Recommended reading: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?
by Jack GrantIn response to some simple-minded assertions, here is a long list of links, most related, some not:
If You’re Not Doing Something Wrong, You Still Have Something To Worry About
Rumsfeld Reveals Split Over Interrogations
Talking Points Memo on Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) remarks at the Hayden confirmation hearings
Social Security for Illegal Aliens?
America’s Future…isn’t in America
AT&T Whistle-Blower’s Evidence
In the hunt for golden buckyballs
Almost Enough to Make me Buy a Mac
Interactive graphic of the flooding of New Orleans because of Katrina
The Eternal Value of Privacy from which comes:
Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (”Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
So, given what has happened in the last six years, what do you think, and what do you want for the future?
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A problem with the idea that only those “doing wrong” need be concerned is that we have granted authority to the government to decide what is wrong and what is not.
I’m all for listening in on terrorist conversations, but by this time, isn’t it just a tiny possibility that the terrorists have already moved on? So we are left with eating ourselves.
All around London, there are thousands of cameras recording constantly. Two thoughts come to mind:
(1) All that video didn’t stop July 7, so what are they for? And how many people are needed to watch all this?
(2) This calls to the fore the possibilty of inadvertant entrapment. In other words, evidence gathering to foil terror plots can now be used to find all sorts of things people do “wrong.”
It sounds Orwellian, but there is no reason to trust government. The only speck of hope is in knowing how incompetent our spies are, but sooneror later, I’m willing to bet that one day, some poor schmuck who just had his subway token swallowed by a turnstile and decides to jump to get to a train will be nabbed and become public enemy #1.
By Daniel Berczik on 05.21.06 14:10