> I don't really understand the threat.

Do you view the government as benign? What if that were to change?

Do you view all governments as benign? Foreign governments can further justify their actions by pointing at so called "free", and "democratic" nations and say if they can do it, so can we.

Do you trust these organizations (government or otherwise) to secure your data?

Governments change. Conditions change. Imagine another large criminal act in the US where thousands perish. The citizenry starts demanding more and more invasions of privacy, in futile attempts to stop further attacks. As each generation grows up with less and less privacy, they become even more accustomed to it. Is it possible to have a free society that's completely surveilled?

> And if it was warrantless then it's inadmissible anyhow, right?

In 2015, not a single one of the FISA applications for a warrant were rejected.

> If you don't want them "taking" your info, just don't speak to them.

GHCQ in the UK collects massive amounts of data on all internet users. You don't have any choice, if you're operating on anything but the dark web. The issues we're facing here have never been faced before. It's never been possible for the police/governments to just record and store everything, making it possible for them, or some future government, to use it against you.

I should also point out - when I say you, I don't mean you. Or me. We're just two idiots on the internet. I'm talking about people with power. Or journalists, who want to expose wrong doing. Judges, who are going to decide whether or not to put that person in jail (or let them off). Maybe even other police. Oh, this officer wants to report me for corruption? Find out what shit we have on him, make it stick. Nothing? Well, easy enough to add data, and problem solved.

If you're not convinced - think about it this way. This is the exact opposite of what should be happening. We should know what our governments are doing, what they're spending OUR money on. We should know when a corporation is planning to pollute the air so that they can sell more cars. We should know if a moral pillar of our community is a den of pedophiles. WE should have the information on THEM, not the other way around.

> Is it possible to have a free society that's completely surveilled?

It is, if a society's ethical and legal code and how its members actually behave are closely aligned (which prevents blackmail), surveillance is done by all to all, and the government has limited ability to arrest and prosecute.

>> Is it possible to have a free society that's completely surveilled?

>It is, if a society's ethical and legal code and how its members actually behave are closely aligned (which prevents blackmail), surveillance is done by all to all, and the government has limited ability to arrest and prosecute.

Anonymity and privacy would still have to be respected for it to work. While I believe that this is possible (just finishing up first draft of my first novel, a scifi that looks at this) it's not going to be achieved by legislating our way to it (or that it'll even originate from our governments).

The main thing I think to point out is that individuals shouldn't be the ones we're keeping eyes on. Governments, corporations, charities, religions, and unions - basically any group of people - is where we should be demanding complete transparency, and surveillance by all.

Any system based on trusting a government not to do something is bound to fail, usually in spectacularly explosive ways.

This is why trust is not a cornerstone of the US Constitution.

I want to live in the world you propose. But.. I'm sad now.

> If you don't want them "taking" your info, just don't speak to them. That's your right.

One problem is that it sets up a very adversarial relationship between the police, and the people they are supposed to protect. My every interaction now has to be weighted - do I expose myself to more risk by talking to this police officer, or by not reporting something fishy I just witnessed?

And as far as the threat, one of the problems is that it's the unforeseen threat that's the problem. I listened to a podcast that described how birth records were used to deny people of their rights based on their race - the law changed from how a person was categorized based on their ancestry, and overnight some people became "legally black", and were denied many rights.

Sure, you can say that that's in the past, that's in the south, there's nothing like that in your data, but you can't really know what will become problematic in the future.

The example of birth records highlights the issue with such "unforseen" threats - anything and everything can become such a threat. In the past it was birth records, or census records. In the future it may be liquer store sales data or air quality metrics. We can't just stop improving things with data because of a vague fear that it may one day be used against us. Especially that data abuse is mostly a small symptom among numerous, more serious issues (e.g. by the time birth records were used for exercising racism, the problems with that government were most likely pretty visible, and even if they didn't have that data, they'd find another way to do what they wanted to do).

I see what you're saying, but I think that the onus should be on the government to clearly demonstrate where the value from collecting this data will come from.

What improvements has the Charleston PD made with this data? What improvements are they planning on making? They offer precisely one example of a man convicted for murder using that information, but while they claim it's "crucial", we can't exactly go back and see if he would have been convicted without that one particular row in the database.

