[john_b]

> "Secondly, surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime."

This is a very dubious assertion. I'm not aware of any evidence that mass surveillance deters or prevents crime at all, much less is "an essential tool" for doing so.

But even if one, for the sake of argument, concedes the point that mass surveillance does significantly deter or prevent crime, you still have a system set up where the costs of that surveillance (loss of privacy, loss of accountability for abuses of power, introducing/secretly discovering backdoors, etc) are borne by the least powerful--ordinary citizens--while the benefits of mass surveillance (concentration of power, ability to bribe/extort/intimidate rivals, being seen as "doing something" about terrorism, etc) accrue only to those who are already powerful.

That is the real problem with mass surveillance. It creates a positive feedback loop that only exacerbates existing power imbalances, inevitably leading to corruption and capricious injustices by those who are most able to get away with it. Having a speedbump on the road to that inevitable destination, even a big one, is not much of a consolation if the heading is still the same.

[hglman]

Exactly that, as long as you have those who have access and those that don't you have something to be exploited. There you move towards a great divided in power, towards total lack of privacy or you don't gather the data. I think the later is actually the least likely. There are a lot of really powerful things you can do with good data, that seems worthwhile. The issue is then exploitation of that knowledge. For sure advantage will be had by someone, question is extent of imbalance and lack of privacy.

[tootie]

I'm not talking about mass surveillance. I'm talking about the targeted surveillance that comes from the warrants they sign off on.

[jasonlotito]

> I'm not aware of any evidence that mass surveillance deters or prevents crime at all, much less is "an essential tool" for doing so.

Oh, you think you are sneaky. This is so carefully worded. You explicitly twist the words of the GP, where they use "fighting crime" you turn that to meaning "deters of prevents crime." They mention "surveillance", and you turn that into "mass surveillance."

That's like me saying "I don't see how fingerprint analysis helps to deter or prevent crimes." Oh sure, it helps capture people after the fact, but I don't think there has ever been evidence show that fingerprint analysis has actually deterred or prevented crime.

So, while you can stand their, smug with your "technically correct" remark, the reality is "surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime" has been proven to be correct time and time again, and has been instrumental in handing convictions for a long, long time.