[owl_troupe]

OK I'll bite. From this article:

>The public learned about the NSA’s “PRISM” and “Upstream” programs, which involve [...] warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications on a massive scale.

The US executive branch engineered an automated, massive breach of the constitutional rights of US citizens and the rights of people abroad.

> The executive branch’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ call records had produced “little unique value”[.]

These programs have yielded almost no positive results in actually increasing security, which was their stated purpose. How much does this cost? What do we get in return? What is the chilling effect on society?

>The human toll of government surveillance is undeniable. It can have far-reaching consequences for people’s lives — particularly for communities of color, who are wrongly and disproportionately subject to surveillance.

Mass surveillance programs have been adapted to routine policing matters and have served to dramatically enhance existing biases in policing against marginalized communities. Over 75% of warrantless searches conducted by US police under the auspices of the Patriot Act were for drug related offenses [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/04/surveillance-s...

[slibhb]

The article provides no principle by which we can say that mass surveillance is wrong. It does observe (per your quote) that mass surveillance has not worked very well. This raises an obvious question: if mass survillance did work well, would it be acceptable?

The broader point here is that there are arguments against mass surveillance on principle, the ACLU just doesn't find them convincing.

[AnimalMuppet]

We don't actually need to worry about your obvious question, because it doesn't work. Yours is hypothetical. (And hypothetical questions can be interesting. Also, it can be good to have answers while they're still hypothetical, because sometimes they quit being hypothetical, sometimes very abruptly. But for the current discussion, we can reject mass surveillance on pragmatic grounds without worrying about the theoretical.)

[slibhb]

It's not obvious that mass surveillance doesn't work. It seems to work pretty well for the Chinese.

Anyway, we have a mass surveillance program because people thought it would work. Perhaps we could have avoided the program if we had more people in that room who had effectively argued that, even if it worked, it was not to be pursued for reasons that have nothing to do with its efficacy. Sometimes principles come in handy.

[pintxo]

Not sure the efficacy of mass surveillance can be determined within timespans of less than several decades. As there seem to be two major effects at play, one is the direct usage of information learned from mass surveillance which can be used by the surveyors. I can only assume this is the "works pretty well" you refer to. On the other hand, there are the (indirect) effects of mass surveillance on the surveyed population. Maybe the best example here is the GDR, which had a massive surveillance operations run by the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit). They might have well delayed the ultimate dissolution of the GDR, but ultimately they could not stop it.

[dTal]

While you're not wrong, it seems very clear that these measures are not being pushed for their stated purpose. The fact that they are ineffective at that purpose is powerful and important supporting evidence that we should not ignore.

Here's an example: Article 20 of The French Military Programming Law, which entered into force on 1 January 2015 against heavy criticism from civil liberties groups, gave the state full access to all unencrypted telecommunications, including SMS.

11 months later, Paris was attacked by a wave of terrorism, coordinated by... unencrypted SMS.

In response, the government... pushed through even more intrusive surveillance legislation, and coordinated a public relations push to implicate encrypted messaging providers as "complicit".

[owl_troupe]

By "work[ing] well", what is the metric you see as success?

A broad society that has rendered itself completely nonthreatening to its ruling class?

A place where certain forms free expression can result in imprisonment, torture, or execution? [1]

Mass surveillance serving as the infrastructure of religious, ethnic, and political persecution, including genocide? [2]

[1] https://organharvestinvestigation.net/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide#Use_of_biometr...

[AnimalMuppet]

Both your points are fair.

[actually_a_dog]

I'm confused. At the top of the second paragraph, it explicitly mentions the erosion of privacy rights. Isn't that a valid principle upon which to oppose mass surveillance without cause?

Then there's this entire paragraph:

> The human toll of government surveillance is undeniable. It can have far-reaching consequences for people’s lives — particularly for communities of color, who are wrongly and disproportionately subject to surveillance. The people who feel the impact the most are Muslims, Black and Brown people, people of Asian descent, and others who have long been subject to wrongful profiling and discrimination in the name of national security. Routine surveillance is corrosive, making us feel like we are always being watched, and it chills the very kind of speech and association on which democracy depends. This spying is especially harmful because it is often feeds into a national security apparatus that puts people on watchlists, subjects them to unwarranted scrutiny by law enforcement, and allows the government to upend lives on the basis of vague, secret claims.

They don't actually come out an explicitly state it, but the idea they're getting at is that we shouldn't oppress people, particularly people who are already disadvantaged, without cause for suspicion. That would seem to be a second principle we can apply here. You can also combine this with the general ineffectiveness of said mass surveillance and use utilitarian principles to reach the same conclusion.

[slibhb]

> I'm confused. At the top of the second paragraph, it explicitly mentions the erosion of privacy rights. Isn't that a valid principle upon which to oppose mass surveillance without cause?

"We should oppose surveillance because we have privacy rights". Sounds like a tautology. It raises the question: why should we have privacy rights?

The long passage you quoted enumerates negative consequences of surveillance. We should have privacy because democracy depends on it, we should have privacy because surveillance doesn't work, surveillance is racist (how trendy), etc. What's missing, in my opinion, is an assertion that people have a fundamental right to privacy solely based on their being human. That's a natural rights perspective, I think it's indispensible, and I think it's unfortunate that we (not just the ACLU) no longer find it convincing.

As long as we justify our rights based on contingent circumstances they will always be up for debate.

[lenkite]

Without the right to privacy, the other rights frankly don't matter much.

[actually_a_dog]

Well, you've got a problem, then. You don't get rights just for being born. You only get rights within the context of a society that has agreed to respect those rights.

Consider this: if you have rights simply because you are human, then there must be something different about humans that gives them those rights, which chimps and bonobos don't have. What is that?

[slibhb]

You're proving my point. You don't find the idea of natural rights convincing. That's exactly what I wrote. The problem is that, in your framework, there will always be a good reason to violate people's rights. "If we don't spy on people, the terrorists will blow us up" sounds silly today but it convinced people after 9/11. As did "we have to torture these people to prevent a terrorist attack".

I agree with you that this is linked to a distinction between humans and animals. The fact that we no longer find that distinction convincing is linked to the fact that we no longer find natural rights convincing.

[actually_a_dog]

I'm open to being convinced, if you're open to trying.

[oliv__]

> Consider this: if you have rights simply because you are human, then there must be something different about humans that gives them those rights, which chimps and bonobos don't have. What is that?

Uhm consciousness?

[actually_a_dog]

How do you know chimps and bonobos aren't conscious?

[throwawaysea]

Surveillance of public spaces with some controls (like needing just cause or warrants or a human in the loop) seems appropriate and obviously useful. This would allow police departments to more easily track and apprehend criminal suspects. I don’t believe the frequency of biased policing to be significant enough to offset the clear boost to pubic safety this would bring.