> I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years.

Because in their model of the world, evidence derives from authority. They value phatic expression and hierarchy instead of deduction and reasoning. Before you can convince such people of anything, you must first learn to speak their language.

http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...

While this essay is concerned with creationists and evolution, I encourage everybody to read it as it's observations about phatic communication - and how to overcome that roadblock in education - apply generally.

This article is fascinating and your comment is prescient, thank you very much for sharing this.

I could be wrong on the facts here as I have not been following the story closely, but I believe that the unencrypted SMS found on a phone outside the Batcalan helped lead police to St. Denis where they killed the mastermind and several other terrorists and likely prevented a further attack. Between St. Denis and the raids in Belgium, it seems like the police likely (1) already knew a lot about many of the people involved and/or (2) were able to quickly piece together clues, both of which were probably aided by the ability to monitor digital communications. Look also at the number of targeted killings of terrorists over recent years (e.g. Jihadi John) which I would assume were aided by digital monitoring.

And the terrorists are aware of the above and are now training their followers to use apps like Telegram.

With 7 billion people in this world, preventing every single attack by mass surveillance alone is impossible. But I think its naive to believe that surveillance is not helpful to law enforcement or that the pro surveillance crowd is motivated by some sort of ulterior motive to blackmail people. If you are the head of the CIA or NYPD, you probably spend a lot of your time genuinely worrying about letting an attack happen on your watch and you would be strongly inclined to fight for every tool you can get.

The question is whether the benefits of dragnet surveillance and weakening encryption outweigh the negatives, and like others here, I'm inclined to think they do not.

Jaron Lanier writes about this problem in "Who Owns The Future" and calls it the Siren Server. People seem to continually mistake the mass collection of data and its generic processing with actual actionable intelligence. What you really end up with is a mass of data that has no meaning or function unless you already have an inclination where to look.

That inclination is likely going to fall along the lines of your biases unless its in direct relation to an already occurred or ongoing event.

Terrorists make common cause with established governments when they inspire fear in the governed.

The design goal of terrorism it to provoke overreach on the part of the authority being targeted. But you can't get an allocation of funds for your open-ended anti-terror programme if you say this.

After fiftyish years of television and 100 years of movies, people's willing suspension of disbelief impulse is ragged and raw. It's both hair-trigger and numbed. And since the mode of the terrorists is akin to blood sacrifice, it's even more profound.

Perhaps the argument is that they couldnt keep a close enough eye on the "known perps".

I feel like it is a fair/valid argument to support expanded/enhanced wiretapping of those with warrants ("known perps"). One could argue either way if it is the person's right to know if they are on a watchlist.

I DONT feel like the argument for expanded/enhanced wiretapping for everyone is fair/valid. Aside from the fact that it feels draconian and cowardly, there isnt any hard data to back up its effectiveness.

> I feel like it is a fair/valid argument to support expanded/enhanced wiretapping of those with warrants ("known perps").

If the police have a warrant then they can tap your phone, bug your house, install a hardware keylogger on all your devices, etc. etc. That has been the case forever and nobody is objecting to it.

The objection is to warrantless surveillance and mandatory backdoors.

"And that did nothing to stop a much larger, more complex attack"

Perhaps, but I think the best way to measure the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the program is not the number of attacks that have slipped through, but the proportion of those that were prevented compared to those that slipped through.

This is impossible. One of the problems with the blatant misuse of forecasting is governments using it it to compare outrageous black swan futures against real history. It leads to claiming that "spying on everyone 24/7 to prevent an infinite number of terror attacks" is in everyones interest. The reality is that a limited number of black-swan terror attacks is actually a minimal cost compared to destroying social fabric modern western society is built on.

This type of false thinking is what allows government officials to manipulate public thought into agreeing to give up their rights. This has literally led to the FBI radicalizing young men in order to 'catch them' in the act -- thus justifying their existence by creating the very black-swan event they are supposed to stop.

For now it seems that terrorist attacks made more impact on social fabric than US or French surveillance.

Well, they did enable government to implement those surveillance programs. It was already in the works, but terrorism is a wonderful pretext (along with paedophilia, Nazism, and starving authors).

Measuring how much something did not happen looks pretty tough. I have a lucky rabbit's foot, and I have not been attacked by a bear. How many bear attacks has my lucky rabbit's foot prevented? Seven? A million?

Either an informed electorate runs the country or the security services do. That sounds like a false dichotomy, but if all of the important information is classified, and voters are prevented from becoming informed (which is what the security services want)? I don't see how the system can continue to operate.

And that doesn't begin to address the catastrophic civil liberties problems the surveillance state brings. I'm just wondering who is in charge.

When developing complex and robust systems, the measure of effectiveness of a program is how little the original system changes in response to new stimulus. If the system constantly needs to change, it's not meeting the stating requirements.

Unless of course the program contributes to causing those attacks in the first place. Now? Probably not. 20 years time? Perhaps.

Soo... which were prevented? These must somehow end up as court cases eventually, right?

Didn't think so.

Those cases are handled in "secret courts" run by "secret judges" with "secret prosecutors".

Apparently the defense counsel is also secret since they don't come out afterwards to say what happened to their clients. Assuming the prosecuted had defense counsel.

No France did not ramped up their surveillance because the law has just been voted few days before the attack.

(French here)

"France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks"

I don't think that's true. When France passed the big intelligence law this summer, the goal was to explicitly legalize the surveillance programs that were already in effect, but were until then in a grey area, legally speaking.