We can't even get the data without paying nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

Fine; let's use data about me to improve things. But tell me what you're going to improve, tell me how long you're going to keep the data, and find a damn good way to reassure me that it won't be used to harm me, either.

I agree. There should always be a good justification provided for the data collection, as well as a description of safeguards against malicious use and also a way to verify if the data is indeed used as intended and brings in value. This should be a minimum standard to hold a government to.

I come from a country where we had the secret police(Poland) and everyone knew that there was an archive somewhere where most citizens had a folder with whatever the police gathered on them. Any telephone conversation always started with the operator announcing "this conversation is monitored, this conversation is monitored". Letters would be opened randomly and read.

And you know what - vast majority of people didn't care. They accepted this as reality they lived in and that was it.

Well, almost 30 years on after fall of communism, these folders are still coming back and haunting people. People find facts about themselves or about others, that shouldn't have been collected in the first place.

Not to mention the old story of completely innocent data that actually lead to people dying(governments before WW2 collected census information about religion, and that very information was used by the nazis to hunt and kill jews).

My point is - even if right now it seems like collecting this data is harmless, you never know how it's going to be used in the future. Governments fall all the time, wars happen, people look where they shouldn't. The less data the government collects the better.

To be honest - 30 years after fall of communism, the vast majority of people still doesn't care, because why should they? Those folders are only a talking point for the media, and something our asinine politicians use against other asinine politicians. Pigs fighting in mud, nothing you want to be close to.

My biggest gripe is with those from general population who care that other people have some entries in their folders. It's their attention that weaponizes this information. If that minority didn't give a shit either, those folders wouldn't be an issue nowadays.

It's also a general point about surveillance state, I think - a lot of its power to hurt people comes from the personal immaturity of citizens, who get aroused by the knowledge that someone else has commited some indecency in the past. I know this is a collective problem so it's hard to change, but again - if people minded their own morals instead of those around them, data collection would be much less of an issue.

I love the quote (I think it was from Edward Snowden): "Saying you don't care about mass surveillance because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about the First Amendment because you have nothing to say."

To me, that says it all.

> And if it was warrantless then it's inadmissible anyhow, right?

This only matters if the government collecting the data continues to be relatively democratic and free. That can change nearly in an instant given the right circumstances (see the crackdown following the coup attempt in Turkey) and all that gathered information then becomes a great way to go fishing for "undesirables".

The nonchalant attitude of many towards this proves George Santayana's adage true: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

> if it was warrantless then it's inadmissible

I'm not sure if that really matters anymore. So much data is being collected on everybody all the time that the government doesn't need a warrant to collect the information because they generally aren't the ones collecting it. The police often can just ask the individuals and companies that are actually collecting the data to see what they have. They might be told to come back with a warrant and that warrant is super easy to get.

A guy in my neighborhood set up a license plate reader outside of his house. He logs all the traffic into and out of the neighborhood. I would bet the police would just have to ask him for the data and he would turn it over. I believe his data helped catch a couple that was stealing Amazon packages during the day.

> And if it was warrantless then it's inadmissible anyhow, right?

Generally, no. Only if it was a product (1) of a search (not all information received or acquired by law enforcement comes from what is legally a search), that was (2) warrantless, (3) of the property of the person against whom it was used (the exclusionary rule does not exclude evidence illegally seized from someone else), and (4) occurred in a context which is not covered by one of the exceptions in which a warrant is not required for a search to be reasonable.

Please provide some original thought instead of just posting a link to a Wikipedia article.

> If you don't want them "taking" your info, just don't speak to them. That's your right

But that's the point. They're so used to people complying that anyone who politely declines to provide the information when asked is then treated as a criminal, with (perhaps illegal) detentions and escalations.

The problem I would see is that if the cops were called to a particular address, they could look up "how many guns are registered to this address" on the way there - and this will greatly affect their demeanor upon arrival.

People have guns for many reasons - but the police will only make the assumption that if you have them, you'll be wielding one or potentially have it ready to go once they get there.

This comment made my knee jerk very hard, but despite that I think I might have to agree with you, kudos.