Ask HN: Is spending on surveillance a bad economic decision? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is spending on surveillance a bad economic decision?

4 pointsMisterQ4 comments

After yet another terrorist attack the debate over the need to invest more money on surveillance has been brought up more than once. Considering the vast amount of money spent already and the non quantifiable cost of privacy loss, wouldn't a better solution be to spend those money in education and better integration of minorities in the local communities rather than keeping tab on an ever growing number of people that may or may not be suspects? I would not propose this as an immediate shift, but rather spread it over a decade or more, even from a cost perspective wouldn't it be more viable.

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I think surveillance is completely retarded. Not completely but pushing for more and more, I see people asking to give away their privacy because terrorist succeeded an operation?

All of the french terrorist (yes, they are also french, born in France and turned in France), including the ones from january, were already known from the police. We knew they traveled to Syria. Some official said back in january that they just couldn't afford to follow them 24/7, just not enough manpower.

So what more surveillance will do? We already know who they are, we can't arrest them before they do anything, and from interviews on french TV (I am french), our services already stopped a lot of them before they act already. Like earlier this august, apparently some dudes was planning on hitting a music concert, probably during one of the numerous summer festivals.

I realize that this could be an argument for more surveillance since it is working for most cases, but I still strongly believe that more surveillance means:

- Working on consequences instead of causes (causes would be french people getting radicalised)

- Completely prepare the field for abuse if futures gouvernements feel like it, which I believe they will (they already do basically, to some extent). Let's remind everyone Hitler was elected, majority of people voted for him. I'm not saying I'm scared that a new devil will rise in France, or even western countries, but none of our liberties and rights are secured by any means.

I bet there's a world wide natural experiment going on right now (since the late 90's) on that very subject. I also bet that there's several very smart people working on that very question.

The real questions are who are these people, what is their data, and what can they conclude? Maybe the fine folks over at Freakonomics might have a hint.

In the end, I believe we should believe what the academic Economists have to say about it.

How much money are we talking about? Which country?

Just because you can't quantify the cost of privacy loss doesn't mean we shouldn't spend money on surveillance.

Well, we know from the Snowden disclosures that the NSA gets about $50 BILLION a year (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black...). Neither CIA/NRO nor FBI are included in that, I think, and we know that both run extensive/expensive surveillance.

So, the USA may spend around $100 BILLION a year on various surveillance activities. Spy satellites are pretty expensive to develop, launch and operate.

It's also pretty clear that some of the surveillance is turned inward, against US citizens inside the USA's boundaries. That would be the FBI part of the surveillance picture.

Given that US citizens are supposed to be presumed innocent, and protected from unreasonable search and seizure, we have a binary decision to make, and I don't see how anyone can say that dragnet surveillance of all/nearly all US citizens lies within Constitutional limits. At the very least, we should change the rules, and make performances of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American" some kind of mild federal crime. You know, just to be honest and consistent.

On a sociological level, we know that being under surveillance all the time causes some psychological effects (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2412564, but it's easy to find lots of serious stuff about those effects). Do we, the citizens of the USA, want those effects? If we all go about censoring ourselves, how does that affect the technological and social innovation that we depend on to keep our civilization running? Keep in mind the fate of the Spanish Empire after the Inquisition, and China's "one eye open, one eye shut" enforcement.

Let's also keep in mind that surveillance will be used against politicians and potential politicians, and leaders at all scales. Do the citizens of the USA want that?

Do we want the market distortions that secret knowledge gives some people (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...)?

We haven't discussed any of this openly. Hardly any of it has an easy cost to calculate, but it's probably not worth $100 BILLION a year.

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