Almalieque wrote:
What's amusing is pretending that the accuracy of the no-fly zone list is the core of the problem, when it's actually the ideology of using the list to prevent firearm sales.
It's not an either/or proposition though. I'm pointing out that when you do have an entire half of our political landscape calling for using the no-fly list as a list to restrict firearms, then you also now need to look at the accuracy of the list itself. Because both work together.
The difference is that I'm not naive enough to just assume that when such lists are assembled, that someone wont use them for another purpose later on. The demands of the House Democrats just proves my point. These things get repurposed. How many things do you use your social security number for again? The number that the government swore up and down would never be used for any form of identification at all, but was just an account number social security and nothing else?
Got a bridge to sell ya.
Quote:
This is stupid. Prevent this from happening and problem solved.
Yes, it is stupid. How do you prevent it from happening? You speak out against it like I am doing now. See how that works? Because trying to argue against it after someone who was on the list commits a terrorist act is often shouted down by the emotionally charged mob. You know, like folks saying "let's not tie gun rights to a no-fly list" were? Just like that.
This is why we should have these discussions openly and publicly *before* the emotion laden trigger event occurs. It does not always help, but at least puts the kernel of sense into people that when someone says "we shouldn't do this because of X", more people will have actually heard that before and might just stop their emotional reaction and engage their intellect instead. Maybe still not enough of them, but more than would other wise.
Quote:
None of your examples provide an example of a threat to national security or the local populace.
Correct. But in the process of any large scale government program to collect enough data about people's communications to catch all the folks who do qualify as threats to national security, you will also collect plenty of data about a host of other things people say. And, as I mentioned above, once that data is collected, someone will think to use it for another purpose. Like rooting out hate speech. Or tracking voting trends to speech patterns. And then using that data in some way that benefits those speaking in ways that align with "good" voting patterns, and penalizes those with "bad" voting patterns.
You're looking at what this data would be used for today. I'm looking at how it could be used tomorrow once it's collected. Those are two different things. And as I said above, it's incredibly naive to just assume that data wont ever be used for anything other than catching terrorists and other threats to national security.
Quote:
Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you from verbal attack. There's a difference between negatively expressing yourself against a particular demographic and discussing plots on killing them.
I think you totally missed the point. I'm not talking about someone reclassifying some types of speech as threats to national security, but using the same data collected in the process of looking for threats to national security to look for other things. Those "other things" could be anything at all.
Quote:
It really is hard to imagine that. I mean, this forum is monitored and censored. As I said, you'll never be free of observation on the net.
I was speaking of what would happen if we just gave up on the idea of privacy at all, and allowed the government to freely hack into all our computers, bug all our homes, record all our phone conversations, etc. The potential uses of the data we already allow to be publicly accessible is just a starting point. If we can already see how that information can hurt us, we should see even greater potential harm if information we currently consider "private" becomes so broadly available to our government. Again, it would start out as a means to catch terrorists, but the temptation to use it for a "greater good", would almost certainly be too great to resist.
Just think how much better our society would be if we could key in on communication patterns that indicate some form of mental illness? We could get those people the help they need! And we could pick up on patterns that indicate abuse in a home and fix that too! Think of all the sexual predators we could get off the streets? But once we do that, what then? We might move on to other social "problems", right? And I'm again led right to the common belief by many on the left that conservative ideologies and actions are hateful and harmful to society. I recall a thread on homeschooling where several posters equated homeschooling to child abuse. Think that opinion is limited just to random liberals on a forum board? Or do you think that people who intentionally gravitate into a position involving detecting and preventing child abuse might just hold that view as well?
We need to make decisions about the balance between having a free society and a safe society. It's obviously not an all-or-nothing proposition in either direction. But it's incredibly important that someone be the voice for the "free" side every time someone proposes some new thing that will make our lives just a little bit safer. Isn't that really the issue here?
Edited, Jul 11th 2016 6:07pm by gbaji