Slashdot Mirror
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.
Security expert Bruce Schneier has been explaining for years that the "tradeoff" between security and liberty is a false one.
It's put out there by politicians to justify a war on liberties.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
Any "survey" or "poll" that requires comparing the two or claiming you must give up one to have the other has begged this question and is already false.
E
If only the US had some set of rules, encoded in a founding and fundamental document of some-sort, that limited the ability of the majority to commit tyranny on the minority through unfair legislation or otherwise.
The fact that Trump is even a candidate has made me give up hope on that country for the forseeable future.
*Everyone must have a job even if the things you're good at have been replaced by bots or outsourced to the Chinese. If you don't have a job you are derided as a scumbag
*Tremendous poverty, everyone brushes it under the table because everybody is so opposed to the idea of people getting a free lunch
*Nobody wants to give up driving their big automatic pickup to work, even if it can be proven they are causing global warming.
*Nobody wants to give up their silly pea-shooter in case of Government aggression even if the government has much better toys that would make very light work of someone toting the said pea-shooter
*Nobody complains about the government pissing away trillions of the aforementioned toys while people starve and die of curable illnesses.
I actually read the article and it is missing some key details, such as what is meant exactly by "Internet Surveillance". Do they mean simply looking at what's on the public Internet for suspicious activity, etc., or do they mean the power to compel service providers, ISPs, etc., to turn over private customer information or private data? There's a difference between looking at someone's public tweets, and reading their private e-mail messages. Was this distinction made clear in the poll questions when the surveys were taken? It's possible that the people who responded to the polling questions didn't really know what they were answering.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
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
The only thing I saw worth noting in the article is that Americans find terrorists to be scary.
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