is a losing battle. If you even manage to convince people of that, best case they'll still be in favour "just in case it does work".

The actual, real point is that they're underestimating the downsides or surveillance, and that even if it would work, it would still not be worth it. That's the only argument that can hold, and the actual reason we're against it.

[smichel17]

Moreover, the argument becomes invalid work as soon as someone finds a method that does work. Which creates an incentive for anyone with a vested interest in this spying to create such a working system.

[aww_dang]

Agreed. I would dismiss those arguments under the well established heading of: "The ends justify the means"

[pdonis]

> We should not be arguing that that nothing good comes out of surveillance.

The problem is that we, the people, can never know what, if any, good is coming out of surveillance. Attorney General Barr admitted that in one of his speeches arguing for back doors in encryption. The government cannot reveal what is being discovered through surveillance without disclosing sources and methods that it (understandably) wants to keep concealed from adversaries. But without that information we and our elected representatives cannot exercise proper oversight. And without proper oversight any such capability will be abused.

[WorldMaker]

It's often not the the government "cannot" reveal those details (maybe not immediately and directly in some cases, sure, but certainly with the distance of time that tools such as FOIA requests require), but that they "won't" and have no interest to. It should be the public demand with each attempt to increase surveillance to increase oversight. Sousveillance (watching the watchers) is the best known defense we have at keeping surveillance in check. The hard part is speaking those demands to those in power, embedding those checks/balances/required transparency in the surveillance processes in such a way that they cannot be circumvented by those in power.

[pdonis]

> with the distance of time that tools such as FOIA requests require

Often that is way too much time--25 to 50 years in many cases, since those are the time frames for declassification of classified information--for such revelations to be useful for oversight, especially with the state of encryption as it is since computers and the Internet.

Before computers and the Internet, it was possible to have a reasonable tradeoff between strength of encryption and the ability of law enforcement to conduct surveillance, because perfect encryption was impossible and imperfect encryption got more expensive the closer you wanted it to be to perfect. So people were already making a cost-benefit tradeoff (difficulty of breaking the encryption and obtaining private data vs. cost), and it was reasonable for the government to ask that the potential benefits of surveillance be included in the tradeoff, since that would just adjust the balance of the tradeoff, and the adjustment could be periodically reviewed based on data on past surveillance that was revealed by things like FOIA requests.

But now, with computers and the Internet, perfect encryption is cheaper than imperfect encryption. Perfect encryption is just a mathematical algorithm, and it's straightforward to put that algorithm in computer code and verify that the code correctly executes the algorithm. Imperfect encryption requires adding code to that perfect algorithm, which adds cost, and also adds a risk that wasn't even there before, of whatever back doors are in the code being exploited. So now we users, to enable surveillance by law enforcement, would not be just making a small adjustment that could be periodically reviewed in a tradeoff we have to make anyway. We would be adding a new tradeoff that we have no other incentive to make, and thus taking on a new oversight burden, which is, if not impossible, at least extremely difficult to properly fulfill, that we have no other incentive to take on. That is simply not a bargain that free citizens of a free society should accept.

> embedding those checks/balances/required transparency in the surveillance processes in such a way that they cannot be circumvented by those in power.

The processes can't be transparent because, as I said, that would reveal sources and methods that should be concealed from adversaries. An application for a FISA warrant can't wait for the years it would take to allow a FOIA request to be fulfilled in the interest of transparency.

[WorldMaker]

> Often that is way too much time--25 to 50 years in many cases, since those are the time frames for declassification of classified information

That's only part of what I mean about the goal to demand expanding oversight, maybe those timeframes are too long, but the point is that those time frames sometimes serve a useful purpose to slow things down for safety of parties involved or other reasons. A goal should be to find a healthy "medium" where "Surveillance FOIA 2.0" still allows for transparency/oversight/review without hobbling the process, and FOIA was just one example of an existing transparency tool to model from, it's not the only tool/model it was the first example to mind, but you would hopefully expand to a larger suite of transparency/sousveillance ("watch the watchers") tools.

I'm also not claiming that we shouldn't fight surveillance attempts, simply that where surveillance seems inevitable/a foregone conclusion/rough to fight that we also need to devote resources to fighting for increased sousveillance/transparency, because power will always abuse surveillance.

[pdonis]

> where surveillance seems inevitable/a foregone conclusion

To me, breaking perfect encryption by putting backdoors in computer algorithms is precisely the kind of place where we should not think that surveillance is inevitable/a foregone conclusion, but should draw a line in the sand and say that no, we're not going to accept this, law enforcement simply needs to up its game and figure out how to operate in this new environment where anyone who wants to can use perfect encryption.

[adrianmonk]

Hmm, that's a good point. It is a problem. And a problem for both sides.

If X is the amount of utility coming out of surveillance, and you cannot know X, then you cannot argue that X = 0 or that X > Y (for any Y you want to pick, like downsides of surveillance) or that X < Y either.

Essentially it becomes impossible to rationally debate the issue on the basis of whether it is a net gain.

Which means you need to fall back on other forms of reasoning. A reasonable position is that freedoms shouldn't be sacrificed for something whose utility cannot be demonstrated. But that's an argument about what sorts of justifications are required for laws, not about how much utility the law would have.

