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It violates the core principle of equal justice. What if we only required search or arrest warrants for those with more than $10M in assets? Your comment would still apply, and would be more obviously unjust.



Whether it harmonizes perfectly with the spirit of equal justice or not is irrelevant to whether or not it still represents an improvement over the status quo. Your hypothetical is similarly asanine and works mainly as a straw man because, as far as the integrity of the democratic process, there's a clear difference between shielding individuals competing in a public election and random rich people on the street. You're literally arguing against something that would improve the integrity of the system.


If you have a broken system, and you allow people in power to fix it in targeted ways that only affect them, then it will never get fixed for ordinary people.

Your point might hold true if the people being exempted from surveillance weren't also the people deciding who can be exempted from surveillance. But since they are, it is counterproductive to the privacy cause to allow Congress to give itself these kinds of special rules.

Force everyone in society to play by the same rules, and everyone in society will get the benefits. Allow Congress to get into the habit of exempting themselves from social systems or problems, and those problems will continue to exist.

In other words, when setting up incentives you have to think pragmatically about the entire system in the long term; you can't always just focus on short-term goals to the exclusion of everything else. Local optimums[0] aren't just a problem in AI, they're also a problem in real life. Because of the long term consequences, we're not interested in forming privacy castes in scenarios where doing so will make it harder for us to improve the system in the future.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_optimum


Small correction, but these amendments originate in the Senate, not Congress.


The US Senate is a proper subset of Congress, comprising one of its coequal houses, the other being the House of Representatives.

Collectively the two are Congress.


Is formalizing a two-tier surveillance regime an improvement over the status quo?




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