[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.

[throwawaykf02]

"People die everyday in car accidents and safety is an illusion, so let's stop wearing seatbelts. Safety is not worth the indignity of driving around trussed up like a turkey."

BTW, the government and the courts agree that warrantless snooping is dangerous, which is why there are checks and balances in place. The recent leaks raised doubts that those were not effective. But if the numbers in the declassified documents are accurate, it's nowhere nearly as bad as people here are imagining.

[lukifer]

But we can't really know, can we? The trust is completely eroded. Fool me once...

Put simply, databases change the equation. Never in human history has it been possible to store and mine such a massive quantity of data in perpetuity. If the infrastructure exists to capture and process that much data, included via algorithm rather than by human, that represents such a radical shift in power that its abuse is inevitable, regardless of whatever restraints may or may not exist today. What happens if the next Snowden is a profiteer? What happens if China finds a backdoor, and can suddenly tap all data on every American citizen.

Capturing and storing all data is really really fucking dangerous, no matter who's doing it or why. (I'm not thrilled about Google or Facebook either, but at least it's voluntary, and they never throw anyone into a cage.)

> People die everyday in car accidents and safety is an illusion, so let's stop wearing seatbelts.

I think a better analogy would be a seatbelt that you can't take off, "for your own good". And if you're trapped by your seatbelt in a crashed and burning car, well, too bad, we meant well!