Crime rates have been going down for decades in the Western world (including Oz). Yet governments continue to pass surveillance laws to “fight crime.”
If that doesn’t highlight their true aims, I don’t know what else does.
If that doesn’t highlight their true aims, I don’t know what else does.
Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there.
Incidentally, it’s really hard to counter this reasoning, no matter what subject it is applied to. The truth is, we don’t know what crime would have done without such a system in place. It may have dropped even further. It’s the typical causation / correlation confusion.