Privacy: For/Against

[Sammael Bard]

So, in order to make this clear and NOT turn this into political bickering, this is related to a story I'm trying to write. Try not to get emotional and/or violent.

The gist:

My protagonist is an agent for the government. And, in a particular scene, he has to defend/explain his job (involves a lot of snooping through people's data for "national security" purpose) to his girlfriend/hostage (don't ask how/why. It's a long story)

I can defend the his/government's position by saying that "we won't do anything with your chicken soup recipe" or "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Also, I can say that this law of covert snooping is essential in the light of recent terror attacks in the country (fictional). I can spin enough material to make it sound convincing.

How do I give a counter-argument? I mean, how do you debate with someone bred into this ideology. Someone passed the idea of comparing it to 'mental rape'. This is a good comparison and can constitute an ending to the debate, but it does not make a debate.


So....I need some help. I need some arguments that can be convincing. Even a few points will do.


TIA

 

[hylas_]

The pro arguments only work if you trust the government. There are plenty of examples, past and present, of governments that were/are deeply unethical. There are places in the world right now where it's illegal and even deadly to be, say, queer or an atheist.

"Not in our country, though," you might say. But governments change, and perfectly "reasonable" contries can slide into fascism.

"It's too much power to hold for any one institution," is basically the argument here.

Who are you to decide that *you* are the right person/institution to be trusted with that kind of power? Of course you think that you're on the side of the angels... but everybody kind of does, in their own heads, no?

 

[8letters]

So, in order to make this clear and NOT turn this into political bickering, this is related to a story I'm trying to write. Try not to get emotional and/or violent.

The gist:

My protagonist is an agent for the government. And, in a particular scene, he has to defend/explain his job (involves a lot of snooping through people's data for "national security" purpose) to his girlfriend/hostage (don't ask how/why. It's a long story)

I can defend the his/government's position by saying that "we won't do anything with your chicken soup recipe" or "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Also, I can say that this law of covert snooping is essential in the light of recent terror attacks in the country (fictional). I can spin enough material to make it sound convincing.

How do I give a counter-argument? I mean, how do you debate with someone bred into this ideology. Someone passed the idea of comparing it to 'mental rape'. This is a good comparison and can constitute an ending to the debate, but it does not make a debate.


So....I need some help. I need some arguments that can be convincing. Even a few points will do.


TIA

There are laws against unreasonable search. And there are reasons for laws against unreasonable search. Almost everyone has violated the law in some way or another. If the authorities have carte blanche to search through records, then they are deciding who to arrest based upon arbitrary standards.

The bad guys know that the authorities can search through records. The only people they are going to catch that way are people who are stupid. Stupidity isn't a crime.

 

[sr71plt]

The pro arguments only work if you trust the government.

Or if you are smart enough to realize that you can't have personal safety in a totally free "do as you like" environment. You have to permit a certain amount of scrutiny of and control of your own actions to achieve the safety of not being at the complete mercy of the unfettered whims of others. If you, in fact, aren't doing anything abhorrent or illegal yourself, you're smart enough to realize that some level of scrutiny of all protects you.

 

[hylas_]

^ Dude, I'm just giving a counter argument, like the OP requested. Of course there are two sides, and the healthy middle ground.

 

[lovecraft68]

You're saying hostage...that means he's snooping and had to abduct her because she saw him?

In that case, I really don't see his argument being valid at all and I think you don't have to think much on a counter argument. "You have no right to do this works" otherwise do you want a story that bogs down into two people having the political argument you're looking to avoid here?

If you're a hostage, "let me go, you can't get away with this, this is illegal, I won't tell anyone if you let me go or even a "when this is over you're dead" would be the extent of responses.

Ever watch 24? Jack Bauer had more than a few situations where he was holed up somewhere with people who are like "what are you doing etc..." he told them...jack shit.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

In fact government collects all it can from all of us and the rest of the world. Its gow we capture the terrorists so quickly. As a rule the bad guys keep the police plenty busy, but the NSA and other spies can collect every fact, and do, because one day you may OD on unicorn farts and go buy an assault rifle. Putin was doing his job when he looked up Hillarys skirt, he knew he cant trust her. Obama looks up the Queens gown.

