[mcphilip]

Cue praise from the majority of the main stream media that only tens of thousands of communications are improperly monitored since there are roughly 150 billion emails sent per day (globally). The surveillance program will be declared a stunning success and most people will agree since they are impressed by small percentages. The error rate being so low will imply, to most people, that the NSA is painstakingly concerned with only monitoring pertinent communications.

Out of curiosity, what is a good argument against this perspective that Average Joe can grok?

[morpher]

Why are you less impressed by small percentages than by numbers that are large only in the absence of a reference scale? It's generally not possible to design flawless systems, and failure rate a much more meaningful number.

[mcphilip]

I was looking for intelligent discussion about why even a small percentage failure rate is worth being alarmed at and how this can be communicated to Average Joe effectively. Instead, I get this inane straw man reply.

Obviously a very small failure rate is impressive in the abstract. We're not talking about the abstract here, we're talking about foundational concerns about whether there can be an expectation of privacy in any online communication.

[throwawaykf02]

No. As long as people keep using the same online communications to plan inflicting harm on society as society does to exchange pictures of grandkids and recipes, those communications will keep being monitored, and thus we can have no expectation of privacy. Liberties have always been compromised for the sake of security, Benjamin Frankliin quotes notwithstanding.

But! Taking these numbers at face value, the low error rate tells us that, yes, we can have privacy with pretty high probability. As with all things in life, it is not guaranteed, but these are much better chances than what we can expect in other aspects of life. I mean, tens of thousands erroneously picked up over many months out of the billions of emails exchanged daily? Why, you're more likely to die in a terrorist attack than be snooped on [1]!

[1] No, I haven't run the numbers, just saying so for dramatic effect :-P

[lukifer]

Where does it end? If the surveillance state effectively trumps terror, why not murders, rapes and child porn? If those, then why not embezzlement and tax fraud? If those, then why not speeding tickets and MP3 torrenting? And through it all, who watches the watchers (and who watches the watcher-watchers)? If this is all so effective, why have due process at all?

You'll never convince me that any jihadist has the capacity to inflict harm on society more than a government with unchecked power to know all secrets. Knowledge is power, and complete knowledge corrupts completely.

[throwawaykf02]

You went wrong the moment you used the term "surveillance state". Before, we had no numbers, so that phrase might have been justified. But now we do: The declassified court document seems to say there were about a dozen million "transactions" collected over a year. Hundreds of billions of emails are sent everyday. A very small fraction of a percent is snooped on. Is that a "surveillance state"? At what level of watchfulness does a society go from "vigilant" to "surveillance state"? There is no such measure, and the term is bandied about to generate an emotional response.

You'll never be convinced because you are, presumptively, ensconced in the safe, protective shell of a (western?) country that does not experience terrorist attacks on a regular basis. The terrorist threat is real. People die everyday in terror attacks. The "power-mad" government scenario? Lets just say in all this noise I've seen very few instances of actual abuse of power, if any.

[lukifer]

People die every day in car accidents too. Safety is mostly an illusion. (I'll admit that not having children probably makes my sanguine attitude easier.)

I don't care what the percentage is. The right to snoop arbitrarily is too much power, and if we accept it will be abused, it will get worse, and it will be very hard to undo. Safety is not worth the permanent eradication of human dignity and liberty. I'd rather die than live like a chickenshit.

[rayiner]

Because when it comes to this topic, normally sensible nerds throw out their good engineering sensibility.

[einhverfr]

I think the argument is very simple, really.

Prior to the American Revolution, British Magistrates were giving the police "general warrants" that let them search whatever they wanted and this lead to all kinds of abuses of power. This is why we require that search warrants are reasonably scoped.

We have come full circle (ironically our most recent "President George" was the third President named George, so I like to affectionately call him President George III) back to a time of general warrants. We can expect that the same kinds of abuses of power will occur.

This means, effectively that the government can decide that someone is an annoyance to them and then look back at all of their communications for evidence of a crime, and then try the individual for very vague crimes in court. Checked face book at work? Are you guilty of using your work computer in excess of what your employer authorized? Worse is it wire fraud?

In the end we end up in a world dominated by government officials who can and will adopt the same mentality of Stalin's chief of police, Beria, who was purportedly quoted as saying "show me the man and I'll find you the crime."