Nobody talked about actually increasing the surveillance, or you have information that we don't.

Well, I would assume any expansion would not be mentioned because anytime someone mentions that type of information they are immediately attacked as "helping the enemy". The conspiracy theorist in me suggests that making the then current levels of surveillance proper under the law just causes them to increase the levels again afterwards. I expect in a year or two there will be talk of making the new higher levels of surveillance, previously hidden, properly legal. Rinse, repeat.

"I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years."

The government is not the borg. They don't trust "the government", they trust various good people in the government.

"Trusting good people" is fine for children, but anyone who has observed the system for a few years knows better. The system has been exposed to "good people" before; it knows what to do with them.

Correct. My observation is: The good people that come into politics either stay small numbers in the back-row ... or they get corrupted by the system and the money and maybe end up as top politician, some even as president -- but they are no good people anymore.

That is the requirement for becoming somebody in politics.

Which "good people" do they trust?

They trust the idea of a paternalistic authority. They trust the government they want, not the government they have. It's wishful thinking.

I think that for things which are far away, people are free turn their beliefs in any direction which suits them. There's no obvious feedback to one's actions except for the reaction of others when they discover your political beliefs.

"I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years."

Because reasoning doesn't work that way, and many people don't grow up in nice conditions. AKA the vast majority of people are poor and have hard lives, aka no time for research. You're on the internet, you are in the top percentage of wealthy people on the planet.

See the science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

>You're on the internet, you are in the top percentage of wealthy people on the planet. I don't really think that's true anymore. Especially with cheap smartphones or tablets, LTE towers and solar panels you can reach even rural africa.

>That's their angle: use the panopticon to get blackmail material on 100% of people, then anyone who is inconvenient or needs to be controlled can be dealt with painlessly.

Right, France is a totalitarian government, no proof necessary. You cannot fight nonsense with nonsense.

I didn't say that they were totalitarian, merely that they had taken a step in that direction. Powers are abused, 100% of the time, even if you don't find out. Steps against free society add up.

Terrorist violences is also against free society.

Criminals do much more actual harm to society, and yet no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records.

Imagine how many crimes local police could prevent if they did have access? Unlike finding small terrorist cells among tens of millions of people, busting local criminals is very easy if you can spy on their communication.

They could probably save thousands of children from serious abuse. They could definitely save some people from being murdered.

And yet, it's still not worth it because we would be living in a police state, not a free society.

>Criminals do much more actual harm to society, and yet no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records.

They are calling for mass video surveillance of everyone's encounters with police.

> > no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records. > They are calling for mass video surveillance of everyone's encounters with police.

That's because there are serious problems with police accountability. Citizens benefit because bad police (which we hope are a minority) are discouraged from acting poorly, due to pervasive evidence, and the police benefit because there is a clear documented record of What Happened, which helps prevent spurious claims of police misconduct.

It's something that most of the police seem not to want, judging from reactions towards journalists and people with cameras, so it's not the __police__ asking for more surveillance. (Well, I mean, they are, but not in this way.)

There may come a point at which police officers have such powerful gear (see: spider drones from Minority Report) that they can effectively monitor the population, but that's nowhere close to what we have with current bodycams.

"Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance

>to get blackmail material on 100% of people

Nonsense.

We had an example not even a month ago. In many cities, there are enough parking spots for everyone, so many citizens will leave their cars for the night near their homes in places where they do not cause significant disturbance, and the police will tolerate this behavior and not ticket them for it. This is a win for everyone: the citizens have a spot to park, and the mayor doesn't have to spend public funds to set up parking spots.

In completely unrelated news, the city of Beauvais voted 67% against the municipal police force carrying weapons. The municipal police retaliated by not tolerating night-time parking anymore, resulting in a significant increase in parking tickets in locations that had been safe for years.

And while the mayor did apologize for this, the municipal police said it was "just doing our job".

http://www.leparisien.fr/beauvais-60000/beauvais-des-pv-pour...

Making common behavior illegal, and then tolerating it, is a great way to harass dissenters in a perfectly legal way.

> Making common behavior illegal, and then tolerating it, is a great way to harass dissenters in a perfectly legal way.

Which, not coincidentally, is the entire basis for the war on [some] drugs [when used by some people].

That sounds more like a work-to-rule labor action than an example of harassing dissenters.

"This is a win for everyone"

Except as you pointed out, it's not a win for everyone all the time.

Hardly.

Thanks to a spectacularly complex legal system, we all break plenty of laws each day. If our every action is recorded, then so are those currently inconsequential violations of law, giving whoever controls the panopticon the ability to pick and choose who to prosecute with near impunity.

Why? If laws are so complex that at any given time anyone is breaking at least one, then a surveillance dragnet gives you cause to indict anyone at any time.

We are talking about a country that routinely acts like a terrorist organisation. Look up who blew up Greenpeace boat ~30 years ago.

One incident 30 years ago != "routinely".

France is not totalitarian, at least for now, but their political system is statist with a tendency for enacting authoritarian policies without regard for individual liberties.

I have been following a lot of French people on Twitter following the terrorist attacks and I didn't sense from them any caution or worries of giving the govt and security forces a carte blanche with the state of emergency and even for the upcoming constitutional referendum.

They seemed very naive and trust their government blindly to the point of trading their freedom for the illusion of safety and not learning the hard lesson endured by their American peers with the Patriot Act and the ensuing mass surveillance following the 9/11 attacks.