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0 pointsdennisgorelik14y ago0 comments

1) Your idea of replacing law enforcement [of illegal wiretaps] with even stricter laws without enforcing them - that's what reminds me about alcohol prohibition.

2) You again are attacking a straw man. I'm not suggesting increasing surveillance. I'm suggesting not to pay much attention to it and focus our very limited resources on what's really important:

- Freedom of law-abiding citizens from government persecution.

- Reducing legal restrictions on citizens.

- Freedom of speech.

Government surveillance abuse is not nearly as important as these three principles above.

If you insist that limiting government surveillance is more important, then please name what item in my list you consider less important.

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dpark14y ago· 2 in thread

1) Prohibition had nothing to do with replacing enforcement of laws with stricter laws. It was about passing a new law where none existed before, to take away a freedom. Your comparison makes no sense.

And I'm not saying we shouldn't enforce the law. I'm saying that the range of the allowed wiretaps should be narrow so that enforcement is feasible. And indeed, the range of legal wiretaps is actually not that broad. If we enforced the existing law, there would be fewer.

2) You have repeatedly said that we shouldn't be concerned about government privacy violations, that wiretaps are not a problem, that we have more privacy than we need, that we should trade privacy for other freedoms, that the government is efficient with less privacy. You may not have explicitly said "I want more wiretaps", but you've been arguing in favor of it quite clearly. This is not a straw man. If you don't like where your arguments lead, then maybe you should ask why you're making those arguments.

Your attempt to separate privacy from other freedoms and present them as a tradeoff is still unsound. I could likewise ask you whether you'd rather have freedom of speech or freedom from false arrest, and pretend that this is a legitimate tradeoff and that we need "not to pay much attention to it and focus our very limited resources on what's really important".

dennisgorelikOP14y ago

1) If wiretapping X is illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent only wiretapping X.

If wiretapping X and wiretapping Y are illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent both of them, which makes law enforcement harder (not easier as you are saying).

2) Of course there is no point in blindly giving government more surveillance power and hope for improvement. But if government agency claims that with more surveillance power it can significantly reduce spending and significantly reduce number of false arrests while maintaining low crime level - then it might worth to try.

If government agency fails to deliver on that promise, then the head of that agency should be replaced, budget shrunk anyway, and wiretapping grant revoked.

3) The difference between "government surveillance" and "limiting freedom of speech"/"false arrests" is that "government surveillance" has much smaller downsides and much higher upsides, while both "limiting freedom of speech"/"false arrests" have almost no upside and very painful downsides.

dpark14y ago

1) Your logic only makes sense if you assume that the rate of wiretaps is unchanged by the legal status of wiretapping. This seems a rather implausible situation.

If wiretapping X, Y, and Z is legal, then it's easier to hide an illegal wiretap of W. When there are more legal wiretaps, it's easier for illegal wiretaps to slip through. The cost of oversight isn't dominated by the number of illegal wiretaps. It dominated by the number of legal wiretaps, because each of those needs to be reviewed.

2) No, it's not worth trying. Surveillance agencies have been saying that forever, and they've not delivered on their promise.

Your beliefs seem to exist in some strange world where agencies are actually held accountable. So long as we don't live in that world, your ideas make no sense.

3) We will not agree on this. You simply don't value privacy. I do, and I think you're really naive about this.

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