[abecedarius]

A plausible story of how our rights are in the way is always ready to hand. If we can't at some point draw a clear line and say no, that's it, stop -- then we have no rights. It's chisel, chisel, chisel, year after year, decade after decade.

In America one of those lines is that your personal papers are private. Get a warrant. I don't have to justify this stand. I might choose to explain why it's a good stand, or I might not; it's on you to persuade us.

[slg]

>In America one of those lines is that your personal papers are private. Get a warrant. I don't have to justify this stand. I might choose to explain why it's a good stand, or I might not; it's on you to persuade us.

Part of the problem is that these devices are encrypted so a warrant doesn't work on them. That is a big enough change that maybe people need to debate if the line is still in the right place.

[abecedarius]

That is a change worth considering, though it must be treated at the level of rights, not just a case-by-case utility calculus. At the same time, most other changes have been towards more surveillance and control: cameras everywhere, even in the sky; ubiquitous location tracking; rapidly improving AI to scale up these capabilities beyond what teams of humans could monitor; tracking of most payments; mass warrantless surveillance by spy agencies; God knows what else now, many years after the Snowden leaks. This talk you hear about the population "going dark" is... selective.

I think my vehemence last night might've obscured the point I wanted to make: what a right is supposed to be is a principle that overrides case-by-case utility analysis. I would agree that everything is open to questioning, including the right to privacy -- but as I see it, if you ask what's the object-level balance of utilities with respect to this particular proposal, explicitly dropping that larger context of privacy as a right (which was not arrived at for no reason) and denigrate that concern as science fiction, as a slippery-slope fallacy -- then that's a debate that should be rejected on its premise.

[computerfriend]

My memories and thoughts are also warrant-proof. We just accept it as a limitation.