There are hidden assumptions in the question "Don't you want your country to be safe?"

What the question is really asking is this: "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?"

No, I do not. I want my country to be a place where I am proud of living. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to have traditions that are important to me that stay the same over time and try to get better over time.

I want my country to stay a place I am happy living in. I can live with some danger much easier than I can a surveillance state. Danger is a situation that is stable over time. Operating a panopticon is not.

The second premise is that it is possible to make some universal rules that will make everybody safe. Throughout history we have lots of examples of places where large groups of people were "completely" controlled. Modern prisons in the U.S. are a good contemporary example.

These places are not safe. In fact, the tighter we grip a population in order to make them safe, the more we create criminals who are part of the surveillance system itself. These criminals are in many cases impossible to discover. So now you have a lot of control and surveillance with criminals you can't identify or catch. The Chinese deal with this by every now and then sacrificing some of the party apparatchiks to the mob. The jury is still out on whether that actually works over several decades or not. I doubt it. But even if it did, it's still an unstable system.

Nations don't exist to extol one virtue over all others. "Safety" is a great thing, but it's not the end of the conversation when it comes to decision-making. It's a complex balance that should dynamically change over time as conditions force. When you systematize things like massive surveillance, you actually hurt the cause of public safety. It gets better for a short while -- then the rebound happens. And it's not pretty.

Indeed, safety also has different aspects. You might be safer from getting mugged, but less safe from getting arrested and tortured, run over by a car, or from breathing polluted air and getting cancer. The same apparatus that makes people afraid to be muggers, will also make them afraid to point out abuses.

There are way more hidden assumptions than just "Don't you want your country to be safe no matter what?".

What's really happening when you agree to surveillance, is you're agreeing to give power in the form of information asymmetry to people you don't know. You assume those people will use that power for your benefit. In reality, there is very little guarantee that that's true - though there is some statistical likelihood that it's true.

At the end of the day, there is no such thing as law and order, no such thing as values and ethics, no such thing as society and civilization. All there really is is groups of people with varying levels of power and cohesion, varying overlap of shared interests, rather predictable human nature, and game theory. If you lose sight of that, you do so at your own peril.

I must say this is the sort of quality comment that makes me come back to HN again and again. I've never been fully able to articulate why the "safety" argument is a farce, and I think you've done a cogent, lucid, commendable job here.

I guess you could look at major European cities like London where CCTV is pervasive and other cities with considerably less.

It seems to me that most of the justification for surveillance systems is focused on edge cases, terrorism and paedophilia which are statistically unlikely of affect the vast majority of people.

If you watch some of the reality TV you see in UK about CCTV surveillance you’d think the county is suffering from a crime epidemic when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers interacting with uneducated angry drunk people.

Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.

> If you watch some of the reality TV you see in UK about CCTV surveillance you’d think the county is suffering from a crime epidemic when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers interacting with uneducated angry drunk people.

I couldn't find London's murder rate further back than 1990 for some reason, but for England, the murder rate is higher now than it's been since at least 1900.

We don't know if CCTV surveillance, gun bans, and silverware purchasing restrictions have had an effect reducing violent crime, but at the very least it hasn't been enough to counter the increase.

> Better social policy regarding education and alcohol would be the better solution.

I'm pretty skeptical that this would decrease violent crime and/or murders. Do you have any evidence for this?

Murder rate or murder rate per capita? Please, please source stats on this kind of thing or we end up talking past each other.

Watch out for "exceptions" causing confusing numbers, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-fig... : "The official figures [for 2017] also show a 26% rise to 723 in the homicide rate, which includes the 96 cases of manslaughter at Hillsborough in 1989."

This article also mentions consistently falling police numbers. The police and court services are stretched very thin.

I never said it would decrease either, I said that better social policy would reduce the need for surveillance and aggressive policing — which seem to be more reactionary and designed to appease the typical Daily Mail reader. There are a lot of angry young men with little or no skills in the U.K. with nothing to do. This ASBO generation is who should be helped with better social policy.

The fact is that the homocide rate has utterly collapsed[0]. It’s difficult to compare the murder rate today with 1900 due to economic and cultural shifts. We may as well compare the execution rate, the domestic violence rate and the sexual assault rate too.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

This is probably the best study out there, and it hits the alcohol point pretty well:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3015237/

Alcohol is involved in 40% of violent crime in the US.

https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/alcohol/crimes/

What happens when you remove "angry drunk picks a fight" type of crimes from those stats?

Drunk people getting in fights is categorically different from violent crime committed for material gain (robbery, carjacking, etc). The causes for the problem and the way to go about solving the problem are totally different. Keeping people from getting angry drunk is not going to stop a home invasion. Stopping a home invasion is not going to improve crime stats because it's a single instance of violent crime. It's very possible to have a society relatively devoid of "violent crime" in which drunken brawls are fairly common. It's also possible to live in a society with lots of violent crime but no bar fights.

Including or excluding drunks to make the crime stats look how you want them to is no more honest than using gang violence to make the "mass shooting" statistics look how you want them to.

