Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

One of those checks and balances is the legal prohibition against operating domestically. These ongoing conspiracies demonstrate that spy agencies have effectively escaped democratic oversight.

Surveillance != Mass Surveillance. If you need to have an investigator show up in person to carry away a thumb drive of data about one case then this means you need to make a cost-benefit analysis about when to send out that investigator. If you can just go dragnet fishing and hoard data forever then there's no incentive to ask whether you really need to.

I think you're right in theory but wrong wrong in practice. While there probably exists a form and degree of surveillance that is very beneficial at the expense of minimal freedom, it's far more difficult to hold the line there than it is to hold the line at "surveillance is wrong." Rallying points like that are essential in politics and in personal moral integrity.

There are likely forms of eugenics that have the same cost/benefit characteristics as the forms of surveillance to which we've alluded. We know that the legalization of abortion has the long-term effect of reducing crime, so what about laws that make abortions easier to access when the fetus has certain genetic characteristics associated with disabilities? Or with psychopathy? "NO!" is the resounding response. "THAT'S EVIL!" And a good thing too, because it's probably the only reliably way to hold the line against policies that really are murderously bad. We don't debate practical eugenics. We muse about it in fiction and hypothetical scenarios, but we don't debate it in politics. We reject it because it's wrong. It's wrong because it is.

Surveillance policy should be met with this same sort of rallied opposing force. Write books about it, discuss it in an academic space, try to imagine ways in which it could do more good than bad; fine. But propose surveillance policy in the real world, and the response should be: "NO! THAT'S EVIL!"

You won't find a more powerful force than moral outrage. It doesn't need to be worked around, it needs to be channeled. On the one side, you will have people channeling their outrage towards criminals and terrorists. On the other side, you must have people channeling their outrage towards the idea of using espionage against civilians. A compromise involving "only the good kinds" of surveillance is unacceptable, because it allows the side that's rallying against criminals and terrorists to continue using moral arguments, while the side opposing them is neutered and can only make comparatively weak arguments. It's nearly impossible to successfully argue that something is morally wrong if it's already the status quo. Why is it so easy to say slavery is wrong now when it was so hotly debated in the 17th century? Same question applies to eugenics, once a topic of much political discussion. We're in that boat with surveillance right now. It feels normal to be spied on, and the uncompromising argument that surveillance is totally morally abhorrent in all its forms sounds extreme, and you'd never hear it made by a sitting politician.

That's a semantic difference that doesn't bear any relevance to what I'm saying. To "realize" that it can be reasonable is to accept the underlying premise - that surveillance is not necessarily (logic term there) unacceptable.

I am specifically arguing that we do not (should not) accept a priori the premise that surveillance is not necessarily bad.

To do so is to capitulate the entire argument against surveillance, and reduce our fight for privacy to nothing more than weighing lesser evils.