[charliesome]

Calling mass surveillance a "fundamentally Soviet activity" weakens your argument here. Is mass surveillance something that happened in the Soviet Union? Of course. But it also happens in the US and many other nations, liberal democratic or not, worldwide. So why shouldn't we call mass surveillance fundamentally American, or fundamentally capitalist?

Mass surveillance is bad. It is toxic to freedom and democracy. Let's focus on that rather than invoking Red Scare tendencies of old.

[freedomben]

> Let's focus on that rather than invoking Red Scare tendencies of old.

He's not "invoking Red Scare tendencies of old" to describe modern mass surveillance. He's giving historical context about what earlier generations thought:

>> Earlier generations passed those laws because they viewed mass surveillance as a fundamentally Soviet activity with no place in a free society.

[akiselev]

It's particularly confusing since the "earlier generations" were the people who wrote the unreasonable search and seizure clause in the Bill of Rights, almost 150 years before the Soviet Union even existed. The Supreme Court ruled in Katz v US that warrantless wiretaps were unconstitutional so Congress passed laws creating wiretap warrants [1] for law enforcement. Congress didn't ban wiretaps without a warrant, they passed a law to create such warrants in response to a Supreme Court decision that banned what police had been doing for decades, Soviet style.

[1] https://it.ojp.gov/PrivacyLiberty/authorities/statutes/1284

[breakfastduck]

Not sure how you've taken his comment that way.

He used it contextually for framing, I don't think he was calling mass surveillance a "fundamentally Soviet activity" at all.