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Questions and Discussion | | | I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that the government's failure to possess and coordinate citizenship information on everyone currently or potentially within U.S. borders is such a bad thing, even if you were to grant a lot of leeway in accomplishing the professed security objectives. | |
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< | For one thing, by assuming a valid need for access to information on everyone by any part of the state at any time, you necessarily justify unlimited increases in surveillance used to monitor the people who either intentionally or unintentionally avoid interaction with the government (e.g., illegal immigrants or people born within the U.S. and feel no need to get passports, who amount to something around 70% of the population based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations). This is the equivalent of switching from an opt-in to an opt-out (even though you can't really opt-out, so maybe a better term would be "you're-in") system of information collection and handling, which you might think is appropriate for "homeland security" purposes, but imposes huge costs on privacy because all of this information possession can be used to limit individual autonomy through whatever form of intimidation a cop or prosecutor or federal agent wants to apply, if given access to a you're-in system. An opt-in system, of course, could still exist and satisfy most homeland security objectives if the opting-in were merely some kind of activity that actually implicated some kind of security threat, rather than just sweeping everyone into the surveillance system at once. While the immense practical and logistical implications of collecting those amounts of data used to be prohibitively costly, today those costs are trivial, and consequently the state now has no natural backstop to prevent total information collection. | >
> | For one thing, by assuming a valid need for access to information on everyone by any part of the state at any time, you necessarily justify unlimited increases in surveillance used to monitor the people who either intentionally or unintentionally avoid interaction with the government (e.g., illegal immigrants or people born within the U.S. who feel no need to get passports, who amount to something around 70% of the population based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations). This is the equivalent of switching from an opt-in to an opt-out (even though you can't really opt-out, so maybe a better term would be "you're-in") system of information collection and handling, which you might think is appropriate for "homeland security" purposes, but imposes huge costs on privacy because all of this information possession can be used to limit individual autonomy through whatever form of intimidation a cop or prosecutor or federal agent wants to apply, if given access to a you're-in system. An opt-in system, of course, could still exist and satisfy most homeland security objectives if the opting-in were merely some kind of activity that actually implicated some kind of security threat, rather than just sweeping everyone into the surveillance system at once. While the immense practical and logistical implications of collecting those amounts of data used to be prohibitively costly, today those costs are trivial, and consequently the state now has no natural backstop to prevent total information collection. | | | All this being said, as Kate's father's experience indicates, we are in the midst of that very transition from opt-in to you're-in, and are in a position to determine what happens in that transition. Regardless of whether or not the homeland security hawks get their way and the state is directly collecting all this information, the information collection will happen as it is already being done by private entities subject to subpoena. Our job is to figure out how it will be used. As I suggested, one way to keep the system limited in some respect might well be to impose these "Chinese Walls" and prevent information sharing that would enable the state's use of information beyond the "concededly valid" goals of homeland security. | | | -- TheodoreSmith - 22 Feb 2009 | |
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> | I apologize if I gave the impression that I thought information sharing wouldn't increase the efficacy of government (and sometimes in desirable ways); I absolutely agree that such is the case. I was merely pointing out that enhancing government efficacy is something to caution against because of the floodgates such a rationale opens, though such a position seems to lack political power these days. Perhaps that lack of political or rhetorical persuasiveness indicates that this the lever we ought to be pulling.
For example, how can we effectively communicate that the quantity of American lives lost to terrorism (3,000 lives lost on 9/11 + 400 in Afghanistan + 4,300 in Iraq averages out to about 1,000 per year) pales in comparison to the 750,000+ deaths per year caused by conventional medicine (of which around 100,000 are the results of drugs which may have been misprescribed because of our permissive attitude toward privacy)? Can we ever convince America to accept terrorism as an acceptable cost of freedom as we do with, to take a slightly more benign example, the the 40,000 deaths per year resulting from automobile accidents? The national security cost-benefit analysis seems to be horrendously misperceived compared to policy areas like automobiles, where we easily accept these mortalities as an acceptable cost of the gained freedom and autonomy to go from point to point more efficiently. We could, but don't, eradicate this autonomy by banning cars and having a totally public transportation system created at incredible cost for the sake of saving lives and "increasing security." Freedom and autonomy both require accepting certain losses, and Americans lack either the desire or ability to comprehend the bargain in the case of national security.
-- RickSchwartz - 22 Feb 2009 | | |
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