When your "right" to privacy starts conflicting with your "right" to safety, something has to give.
Also, there are lots of actually effective measures to improve safety that don't involve giving governments direct access to what everyone says and does.
Once we have established that safety is a relative term it becomes pretty clear that ruthless surveillance would yield some safety improvement. I think that you can make a much more meaningful stand against surveillance when you acknowledge that, a opposed to outright denying any possible effect.
In my opinion, that only makes it more likely that this data will be misused in order to prove that the dollars spent yielded _something._ That the cry of "safety" is accepted as somehow obviously true is a significant problem and exacerbates the issue.
- Everyone working for "agencies" do so with no regard for their stated goal and are simply interested in their own personal gain.
- They're genuinely intending to prevent incidents of "crime" and are relatively disinterested in the maintenance of your privacy.
I find the latter more likely than the former, with a mix of the two broadly probable. Given that I find it equally unlikely that they achieve literally nothing. (Frankly even if the former were the truth it seems unlikely they wouldn't prevent something at some point even by accident).
Claiming they do _nothing_ is ill founded. The more valid argument is "But at what cost?"
To be honest, the only way I might even consider that this kind of surveillance is helping would be to see some concrete examples of them literally saving lives.
I do not believe that those performing the surveillance do nothing, on the contrary, I believe they may be responsible for any number of harms (leaking private information, having that information stolen, becoming a party to blackmail, etc.) But I certainly do not believe that they are making any of us safer.
I am something like 100x more likely to get struck by lightning _twice_ than I am to be killed by a terrorist
Privacy invasion has to be stopped by law. There is no way, currently, for a person who has public safety as a responsibility to say "no" to this kind of technology.
It's much the same with businesses invading user privacy and using it to drive profits. Without a law forbidding it, everyone has to keep up with the profits of the most "evil" corporation.
We need explicit laws.
I'm not against doing something, I'm against counting doing anything as equivalent to doing something productive.
I completely agree with you.
They get away with that when it comes to gun control, why not with privacy too?
EFF yearly budget 9musd...and they have a complicated history with active political engagement.
ACLU yearly budget 133musd
Both the EFF and ACLU do a lot more than just privacy. The NRA does one thing...and they are really good at it. They also have language in the constitution they can mis-interpret. For privacy we are left with the abstractness of unenumerated rights.