 

[sr71plt]

^ Dude, I'm just giving a counter argument, like the OP requested. Of course there are two sides, and the healthy middle ground.

Your argument is on illegal search. There's nothing in the OP that says the search would be illegal. You, the OP, and lots of others just zip out to the edge of possibilities rather than being objective. The OP hasn't given enough information to get an objective response. In fact, the OP is worded such as there would be no devising of an objective argument/counterargument.

Altogether, I think the OP is in over his head on the plot line.

 

[TamLin01]

"if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".

She could argue that this is a hypocritical comment when made about a secret program. How does the public know what they're doing with this information? How do they know it's only being used against "bad" people?

 

[OliviaM]

She could argue that this is a hypocritical comment when made about a secret program. How does the public know what they're doing with this information? How do they know it's only being used against "bad" people?

This is the argument I'd have the character use. (Of course, consider your character and how well-informed she is, and what her political and social views might be.) Invasions of privacy that seem merely annoying yet harmless under one regime can become terrifying under another. All it takes is one terrible election for the people in charge to swing the other way. Suddenly, being gay, having an abortion, being Muslim or Jewish, or just being a personal annoyance to someone in power can have dangerous results. At the very basic level, it causes a chilling effect: the fear of saying anything at all, even in private, and a constant, low-grade general fear and stress. The terrible irony is that all of this has a net effect that causes domestic instability.

The people in the system are the main flaw. There are numerous reported cases of people who have this kind of official access and using it to spy on wives, exes, people they're interested in, or people they just don't like. It's so common, it has a term: loveint. And that's just what gets caught and reported. Remember, these people who abused the system went through an entire vetting process. However, they're merely as human as the rest of the population. The only counter to this is tighter restrictions on the access and use of data, such as, say, going through a judge and greater transparency and due process of law.

What the people with access need to understand is that they're not just keepers of this data for their own use, they should be safeguarding it against abuses in the future. If data exists, one has to assume it can and will be used by bad actors.

 

[DreamCloud]

It is not the collection of the information that is dangerous. It is its interpretation. The white bits become gray, and then the shade of events turns them black.

A seemingly innocent visit to the mega box store to purchase a bag of lawn fertilizer, coupled with the truck I rented to move my old basement furniture to my son's house, gets me placed on a watch list. The FBI flags my name on a security check and I lose the chance at a government job which, in turn, further escalates my name.

My wife texts me a picture of her and her friends in front of the Whitehouse. It was too tiny to make out her face so I texted back that she should blow it up. Now I'm on the no-fly list and there are agents parked in front of my house. Not really a problem since I won't be staying for long. I lost my job when they questioned my boss about my patriotism.

Innocence is in the eye of the interpreter.

 

[sr71plt]

It is not the collection of the information that is dangerous. It is its interpretation.

It's more the mobilization of extraction and analysis ability that's dangerous. NSA may have become better at that over the last twenty years, but when I was in the business and tried to get useful, targeted information from them, they never could find it in all that they were collecting. That's made me feel pretty safe personally.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My protagonist is an agent for the government. And, in a particular scene, he has to defend/explain his job (involves a lot of snooping through people's data for "national security" purpose) to his girlfriend/hostage (don't ask how/why. It's a long story)

I can defend the his/government's position by saying that "we won't do anything with your chicken soup recipe"

"Then you don't need to snoop on it, do you?"

Or perhaps:

"Really? So you're not aware of steganography as a method for terrorist communication? Are you lying, or just incompetent?"

or "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".

Do you have blinds on your windows? Do you close the door when you go to the toilet? Do you give out your bank account details and your medical history to anybody who asks? Are you willing to share the algorithms that you use to identify suspects?

EVERYBODY has something to hide. Secrets are not intrinsically wrong. The same surveillance agencies who use that "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" line are also the first to tell you that they need to conceal their own operations from public view.

Also, I can say that this law of covert snooping is essential in the light of recent terror attacks in the country (fictional). I can spin enough material to make it sound convincing.

