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by sirmarksalot 1158 days ago
I think this is a straw man. I don't think any politician would ever suggest such a thing at face value unless couched in some other argument. For example, after 9/11 a politician would have said, "I respect your need for privacy, but we live in extraordinary times, and we need to temporarily lift the restrictions on our agencies to effectively combat an imminent threat."

The real argument being made isn't that we should give all our secrets to the government, but that we should trust that the government will comply with our 4th Amendment protections and avoid gathering this data without a valid warrant issued by an impartial judge. If you're reading this, I'm guessing that like me, you don't believe a word of that. But that's the argument that's being made, and that's what needs to be debunked loudly and publicly.
1 comments
autoexec 1158 days ago
I think the US government has debunked that for us, repeatedly and thoroughly. If this is really their argument they've already lost.
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JoshTriplett 1158 days ago
> If this is really their argument they've already lost.

This would only be true if government were in fact answerable to people. It isn't, and hasn't been for a long time, if it ever was. Legislators decide what they want to vote for, and then decide how to brush off people who tell them anything they don't want to hear.

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aww_dang 1158 days ago
Lost in which arena? Do you trust politicians to not expand the scope of governance? If they are called out, they can simply rebrand their efforts under a new bill until 3 letter agencies get all the goodies they desire. How much patience does a low information public have? Is it as much as the political and security state classes?
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autoexec 1158 days ago
You're right, I don't think they can convince us this won't be abused, but they absolutely could sneak it past us.

They didn't get much push back when they threw out net neutrality which most Americans supported and as far as I know nothing was ultimately done about the faked opposition either (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biggest-isps-pai...)

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