[mdifrgechd]

Yes, your point applies to many modern discussions and an often used rhetorical device I see is to jump away from the "should we do this" discussions and into the "does this work discussion" (to paraphrase jurassic park a bit). Common examples that won't make me popular are climate change, current anti-covid measures, and not eating meat. People get hung up on technicalities about whether ice cores show evidence of some climate relationship, or whether staying home reduces disease transmission, and pretend that those facts automatically lead to a conclusion about how we should behave, while bypassing the discussion about the kind of world we want to live in. I hypothesize that people feel on firmer ground when they shift their ideological arguments into facts about causality, instead of head on discussing why they value a certain kind of society.

[godelski]

> We need to rather argue that the moral cost and side-effects of public surveillance far outweighs its usefulness.

The argument I make is that it is more cost effective to develop a society where one does not need to commit crimes to get by in the first place. Law enforcement is reactionary and can only punish when crimes are already committed. While we shouldn't get rid of law enforcement, because crime will always exist, let's look to societies that have low crime (and societies that have high crime) and see what we can learn from them (and improve upon). Such policy is far more advantageous for citizens.

[pbhjpbhj]

It's very clear that the people in power in the UK and USA don't want the law to be enforced. They seemingly don't want low-crime society, they want only to be immune to prosecution themselves.

Your idea seems predicated on people in general being benevolent towards others. That's not going to work, there's a significant motivated cadre who want to do terrible things provided they 'win'. You don't enlist Cambridge Analytica when you think you're right, you do that sorry of thing when you don't care about being right/moral/legal but only about subjugating others.

[vonmoltke]

> You don't enlist Cambridge Analytica when you think you're right, you do that sorry of thing when you don't care about being right/moral/legal but only about subjugating others.

Be careful about how you frame that. While this is true of some people who engage in activities like this, there is also the "ends justify the means" group. The latter does believe what they are doing is right and moral, and that being right and moral justifies behavior that is illegal. It's easy to be cynical and assume that the latter group is just the former group deluding themselves, but there are people who genuinely think that way. Addressing them requires a different approach than addressing those who just want power and control by any means.

[godelski]

I see this line of thinking frequently, especially in modern politics, and it always fascinates me. I can get people to agree that the system is messed up because it is a race to the bottom. I can get people to agree that someone needs to draw a line in the sand for it to stop. I can get most people to agree that sacrificing moral values in an effort to win results in a hollow victory (and encourages the race to the bottom). But the interesting part is that my opinion that one needs to hold their own tribe accountable for sacrificing morals is extremely controversial. Yet I see it as logically following from the above.

I think this is why we can see people gladly vote for those that they very much disagree with. I think this is why attacking someone's tribal leader makes them double down and strengthens their convictions rather than changing belief. I think the question is how to get people to realize that you have to fight fair to get others to fight you back with fairness.

[craftinator]

If you have the time, I'd highly recommend writing this argument as a blog post; it deserves a higher and more exclusive visibility than it gets as embedded in these forums.

[godelski]

I think if you find that you poll a random set of people, most of them are (for the most part) benevolent towards one another. So I think it is disingenuous to talk about people in power and then apply that to people in general when these two have different behaviors. The point of democracies are to increase the robustness of governments to help discourage abuse of those in power while providing mechanisms to remove those that do abuse that power. Obviously this can be improved, but that's a different conversation all together.

[vlovich123]

I feel like OP does that 2 sentences later.

> And yes, it is true that these totalitarian methods ar [sic] efficient in fighting street level crime. However for society as a whole, such methods enable a terror of the state that is a crime against humanity itself

[zepto]

I agree with your conclusion.

However I think it’s a very serious fallacy to split surveillance into a ‘useful’ component and ‘side-effects’.

They aren’t side-effects. They are the effects.

Reduced crime may be a consequence of a surveillance society.

In such a society you may discover that discussing crime statistics in a negative light would reflect badly on the party bosses and must be done with caution.

[badRNG]

By the same token, one could say that extra-judicial torture could have "usefulness" as you put it. We could have a similar discussion of how absolutists on the torture question aren't doing a proper cost/benefit analysis and are "providing their opponents an easy strawman for a hollow victory."

I know this is Hacker News, but not every argument requires infinite nuance, we don't need to sit down and examine the pros & cons of torture or any other clear and obvious abuse of government power. We don't need to dignify the position of "read all citizens private correspondence" with a cost/benefit analysis. This practice provides legitimacy to clearly unconscionable actions. It is permissible, even strategically valuable, to have certain positions that we are absolutist on, policies that aren't tolerated under any conditions.

[nine_k]

The nuance here is pretty blunt: no matter how useful torture is, it is never enough to legalize it.

Same with banning secure private communication.

[cmiles74]

Is that it? I think it might be "no matter how many times we legalize torture, it will never become truly useful".

Studies show torture is simply not effective. Similar to how surveilling all communication is not effective.

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/security-...

[intricatedetail]

In that case why corruption is so rife? With so much tools available they should be able to catch some politicians that indirectly cause death and hardship to millions and yet the law enforcement is focused on catching another student who dared to use wrong plant to relax after tough day.

[tenuousemphasis]

How many terrorists did the NSA's illegal wiretapping program catch? Zero.