Domestic violence, smoking, car accidents... each of those kills more people in a week than terrorism kills in a year. [adjust stats as appropriate for your country.] In the worst case, in a very bad year, terrorism might kill a couple of thousand people. A tyrannical government can kill millions. So why respond to a comparatively small threat by spending huge amounts of resources and exposing ourselves to a much larger threat by setting up the mechanisms for tyranny?

Terrorism is a strategy used by groups who can't achieve their aims by force of arms alone. A common terrorist doctrine is to provoke government overreaction with the aim of enhancing social divisions, feeding terrorist recruiting, and perhaps even bringing about rebellion. Excessive surveillance feeds that strategy. [This is a big part of ISIS doctrine, as it was previously for al-Qaeda, and for many others.]

Some other counter-arguments:

- In many cases, the obstacle to detecting and preventing terrorism isn't "we don't have the data", it's "we have TOO MUCH data and it's hard to pick out the pieces that matter". Increasing the size of your haystack ain't gonna help you find that needle.

- Speaking of which, the more data you have, the more you need to automate the search with "big data" techniques. There's a lot of hype about BD, and it's REALLY easy to fuck it up.

As an example taken from real life, Three-Letter-Agency uses phone records to identify potential terrorists in SomethingStan. If you look at a terrorist ringleader's phone activity (and assuming they aren't taking protective measures), you'll find that they travel a lot and have phone contacts with a range of very dubious people. Once you have the phone records you could automate the whole process: scan for people whose activity matches that profile, then call in a drone strike homing in on their mobile.

...congratulations, you just murdered a journalist, because journalists' phone activity patterns look a LOT like the ones you used to build your profile of a terrorist. Doing this stuff right is hard.

- These systems are administered by people, and people abuse this shit. If you google you'll find countless examples of police and spies misusing their access to do things like check up on exes or potential dates. In some cases, they've sold the data to organised crime.

- Even when there are no tangible consequences, being monitored has a chilling effect - people feel less free to express anti-government views.

For an "interesting" example of what the modern surveillance state looks like, check out this article on China's "social credit" system. Every time you share a news article on Facebook, that affects your loyalty score; higher scores make it easier to get travel visas or home loans.

 

[NicoleZ]

How do I give a counter-argument? I mean, how do you debate with someone bred into this ideology. Someone passed the idea of comparing it to 'mental rape'. This is a good comparison and can constitute an ending to the debate, but it does not make a debate.


So....I need some help. I need some arguments that can be convincing. Even a few points will do.


TIA

"It's all about trust. If you don't trust the people and feel the need to snoop where you're not wanted, illegally and unconstitutionally, why should we trust you to disregard everything that has nothing to do with what you say you're looking for? Why should we even trust you when you say it's for our own protection?"

"That's the way the KGB kept tabs on everyone in the Soviet Union. What's next? Gulags in Wyoming and Utah for those who're not registered voters of your party?"

"What guarantees do I have that you won't pass on my recipe for chicken soup to someone who makes money out of it!"

"Sez you! I bet you're only doing it to get the goods on everybody so that you can apply a bit of old-fashioned blackmail when you need *some help* or come election day."

"Okay. Just to let you know: The handcuffs, enema kit and 14" by 3½" dildo I keep just in case some friendly IRS auditor should pay me a call."

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Trust.

So, how many Americans now live off the grid because they don't trust the city, county, state, federal governments? I don't know and I don't think the alphabet soups do either.

 

[sr71plt]

Trust.

So, how many Americans now live off the grid because they don't trust the city, county, state, federal governments? I don't know and I don't think the alphabet soups do either.

Not all that many, I don't think. And it's also a lot harder to go off the grid than TV tries to make you think it is. The other side to this is that it's damn hard to separate out folks who are on the grid--certainly a lot harder than TV tries to make you think it is. Most of those worried to death that the government is watching them are of no interest whatsoever to the government and running across them in searches is just useless flak that has to be separated off.

 

[TamLin01]

"
"Okay. Just to let you know: The handcuffs, enema kit and 14" by 3½" dildo I keep just in case some friendly IRS auditor should pay me a call."

