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Majority of Americans OK With Warrantless Internet Surveillance (ap.org)
An anonymous reader writes: A new poll conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research gathered opinions on the U.S. government's surveillance of internet communications. The poll found that a majority of Americans, 56%, were in favor of warrantless surveillance. 28% explicitly opposed it. 67% of Republicans and 55% of Democrats supported the warrantless surveillance, while only 40% of Independents supported it. Americans under 30 supported warrantless surveillance much less than older Americans. Further, "The poll finds that for most Americans, safety concerns trump civil liberties at least some of the time. More than half — 54 percent — say it's sometimes necessary for the government to sacrifice freedoms to fight terrorism, while 45 percent think that's not necessary. On a more general level, 42 percent say it's more important for the government to ensure Americans' safety than to protect citizens' rights, while 27 percent think rights are more important and 31 percent rate both equally."
Still very, very true...
I suppose "technically" 54% is a majority, but it's not a landslide. Also, I wonder if wording of the questions and / or scenarios might change this number? Sure, most people want to fight "terrorists", but get into more detail about the invasiveness of the surveillance, and people might have different ideas.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Cattle.
Yes, I agree the government - at least if it's not nefariously self-serving, which I doubt, but let's assume... - WOULD have an easier time finding bad guys by violating fundamental rights. But they should NEVER have the right to do so, because fundamental rights are the last line of defense against tyranny and dictatorship,
If the government has a hard time fighting crime and terrorism because they have to preserve individual rights, well, tough titties. That's their problem. People should never accept any debasing of their rights for the promise that their government will have an easier time keeping them safe. Those who think it's an acceptable tradeoff deserve to be carted off to the sheep pen.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"Do you think that putting suspicious elements under surveillance to combat terrorism is acceptable?"
It's all in the wording. Seriously, part of my degree required lots of statistics, I could probably come up with a question worded in such a way to prove that the people in the US want a Communist Regime badly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Since I currently lack the time to write a complete answer to it, allow me to pick a single line from the whole text which, in my opinion, illustrates the underlying problem we're facing today:
"To pretend that it's some kind of "people's victory" when a technical system renders itself effectively impenetrable to the legitimate legal, judicial, and intelligence processes of democratic governments operating under the rule of law in free civil society is curious indeed."
Why is this touted as a "people's victory" in the first place? That alone shows that the problem runs far, far deeper than the question whether encryption or not is the key to more or less freedom and more or less danger. The core of the problem is that the people do not trust their government anymore to have their best interest in their mind. And that's a real danger. Far, far worse than any terrorist group could ever be.
In the end, that was what fell the Communist regimes.
A government that does not have the support of its people is eventually doomed to fail. When a request like "Don't ask what your country can do for you" is met with a "yeah, right, fuck off", you have a problem. And a problem that is far, far more serious than any suicide bomber could ever present.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At the end of the day my friend this is exactly what the government is doing with these systems. They are finding ways to quiet dissent, including how to shape public opinion. All that analysis isn't just for "finding" terrorists. I would bet the farm it is also used to analyze what we are thinking, and speaking about to see how best effectively to shape our conversations. Sad, few people see this part.
Keep in mind that nothing man-made remains constant. Today, we may have a government run entirely by people we trust, and can trust, without reservation. But we don't know that that will be true next year. Or 10 years from now There will always be people who will seek power for their own benefit.. That is why we ought never to give government any more trust or power than is absolutely necessary.
linquendum tondere
It's not unimaginable, given some of the incindinerary talk about Muslims/liberals/homos/SJW's. We did it to 100,000+ Japanese-Americans during WW2, and we did it various Native American tribes before that (despite declarations from the Supreme Court, in the case of the Cherokees). You can object that these were not instances of full-on, permanent tyranny (like North Korea), but they were brutal events for the targeted populations, prosecuted without objection from the majority of this supposedly freedom-loving populace. Remember that Rome itself transitioned to a dictatorship with the support of her people. Caeser treated his army well and the senate was increasingly seen as helpless to address the problems of empire. There are plenty in the US who would support arbitrarily trampling it the Constitution and democratic principles so longed as it helped their cause it made them feel a little safer from a handful of bad actors. This article merely reflects how naieve we are about the dynamics of power (especially our children, who grow surrounded by surveillance). Unfortunately, it looks like the continue continuous expansion of federal (and corporate) powers that's been occurring for there past ~90 years will keep accelerating upwards, with near unilateral support from across the political spectrum. The consequences will be severe.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction