This is fundamental, and this point needs more airtime than it gets. Terrorism is a real threat. It is a challenge that our institutions are struggling to deal with. But the threat that it poses is tiny compared to the threat of powerful government, a troll that goes back to the beginning of civilisation. We must not let the focus on terrorism distract us into relinquishing defenses against the greater threat of powerful government.
Advances in technology make privacy more important than it has ever been. Without privacy, there is vast opportunity for government to reach deep into our lives in the name of enforcement.
Government of the people has an obligation to find ways to combat terrorism that are compatible with the controls we need on government. If we don't hold the line on privacy, government will increasingly shift us towards serfdom.
Government has gotten us all involved in an endless war of attrition in which the average person has almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. If the priority was really to keep the population safe, things would be handled very differently.
People can conspire, people can be crazy, or unhinged. Columbine, for example. And even if we accept that terrorism is a reaction, they exist in many countries and would inflict more harm if they could. Terrorism is not a thing which only threatens the US, it exists in Europe, Africa, Asia, the middle east, etc.
But yes people will have to come to terms with how to deal with the issue of privacy (secrecy) vs openness (accessibility) How it's managed will change over time, surely.
These questions must be weighted by each person for him or herself. I've chosen for some nicer car insurance. I still don't have nuclear terrorism insurance. I still sleep well at night after working in defense in this area and having friends working on these very issues.
But the solution to "someone might steal a nuclear weapon" is not "spy on everybody in the world" -- the solution is to secure the nuclear weapons. Which is a thing governments do that nobody is objecting to and that has nothing to do with mass surveillance.
After WWII, the US government and foreign policy got reconfigured in such a way as to assure the United States could defend itself from a nuclear superpower and to have access to the resources to re-fight World War II.
The original goal in all of the above was to keep the population safe. Things have evolved a little since then, however.
It is quite sad that we've reached a point where technology could empower us to lift up the state of humanity, but we're deploying it in a way to keep humanity in subservience of the state. Of course... there is no such thing as a government; it is just people oppressing other people[0]
Terrorism is broadly defined as using threats and violence to coerce a civilian population for political purposes... when the government grants itself the right to indefinitely detain dissidents and declares that its own territory is a battlefield (NDAA 2012) and authorizes itself to deploy propaganda domestically (NDAA 2013), and does things like threaten economic collapse and martial law if the citizens won't pay $1 trillion with no accountability (TARP bailouts)... who are the real terrorists under that definition?
Thus it is never "the government" oppressing people... it is people oppressing people. Similarly it is never "the government" helping people... it is only people helping people.
The moral and/or ethical implications of this concept are significant, as it "pierces the veil" of the idea that the actors are somehow absolved from their actions because they are in the name of "the government".
There are: http://www.shotspotter.com/
Though results are mixed at best: https://www.cctvcambridge.org/DoesShotSpotterWork
Create loads of dirt cheap shotspotters with https://nurdspace.nl/ESP8266 plant them in your neighborhood. Make them report to community site so false positives could be eliminated by considering only simultaneous detection from nearby sensors.
Invite cops to use the site.
Playing devil's advocate to your last comment. There are a lot of people in the world that DO see blood on the street, every single day. Does the fact you come from a country that doesn't out weigh their experience? I agree with a lot of your other points, but if you want to be true to them then it shouldn't matter even if you see blood on your own street. Even if you become the minority that is to die. You're just one more human in humanity... we all are.
Further to that you need to be able to say the same thing when it is your family that may die, or your child.
That's actually exactly what we are talking about. The police's job is to enforce the law, and as technology changes, they need to adapt, the same way firearms now have serial numbers, and they collect DNA samples / fingerprints (all of which have met similar resistance before they became a broadly adopted technology, and are also open to abuse).
It's totally fine to have a rational discussion of where, as a society, we want to draw a line, but let's please keep our own rhetoric in check - there are lots of scenarios (outside the high visibility of this case) where, with proper legal controls, enabling the police to be able to access someone's phone is the equivalent of a traditional search order that allows the police to enter someone's premises and search for evidence.
The point is the government is already not respecting the rule of law with all the 'secret FISA court' stuff nor does their foreign policy seem capable of making us safer. I am loathe to give them more weapons against activists, politicians, journalist and the discontented when they have greatly earned our distrust.
Once we have transparency and controls in place to make sure traditional laws are being used properly we can begin a careful deliberation on expanding those laws.
Let's debate honestly about what we think is acceptable. I honestly don't know, but I think perfect security is a mathematical inevitability, so I guess I'm more on the side of figuring out how to live with it.
No.
Do you know how the police normally operate? There is a victim who comes to the police and says "these people committed a crime" and the police go investigate. They get a warrant based on the victim's testimony/evidence. They plant a bug in the suspect's home/office/car. They send undercover officers to infiltrate the organization. They interview witnesses and find other victims.
All of which can be done regardless of whether they can read your iPhone, which people didn't even have 15 years ago. And a video bug can capture you entering your PIN into your iPhone before they arrest you and confiscate it, so there is also that.
I mean, why draw the line here? Bugs and taps were new at one point. Why not say "police used to get things done without these newfangled spy devices, so why should we allow it now?" I would say a bug or tap is actually very invasive, but as long as a warrant is required, it doesn't seem so bad.
The difference with an iPhone is not that it hides criminal activity but that it records it to begin with. There was no default recording of the content of communications. What loss have the police suffered that the information is now stored but unreadable when it was previously not stored at all?
> I mean, why draw the line here?
Because there is a difference between the police being allowed to do something and everyone else being obligated to facilitate it.
Actually it is not what we're talking about, because they're not blind, they can use usual means of inquiry, and the technology. How comes already there are no firearm firing sound detectors, or remote-controlled drones with tasers in major streets to react instantly, ect...? There are ways to act which don't strip citizens from their power, as information nowadays is power.
A handful of people died because they lacked this power, and this will always be the case that people will die because of their lack of power, no matter what they have.
At the end of the day, there is 7 billions people, and only one world, one humanity, one future, so protecting the people from the government is more important than protecting the people from the people, at least as long as it stays manageable.
Every month, the world gets more peaceful, and more educated, we just didn't always have the internet flashlight. Making such a backdoor, it's another leak to oligarchy, because security and corporations can ally and spy the rest into uncompetitiveness. Ect... I will worry when I see blood on the street.