[matheusmoreira]

It's all about headcount, actually. Society should maximize the number of people necessary for authorities to do anything at all. If they want to investigate someone, they should have to send men out there to physically compromise the computers instead of having a button they can push to reveal that person's entire life history on a monitor. That puts hard limits on the scale of their operations, ensures their powers are checked and limits the damage done by any eventual abuse.

Society is going in the opposite direction instead: it's minimizing the number of people required and maximizing the scale of operations. Naturally, societies all over the globe are trending towards totalitarian surveillance police states where power and authority are concentrated in the hands of few. The panopticon was envisioned as a way to allow a single guard to keep watch over limitless prisoners. People are always ready to accept that because they think they would never be imprisoned themselves.

[hackerlight]

So this is a change in topic, from "will surveillance help them catch more criminals", to "is surveillance a bad thing".

Basically, your view is that surveillance is bad because it can be abused by an authoritarian and eventually lead to the erosion of liberal democracy and individual freedoms. Which has validity.

What about terrorism, though? If we completely eliminated the surveillance apparatus, how many more terrorist attacks would there be, and what would the consequences of that be on the survival of liberal democracy? I ask these questions in earnest. Maybe the answer is "not many terrorist attacks would have been prevented". But then I read these news articles of multiple terrorist plotters being arrested before committing the act. What percentage of those arrests are attributable to the surveillance apparatus? And if that apparatus was removed, and these people successfully committed those acts (say, they blew up a bunch of people on NYE), what impact would this have on people's voting patterns? Well, people would be more inclined to vote for a strongman authoritarian to fix the terrorism issue, which then creates the very problem that you are concerned about with the surveillance state in the first place. Which is the erosion of liberalism and democracy and freedoms. The AfD will get elected. Forget any progress on climate change. Then we get climate refugees, leading to further destabilization. Etc. What I'm getting at is there is no solution that doesn't involve trade-offs when it comes to protecting freedoms and democracy.

Maybe the answer in the modern world isn't that surveillance is always bad, it's that surveillance needs to be heavily constrained with newly designed checks and balances.

[matheusmoreira]

> What about terrorism, though?

What about the principles the US was founded upon, though?

Will you maintain those principles even though terrorists are flying aircraft into your buildings? Or will you break and start stripping your citizens of their rights, surveilling them without warrant in a desperate bid to stop future terrorists?

The US made its choice. The price of freedom is high and paid in blood. They no longer want to pay it. The consequences will come.

> I ask these questions in earnest.

I hold that these questions are ultimately irrelevant. It seems like these terrorists won either way. America was destroyed, even if only spiritually. Principles it once stood for, stand no more.

[hackerlight]

> America was destroyed, even if only spiritually.

This is my point. If a constrained surveillance apparatus could have stopped 9/11, we could have prevented all the negative consequences of 9/11, including the growth of the surveillance apparatus itself.

The system that you are advocating for (pre-9/11 lack of surveillance) led to the event (9/11) that destroyed what it is you're advocating for.

This is a flaw I see in the libertarian worldview. There's an under-appreciation of unpredictable spillover consequences. In my view, sometimes rights and freedoms need to be violated in order to protect those rights and freedoms. It's not that I want violations of freedoms, it's that I see it as a pragmatic necessary evil sometimes.

Let's think through the causality step by step. When a terrorist attack happens, people are shocked and angry. Clear-thinkers like yourself have no input into the decision making during this time because you're a small political minority. Nationalism and security paranoia dominate decision making. Then we get the Iraq War and all the other stuff.

This is a funny discussion because you're probably a libertarian and I also consider myself a (left-)libertarian (or at least strong anti-authoritarian). But I'm one of those "paradox of tolerance" guys who wants to protect liberal democracy from some of the failure modes that emerge from the complex social system that democracy is embedded in. That means: keeping inflation low, ensuring housing costs are reasonable, eliminating sectarian violence (terrorism and hate crimes), keeping institutions robust and low corruption, quality public education, making sure people feel physically safe and socially respected, racial equality/harmony (equality of opportunity and no racism).

[matheusmoreira]

> This is a flaw I see in the libertarian worldview. There's an under-appreciation of unpredictable spillover consequences. In my view, sometimes rights and freedoms need to be violated in order to protect those rights and freedoms. It's not that I want violations of freedoms, it's that I see it as a pragmatic necessary evil sometimes.

I understand your point. Deep down I agree with it and that causes me immense sadness and disillusionment.

I want a set of principles that are true, universal and moral. A solid bedrock of philosophy to guide my thoughts and actions. If such principles can be invalidated by circumstances, they are worthless. A principle like "people cannot be tortured" cannot be relativized by the fact terrorists flew aircraft into buildings. Even though they flew aircraft into buildings, they cannot be tortured. Obviously CIA guys reject that worldview, but for me these things must be absolute. Otherwise I'm going to start coming up with many more equally valid reasons to torture people.

If I cannot be certain of such fundamental principles, then pretty much anything can be justified based on circumstances and there's no point in wasting time philosophizing about anything. Everything becomes about power, what you can get away with. Civilization breaks down and the law of the jungle dominates. You become desensitized to death and suffering because you internalize the fact "people cannot be unjustly killed or imprisoned" was never a valid universal principle to begin with.

> But I'm one of those "paradox of tolerance" guys

Yeah, and I'm the guy who says democracy should be able to tolerate literal nazism or it's not really tolerant as it claims to be. I'm very sensitive to that argument because I live in a country where nazism is a crime and yet communism is not. Literal communists walk our soil with absolute impunity. Literal, self-admitted communists are in our supreme court. If they will arrest nazis, then I demand they also arrest these communists. If they refuse, I'm going to start drawing some very ugly conclusions about the system they use to justify their actions and the culmination of those conclusions is the complete rejection of their authority.

The reason I said I agree with you deep down is I've already drawn these conclusions. I'm very uncertain about things right now. It's like nothing is true and everything is allowed. I think I make these comments here partly because I'm mourning and partly because I desperately want someone to prove me wrong.