It's tangential, but this reminds me of a story: A friend of mine used to do a stripper routine dressed as a nun. One day her credit card gets declined; turns out the company deactivated it for "unusual activity."

She calls them up and they tell her, "Yeah, it looks like somebody bought a rosary, communal wafers, and a nine inch dildo on the same day. We thought that was strange."

And, well, she couldn't exactly say they were wrong...

 

[NicoleZ]

It's tangential, but this reminds me of a story: A friend of mine used to do a stripper routine dressed as a nun. One day her credit card gets declined; turns out the company deactivated it for "unusual activity."

She calls them up and they tell her, "Yeah, it looks like somebody bought a rosary, communal wafers, and a nine inch dildo on the same day. We thought that was strange."

And, well, she couldn't exactly say they were wrong...

OMG!!! So what did she do?

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Tard I wish I could iggy your lame ass.

 

[Hypoxia]

Guy explains need for gov't snooping to GF, who replies, "You work for immoral pigs who falsify data on threats so they can get a bigger budget[1], rig elections in the US[2], grab tons of communications without warrants[3], kill people based on assumptions[4], and generally shit on our national principles and decency. Fuck me!"

[1] "Missile gap"
[2] FBI's Comey
[3] today's NSA
[4] drone strikes

 

[TamLin01]

OMG!!! So what did she do?

She said, "Yes, I bought those, reactivate my card." And they did. She didn't really leave them much choice, after all.

 

[Grillytilly]

Here's an argument against it, she'll share her information with the government if the government will share it's information with her. What does the government do with people who collect information about it? They jail or execute them. What does the government do to people who expose government wrong doing? What does the government do to people who try to expose criminal activity by those in power?

Remember, the government works for us, they don't lord over us. We made them, not the other way around. Any sort of imbalance in power between the people and the government must be challenged and eventually done away with.

The founding principle of any democracy is government only governs with the consent of the governed. What this means in practice is that the people must have the opportunity to give a yes or no on government action. In the US we've decided that we will not allow the government to search our data (called papers in the constitution) without probable cause and a warrant signed by a judge. The government does not have our consent to tap our phones and listen to our calls. They don't have our consent to read our email. They don't have our consent track our movements.

The more they try to take power that the people have not consented to give them, the more people start to look at them as illegitimate. It's called the broken window theory. If you have a building with one broken window then it sort of encourages people to pick up rocks and break more of them. The owner of the building obviously doesn't care. But if the window is fixed timely then people are discouraged from breaking more windows because they realize they could actually be hurting someone.

So the same goes with government overreach. They can't just act like cowboys and do whatever they want. State government can pass laws because they were created by the people's sovereignty and the lawmakers are elected directly by the people. The Federal government can pass law on certain issues itemized in the constitution because the states created it for that purpose. The federal government has no direct sovereignty of its own.

So, noting that I am not a lawyer, if we are speaking legally, constitutionally, on principle, or morally; NO the government can not collect our data. We could choose to give that power to them but as of yet WE HAVE NOT DONE THAT. We have been given no opportunity to consent to that kind of government interference in our lives.

Keep in mind, the constitution is the LAW. It even says so in the document. The drafters of that law did not intend for the federal government to be on par with the state governments in ability to pass laws. That is why education laws passed at the federal level are meaningless and the feds have to use grant money bribes to get states to pass the laws for them. That is why the 16th amendment was the most idiotic thing to ever happen from a legal perspective.

People say the government's job is to keep us safe. It is not. The government's job is to do what we tell it to do. We've decided that one of the government's responsibilities is law enforcement for things like theft and murder. So we expect the government to collect data on individuals they honestly believe are engaged in those kinds of activities. That is why they need probably cause. But for some reason the second you give someone a badge and tell them they can act with government authority, some of those individuals will lie. We can't trust them. That is why a judge has to sign the warrant. You need another, older, more experienced pair of eyes to look at what the government wants to do and say if it's ok or not.

