Let me try to present the other side of this argument in a way that doesn't sound crazy:
When one of your people dies, it really hurts. If you were the one in charge of guaranteeing the safety of that person, its a failure much deeper and more profound than the worst startup company failure. Most people will be willing to do anything to prevent the loss of another life on their watch. The monitoring of communications seems almost small in comparison to the lengths that many would go to.
There are practical reasons for government monitoring of communications. Bad people have existed long enough that it's safe to assume the trend will continue. [1] Listening to their communications is the best way to stop them, or at least to ensure that they can't act openly. Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.
Privacy could easily considered to be a basic right of all people. But it lives in a continuum like everything else that we value. Some times it's better if the government errs on the side of caution. And most of the time, people have nothing to hide.
> Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.
Except, once you start a regime of easy and ubiquitous surveillance, you cannot guarantee that those risks will remain small.
Surveillance is useless without absolute secrecy of who is being surveilled and why. The potential harms of such an institution should be obvious. Which is why American jurisprudence allowed such surveillance only with court orders, or the assent (sometimes after the fact) of special courts like the FISA court.
What we are fighting today is surveillance, through technological means, of everybody all the time. It is therefore absolutely guaranteed that a concomitant amount of government operations and agenda, related to this surveillance, will become secret and unaccountable. At this point, persecution and abuse is not just a possibility, it is guaranteed.
To anyone who favours a free society, your argument may not sound crazy, but it sounds dangerous. Most apologetics written on behalf of a surveillance state seem to ignore the unsavoury elements of the government itself.
Instead of becoming more transparent, governments are wanting to keep more secrets, while demanding that more of yours be exposed. Governments usually do have something to hide, ranging from corruption to murderous adventures abroad (sometimes not even abroad). This is not an institution that I trust to monitor me for "my own good".
Shame you are down voted for this because you have an important point, our human contradiction.
If government lets something bad happen because of privacy issues, we the people complain, and can vote them out. If the government pull out all the stops, including trampling all over privacy, then we don't like that either, and can vote them out. So what is a government supposed to do?
The next problem is that we the people say its fine for our governments to abuse the rights of "them". We don't mean "us". But government has to get that distinction right, and to do so, as best as they can, they have to cut through privacy and decency. That's fine for "them", but not "us". If its some Arab in gitmo, meh, whatever. If its some western god fearing christian, hmmm, that can produce a different response. If its me or my friend, we can get very upset about it.
In the end, people have to make a real grown up choice. We need to decide how far this goes, and accept the risk that goes with that. That risk works two ways. Risk of say a terror attack and risk of our own governments increasingly ruining our lives. And this is a cold numbers game. Think about it, are you or me more likely to be killed in something like 9/11 against perhaps daily government interference.
In many ways this is our fault. We expect too much and are not prepared to accept the risk or responsibility. Personally, I'd rather have my privacy and freedom, with a higher risk of being killed in a terror attack. I'd rather those who oppose those freedoms didn't win by making our society more like their ideal. If an attack happened and my government proved that it did everything possible, but privacy protection for us all got in the way, I personally would accept that. Its the price of freedom.
Mind you, them and us again. Of course Im calculating that the chances are I personally wont be involved in a terror attack, and the victims will just be another "them"......
Are you so naive as to think that the real terrorists will be communicating in the open? "Real" terrorists will use Tor, TrueCrypt, PGP, Steganography and any other tool in the toolkit to hide their tracks. I don't see how a gov't surveillance apparatus is going to catch any of them.
IIRC, in 9/11 the problem wasn't that there wasn't enough surveillance, because information regarding the attacks DID reach the White House, but it was apparently ignored.
"Real terrorists" communicated in open using mobile phones, during 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. These conversations were tapped by Indian government and were used in further investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks#cite_note-D...
Let's take the following premise as given: Most Americans will say "I support our troops, because they're willing to lay their life on the line -- and sometimes lay it down -- to protect our freedoms."
Or, as Patrick Henry put it when this country was fighting for independence from Great Britain: "Give me liberty or give me death!" [1]
These examples imply that most of us think of our freedoms as something that we won't automatically give up when the alternative is putting our lives on the line.
NB, I'm not saying we won't give up our freedoms when faced with an alternative of certain death. I'm saying most of us are willing to fight for our freedoms even if it means accepting a significant risk of death.
I speak only for the USA; the viewpoints of other countries and cultures may be quite different.
>There are practical reasons for government monitoring of communications. Bad people have existed long enough that it's safe to assume the trend will continue.
Bad governments has existed even longer.
Especially some of them like, you know, the one at constant warfare with other countries, the nuclear-bomb dropping on civilians one, the McCarthyism and J.E Hoover one, the still having the death penalty in 2012 one, the bible yielding one, the BS marijuana prosecutions one, the Rodney King one, the Kent State shootings one, the world leader in incarcerations one, the BS WMD pretext one, the Watergate one, et al.
>Listening to their communications is the best way to stop them, or at least to ensure that they can't act openly.
The second phrase contradicts the first. They quickly assume they cannot talk openly and they don't, so listening to public, unencrypted communications has no use at all. You might catch some naive idiots that way but never the well organised big fish.
Plus, it's all a pretext. It was never about the terrorists, it's about the government having more control, and especially the secret services and such inventing more responsibilities and work for themselves, to ensure bigger budgets and role.
>Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.
Define innocent. In my eyes, John Lennon was bloody innocent. And he has a ten thousand pages FBI file. Same for Martin Luther King. Same for thousands of activists, politicians, and change-makers.
When those people are trapped (and throughout history government has shown the will to trap them and stop them, by any means necessary, from blackmail to imprisonment), all of society is harmed and trapped, because change is resisted.
You might catch some naive idiots that way but never the well organised big fish.
During the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, Indian government tapped into the mobile conversations of terrorists. These tapped conversations helped in further investigations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks#cite_note-D...
Clearly, these were "well organized big fish" and not "naive idiots".
the still having the death penalty in 2012 one
Whats wrong with death penalty? It is perfectly reasonable response to some kind of crimes. [An example: the terrorist, who was caught live in action, who killed plenty of innocent people. That guy surely deserved a death sentence]
When one of your people dies, it really hurts. If you were the one in charge of guaranteeing the safety of that person, its a failure much deeper and more profound than the worst startup company failure. Most people will be willing to do anything to prevent the loss of another life on their watch. The monitoring of communications seems almost small in comparison to the lengths that many would go to.
There are practical reasons for government monitoring of communications. Bad people have existed long enough that it's safe to assume the trend will continue. [1] Listening to their communications is the best way to stop them, or at least to ensure that they can't act openly. Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.
Privacy could easily considered to be a basic right of all people. But it lives in a continuum like everything else that we value. Some times it's better if the government errs on the side of caution. And most of the time, people have nothing to hide.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents