The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

I'm not well versed on the details of U.S. government surveillance, but is it not the case that collection of phone logs, for instance, does not entail the government directly infringing on or even caring about 99.999999% of the public's private activity? My understanding is that these types of surveillance programs technically exist so that logs can be pulled up retroactively or algorithmically in rare but important cases.

I am asking because I am intellectually curious. It seems to me that _on average_ people could stand to gain from surveillance and possibly predictive algorithms for crime. I would like to better grasp the other side of the argument.

> Like smoking

Smoking causing cancer was substantiated by some of the strongest correlations in medical science history. Regular smoking increases cancer risk by 60x (odds ratio) in contemporary studies in the US.

I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance, or indeed nearly anything the government does. Even urban air pollution increases cancer risk by less than 2x (odds ratio). Surely eliminating urban air pollution was a huge accomplishment of government intervention. And yet look at how small that O.R. looks compared to smoking.

Smoking isn't "accumulation of risk over time." It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately.

And maybe this comes to your conflating some pop-psych notion of people being unable to assess risks with other failures of health and well-being. People are physically addicted to smoking; quitting aggravates real pain.

Nobody is "addicted" to government surveillance. In this country, pervasive surveillance could be dismantled with the stroke of a pen, much like closing Guantanamo or mass incarceration of low-level drug offenses.

Why are these orders politically difficult to achieve? I don't know, but risk assessment fallacies aren't to blame.

>>a constitutional privacy amendment

That would be the 4th Amendment[1].

I really don't think that Americans have never cared about privacy; I think if that were true, we would have a different 4th Amendment. Instead, I think that the various amendments and overall content of the Constitution serve to limit the power of government, and in that regard, it behooves the individuals within the government to disregard as much of the Constitution as they can get away with, thereby acquiring more power for themselves.

That the American people have allowed the individuals within government to disregard the Constitution so flagrantly, to me this indicates a deep gap between the ideals of our predecessors and the ideals of the current generation. So, it's not that Americans have never cared about privacy, it's just that the people of today don't seem to have the political willpower to get it back.

[1] The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Meanwhile, the elected President and his party are demanding the names of people involved in climatology and are passing acts to let them reduce individual named government employees' salaries to $1 per year.

Avoiding that "corruption" really did a whole lot of good with the actual, literal wannabe serial-assaulting autocrat who is in office, you're so very right.

I think this is a great idea, and I may give it a go.

If you are initiating anything else like this, though, I'd make one suggestion: we need some materials that can be honed in their effectiveness in communicating the danger, as what has been done to make it a reality so far. It's a complex issue, and most ad hoc attempts to explain it to a random person will end in disinterest on their part.

Seems like one wiki page for techies and one for non would be a decent approach. For the most part, it would be best to have potential teachers use the resources on the wiki rather than students—but they could hold a repository of illuminating examples, analogies etc. until effective approaches for communicating to each audience type stabilize.

Edit: probably the main benefit of this isn't making teachers more effective, but rather that it would make it easier for potential teachers to get on board. As it stands I'd need to go do a bunch more research and collect specific figures personally before I'd feel prepared to teach anyone.