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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

> it is demonstrably useful for national security

Is it? Please demonstrate it by listing terrorist incidents prevented or active terrorists caught due to surveillance other than narrowly-targeted police investigation, or military action in an active combat zone.

To qualify, the use of broad surveillance should be a necessary component of the investigation, i.e. the investigation would not have started or reached the conclusion it did without it. If some of these exist but they're all classified, that's problematic from the perspective of democracy because it prevents the public from making an informed decision about their merit.

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I don't think that's quite fair. I greatly doubt that successful preventions would be willingly associated with questionably legal surveillance. In the US, "parallel construction" is used specifically to hide how information was obtained and I'm sure similar motivations exist here.

The assertion was that it's demonstrably useful for national security. Without such a demonstration, I submit that it is not, and that terrorists are caught using normal police work.

"It's too secret to tell the public in broad terms a decade after the investigation is over" strikes me as incompatible with democracy. Questionably-legal surveillance also strikes me as incompatible with democracy outside of short-term use in exceptional emergency conditions, which should be disclosed to the public once the emergency is over.

> I don't think that's quite fair.

It is if you're not going to accept a priori the claim that surveillance can be justified. If you need to have it demonstrated that surveillance can be justified, the only possible grounds for such a demonstration is to show the people the benefits--the actual harms that surveillance has prevented. If we the people can't see those benefits, how can we possibly judge whether or not surveillance can be justified?

In other words, the government of any free society is in a kind of Catch-22 position with regard to surveillance: it can't be justified to the people without revealing that it's happening and what it's discovering, but revealing those things destroys the usefulness of the surveillance. The only choices are to not permit the surveillance at all, or to accept an unavoidable loss of freedom--as a citizen, you will never be able to know whether the surveillance your government is conducting is justified. You just have to accept it.

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