Consider Anne Frank. Her family were identified as Jews by a census by the somewhat benevolent Dutch state in the 1930's. The disclosure of these records cost Anne her life, and cost the lives of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of others.
Consider homosexuality, disclosures of sexual preference in 1950's England or in modern Saudi Arabia were, and are, fatal. Cf. Alan Turing!
Privacy breeches can, and do, kill. We should take this very seriously.
History shows us that the risk of the state being co-opted by killers is non-negligible. We can try to prevent authoritarian elements from gaining power, but don’t you think the Dutch in the 1930s felt the same?
We need to be very careful what sort of tools we make available to future iterations of the state, rather than thinking in terms of how much we trust the current iteration (“mass surveillance doesn’t bother me because it’s Obama and I trust him”).
We would like for a benevolent state to have the tools to carry out the services we enjoy, including security, but we should try not to give them too many things that could become effective totalitarian implements at the flip of a switch.
The mass surveillance apparatus is exactly such a thing.
How does this play into how we perceive security threats? As far as I understand it, the general model to reduce threats to any system is to create bottlenecks (reduce attach surface) where you can focus the majority of your countermeasures. Is it at least not a valid consideration that one model of society/government effectively forces a bottleneck of social/political decisions at the government level in order to head off any issues? Citizens in this model would presumably have a higher level of vested interest in the proper functioning of the government, and therefore have higher involvement.
Not disclosing your religion or sexuality to the government isn’t living a closeted life. I could be out and proud to my friends and family, but have little desire to allow some nasty actor in the government to include me in a query like
select * from citizens where sexuality != ‘straight’
This is as asinine as the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" trope. People use guns to kill people. People use privacy breaches to kill people.
People also use ideology to justify killing people, so you're not wrong there.
Scared people are nearly the worst kinds of people you want making policy decisions.
If you can establish statistical significance that no cameras -> cameras (actual causality, not mere correlation) causes a drop in (public) robery-related homicide, and a majority of people believe that drop to be significant enough to warrant the loss of privacy, then sure, you put up cameras. You don't do it because a few people got scared.
You know what also reduces gun-related incidents: denying people the ability to have guns. It won't eliminate them (there's always a black market for everything), but it'll damn well reduce them, probably to a point that reasonable people would believe is an acceptable number.
What's your point? I was specifically responding to a claim about gun-related robberies.
Knives are also short-range weapons and are arguably a ton less dangerous than guns. If someone brandishes a knife at me and doesn't have an accomplice to surround me, I've got pretty good odds if I simply turn around and run. The equation changes if they have a gun.
The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic. Guns democratize the use of violence. Sure, militaries can nuke cities, but only if they want to rule over a sheet of glass. Tanks and air superiority can win battles, but they can't stop the occupied population from assembling. To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force.
More people will die of murder and suicide in an armed society, but it's the price we pay to protect against an existential threat to our culture's way of life, which in aggregate is more important than the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to gun violence. It's not good enough to just say that a disarmed society is safer. You have to show how we can have equal protection against a government run amok without guns. So far as I know, there's nothing equal. Human history is quite long. I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own. Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check. This isn't some abstract fear. It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.
I agree with your thoughts on this. In feudal India, landlords oppressed the common peasants out of which local Naxalism was formed. Today, these guys are effective and in many ways protect local forests and tribals depended on it through guns from local communities with political and economic power.
I'm honestly a little surprised this comment is so unpopular. My understanding is that this is the rationale behind the USA's second amendment, not personal safety, and not hunting.
Oh, it absolutely is one of the rationales behind the USA's second amendment. The problem is that rationale just isn't relevant today, and believing in it is the height of naivete. Even if you got every civilian gun owner in the US to secretly band together to overthrow the US government[0], the US military would pound them flat[1] before you could say "reload".
[0] Good luck with even that much.
[1] Without even touching the US's nuclear arsenal, though they might opt to level a city in clear, full rebellion as a deterrent. They'd still do fine without nukes, though, as devastating to the US population and infrastructure as it would be.
Yea, acknowledged, though I still think it would be harder than you might think for the US military to take over the civilian world. Though I still posit that just because your opposition is extraordinarily well equipped isn't a reason to give up the only advantages you do have.
> The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic.
The US military is far too well-trained and well-equipped for any local civilian militia to have even a remote chance of winning a fight with them. That probably wasn't the case in 1800, but that ship sailed long ago.
> To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force.
So what? The public having guns won't stop that from happening. Having or not having guns makes it equally bad. Actually, civilian gun ownership might make it worse: you end up with a lot more deaths on both sides, but the US military still wins.
> I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own.
That's a pretty extraordinary claim that requires some research and evidence.
> Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check.
Even if we blithely ignore reality and assume that civilian gun ownership keeps the US government in check, what's keeping all those other democratic governments in check where civilian gun ownership is either not the norm or is mostly or completely outlawed? They seem to be doing just fine, and as a bonus have levels of gun violence that are much, much lower than that in the US.
> It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.
To whom? I don't see regular revolutions happening in the vast majority of present-day democracies. Even if it's the case that legal civilian gun ownership was necessary hundreds of years ago to get us to a point where those democracies were able to be formed (I don't really buy that, but let's just give you that for a second), clearly civilian gun ownership is not necessary to maintain those democracies today. We have clear empirical evidence that it's not necessary if you just look at (nearly?) every other (actual) democracy in the world.
But still, all of this presupposes that an organized, armed, civilian militia could realistically win against the US military and overthrow the US government. That's laughable.
I think stickfigure is trying to say that, with cameras above head, which will result in higher probability of being caught if someone commits a crime, the one who would commit a crime if there was no camera will refrain from committing a crime.
With cameras, the probability of losing life will be smaller than without them.
> Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death.
I submit that that statement is false, and removing someone's privacy rights can indeed result in their death.
And that's not even really the point: I am ok with there being a price to privacy, even if that is some amount of deaths that might otherwise be reduced.
I would question living a life like that being worth it. It horrifies me to think I would't even know otherwise should I be born in a country like that.
