fat tony said:
Security companies capture everything, then discard 99.9% of that as irrelevant. A tiny percentage is further filtered and a teeny-tiny bit is sent to a human to look at, probably without identifying features. You'd divulge more personal information to eBay or any shopping site so they can bimbard you with targeted ads. I'm not threatened by surveillance because I'm not doing anything wrong.
I've been seeing quite a bit of this attitude, both in this thread and beyond. I just want to give you guys, especially the international guys, a view from what you could call a "Constitutionalist". Let me start by giving you a rundown of some of the basic ideas Americans such as myself consider highly important, necessary to our freedom, and what *should* be endemic to our very culture:
1. A person is to be presumed innocent, until they are proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, guilty.
2. A person should be protected from search/seizure(taking their stuff) until there is reasonable/probable cause that they have committed a crime.
3. The government should be looking out for the good of it's people, being comprised of the same people, and subject to the same as the people it governs. In other words, a government of the people, for the people, by the people.
Now, let me pose to you a hypothetical scenario. You and your neighbors hire a security company to protect your community. Given this is a small neighborhood, many of your neighbors have been hired as well, for more manpower. Somewhere along the line, this security company starts treating you like crap, out of nowhere and for no reason. They intrude into your house, rifle through your belongings, record your emails and calls, looking for evidence of you committing a crime, even though you haven't. But it's mostly okay, you think, because they aren't *too* intrusive, and their ill-treatment of you hasn't gotten too bad. But now remember that you're paying them to do all this.
That's where people like me shake our heads at those who still have the attitude of "I've got nothing to hide, so I don't care." That's the attitude you should have with a cop at a traffic stop, provided he's following the letter of the law as well. That is not the attitude you should have with your government. Yes, technically you are paying for both the government and the cop, but the police are otherwise necessary for the well-being of your community, and the stop is taking up ten minutes of your time. The government, on the other hand, is spending billions of dollars it could be spending on infrastructure, on crumbling bridges and roads, or on education, raising teachers above poverty lines and moving us back into a worldwide player in the market for educated professionals, rather than the continual slide to ever-growing droves of children that can't even pass already laughable standardized tests.
Instead, billons of dollars, your healthy tax contribution included, are spent on treating you like a potential criminal. I can understand where people get that mentality, I really do. I'm an American, I'm a Verizon customer, but I have yet to physically notice myself being monitored. So I do understand the mentality of, "Well, it's bad, but it's not really affecting my daily life, so it's not all that worth getting worked up about." Well, it is, actually. Because the real problem isn't the surveillance, it's the mentality behind it.
It's the mentality of many in our government that because of the office they hold, they are no longer 'one of them'. In many cases, regardless of whether they say it outright, their actions speak for them. We up here, are going to pass a bunch of laws that make you down there do what we want. It's the mentality of the elected officials and the appointed directors that think, "Hey, we can do all these questionable things, and we can't get in trouble for it, because our laws are decades behind our technology, so it isn't *technically* illegal."
And you, the citizen, are paying for, and enabling, all of it. But we can't stop, because then you're a criminal for not paying taxes. And at this point, we see very few politicians that we can elect to actually change things for the better, because most we do see simply promise that they will to get elected, then ride the paycheck and get nothing done.
That, is why people like me are unhappy about such issues, and you should be as well.
