On Nov 08 21:19, David Cake ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
> Scale matters. There is a very big difference between spying
> on some people, and spying on all of them. While I believe in
> privacy, I accept that governments will, on occasion, present what
> seems, at least from the govt point of view, a compelling reason to
> invade that privacy - which is a roundabout way of saying that I can
> live with warrants, and authorised covert surveillance of certain
> targets.
> I find the argument that 'we all knew governments spied, so
> the Snowden revelations don't matter' bemusing. It seems to me to be
> similar to saying 'we know criminal gangs exist, so we shouldn't be
> surprised to find them running the state, without interference from
> police or government'. Scale and pervasiveness matter.
Agreed, very much so. It is like the observation that if the police
can control the entire citizenry, what you have is a police state.
Police should not be powerful enough to enforce laws a majority
of the people are breaking - it should not need to even try,
if the majority are criminals something is very wrong.
And that applies to NSA and the like as well. If they really
need to monitor everybody, to treat everybody as potential
terrorists as it were, it is not the people they are protecting,
but someone or something else.
I guess it's no news here that "national security" generally
means security of the government, not of the people, but
now it seems it is more and more explicitly becoming
_insecurity_ for individual citizens (nevermind foreigners).
> It is certainly true that this may not obviously be an issue
> of prime concern to ICANN (and thus by extension, NCSG). But the
> threat of surveillance should be something we now consider as part
> of practically every technical decision we make.
Yes.
> There may not be a single huge issue that arises from the Snowden
> leaks - but it should change the way we think about illegal
> surveillance, and how it figures into our decision making
> throughout.
Well said, again.
--
Tapani Tarvainen
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