So if we decide that the government's job is to stop terrorism them I expect them to collect data on terrorists, NOT ME. I don't care that I have nothing to hide. Unless I consent for them to have that information then I expect them to go do their job and not listen to my phone calls when I call the siblings I've never met in the US from another country. I have nothing to hide but it's my business not theirs. Why are they reading my emails? Don't they have better things to do? Why do we pay all this tax money to them if they are just going to waste it?

 

[Sammael Bard]

Thanks for the material everyone. I can't quote everyone because of post size but I loved reading your points. It's great.

I'll try and clear the air a little bit with this:

You're saying hostage...that means he's snooping and had to abduct her because she saw him?

No, no, no. Don't go in that direction. That's a totally different circumstance in the story. If I go down this road, I have to explain 30 pages worth of plot right here.

Stick to the core.

In fact, the OP is worded such as there would be no devising of an objective argument/counterargument.

Altogether, I think the OP is in over his head on the plot line.

Calm TF down, edgelord. If you need more info, you only need to ask instead of doing a passive-aggressive on someone else trying to help.

There is no middle ground in this argument because we're talking about two people with completely opposite views. I, as the author, need the objective view to construct the scene and make it believable. I didn't give much plot, and it sounds ridiculous, because I wrote a compact version instead of the whole 10k thing. The plot isn't the focus, the argument is.

That's all there is to it.

 

[Sammael Bard]

"Then you don't need to snoop on it, do you?"

Or perhaps:

"Really? So you're not aware of steganography as a method for terrorist communication? Are you lying, or just incompetent?"



Do you have blinds on your windows? Do you close the door when you go to the toilet? Do you give out your bank account details and your medical history to anybody who asks? Are you willing to share the algorithms that you use to identify suspects?

EVERYBODY has something to hide. Secrets are not intrinsically wrong. The same surveillance agencies who use that "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" line are also the first to tell you that they need to conceal their own operations from public view.



Domestic violence, smoking, car accidents... each of those kills more people in a week than terrorism kills in a year. [adjust stats as appropriate for your country.] In the worst case, in a very bad year, terrorism might kill a couple of thousand people. A tyrannical government can kill millions. So why respond to a comparatively small threat by spending huge amounts of resources and exposing ourselves to a much larger threat by setting up the mechanisms for tyranny?

Terrorism is a strategy used by groups who can't achieve their aims by force of arms alone. A common terrorist doctrine is to provoke government overreaction with the aim of enhancing social divisions, feeding terrorist recruiting, and perhaps even bringing about rebellion. Excessive surveillance feeds that strategy. [This is a big part of ISIS doctrine, as it was previously for al-Qaeda, and for many others.]

Some other counter-arguments:

- In many cases, the obstacle to detecting and preventing terrorism isn't "we don't have the data", it's "we have TOO MUCH data and it's hard to pick out the pieces that matter". Increasing the size of your haystack ain't gonna help you find that needle.

- Speaking of which, the more data you have, the more you need to automate the search with "big data" techniques. There's a lot of hype about BD, and it's REALLY easy to fuck it up.

As an example taken from real life, Three-Letter-Agency uses phone records to identify potential terrorists in SomethingStan. If you look at a terrorist ringleader's phone activity (and assuming they aren't taking protective measures), you'll find that they travel a lot and have phone contacts with a range of very dubious people. Once you have the phone records you could automate the whole process: scan for people whose activity matches that profile, then call in a drone strike homing in on their mobile.

...congratulations, you just murdered a journalist, because journalists' phone activity patterns look a LOT like the ones you used to build your profile of a terrorist. Doing this stuff right is hard.

- These systems are administered by people, and people abuse this shit. If you google you'll find countless examples of police and spies misusing their access to do things like check up on exes or potential dates. In some cases, they've sold the data to organised crime.

- Even when there are no tangible consequences, being monitored has a chilling effect - people feel less free to express anti-government views.

For an "interesting" example of what the modern surveillance state looks like, check out this article on China's "social credit" system. Every time you share a news article on Facebook, that affects your loyalty score; higher scores make it easier to get travel visas or home loans.

 

[sr71plt]

Calm TF down, edgelord. If you need more info, you only need to ask instead of doing a passive-aggressive on someone else trying to help.

Fun that you should think I'm not calm, when you're the one who can't write his own stories.