You can't just paint with a broad brush when it comes to violent crime (well you can but it's stupid and counterproductive if your goal is to understand crime for the purpose of advocating for public policy that reduces it). A drunk guy getting in a fight is different from domestic violence is different from robbing a delivery driver but they'll all show up when you "select * where includes_assault = true;"

It's true that they're different types of crime, but that doesn't make it not crime and it doesn't make it not violent.

Where did I say otherwise? Of course it's still violent crime.

That might be technically true, but it looks like the murder rate in the UK hasn't varied greatly over the course of the past century-and-a-bit, at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention....

If you watch reality TV then you aren't getting the facts.

Of course, it’s not something I would normally watch. It is however very popular with my parents generation. They get very invested in the whole idea of the world falling apart when the data shows that crime is falling.

Maybe because of the "it was better when we were young" kind of ideas? Obviously it was and it will be for us too. We were younger, healthier, stronger and living in the environment we were raised into, not something made by younger and unfathomable minds.

I've seen some English reality / cop TV, it's entertaining enough - mostly because most of the crime shown there is benign, like idk, people driving without a license or drunk people. They probably make those shows on purpose though, showing on the one side that crime isn't that bad, and on the other to remind people to keep their insurance up to date because the cops are watching.

> when in fact a lot of the situations are minor and often escalated by overly aggressive police officers

Do you have a citation for this?

There appears to be a good bit of literature on the Stop and Search tactic[0] and also the examples of the harassment of law abiding photographers in the U.K.[1]

It’s race to the bottom policing that’s approaching the US model. Assume everyone is a criminal (when crime is at an all tome low), dress police officers up in tactical gear, and turn them into enforcers rather than protectors.

[0] https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?... [1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/23/photographers-pro...

You can visit many town centres in the UK on a Friday evening and witness it yourself, to a degree. The Police also have a habit of speaking some other kind of language that has the effect of causing people who are already bad tempered to become even more so.

Of course no data, purely observational.

The current Mayor of London (Sadiq Khan), his religion (Islam) and immigration are unrelated.

Sadiq Khan is the Labour candidate who succeeded the previous Conservative mayor by majority in a democratic vote. Swings between the two major parties are common.

In other totally unrelated news, 12% of the population of London are Muslim.

Your reckless conflation of facts paints you as a troll of religious discrimination if not outright racism.

So it’s okay for England to colonise half the planet and then get upset when some of their subjects move there?

The fact is that crime in Europe has utterly collapsed.

While I may disagree with the parent post, I do not agree with this one either. Just because some people did horrible things in the past from the country that I had no control over does not mean that these evil things should be done to me, too. It does not justify it. Not at all.

The point is that many of the Rule Britannia white nationalists in the UK point out anyone who is not white Anglo Saxon as immigrants who should all be deported when in fact many of the wide range of ethnicities that call the UK home first settled there during the days of empire or from commonwealth countries.

I guess it’s not unlike the situation with the recent treatment of Puerto Rico by the US.

I'm not sure where you're getting your info, it's a load of nonsense.

You can see net migration explode from 1990 onwards, compared to what was negligible migration in the decades before that.

How is legal immigration an evil thing?

I did not intend to say that legal immigration is an "evil thing". As far as I am concerned the parent comment tried to justify it in such a way that just because some people from England colonized some parts of the planet through aggression in the past, then somehow it necessarily follows that people who live in England today must agree to open borders, or say, illegal immigration. Illegal immigration because, "after all, people from England colonized the planet through aggression before! You deserve it!". See what I mean? This is what I thought the parent meant. It might be the case that I am biased because I did argue with too many people holding this belief: "your ancestors did terrible things, therefore you should keep quiet and take it!". I do not agree. In case this is not what the parent meant, or you think he meant something else, please do not hesitate to correct me.

England doesn't have subjects. Britain has a mere 829 subjects who do not have the right of abode in the UK.

There's no convincing research that establishes causality on such complex sociological matters, since you can't create clean experiments, and observations are not useful since there are too many confounding factors.

However, you don't really need research on this, it's obvious that surveillance offers meaningful safety benefits. I think the problem some people have with surveillance is that its costs may outweigh its benefits.

For example surveillance can be used to shift political system in the authoritarian direction, by suppressing political opposition. It can be used to sustain inequality since it provides those with money or power a powerful leverage to entrench their positions. It can be used by corrupt officials and hackers to commit serious crimes (partly offsetting its crime reduction benefits). Finally, even if surveillance isn't abused, it can be uncomfortable to some people who just don't like being watched.

> it's obvious that surveillance offers meaningful safety benefits.

Is it, though? As far as I know, most crime is of the "spur of the moment" type, decided on the stop, without much regard for the consequences. Thus, I'd expect more surveillance to be able to increase the odds of getting caught, but to not actually reduce the amount of crime.

I'd also be ware for increased surveillance to hamper the ability to correct "wrong" laws.

Oh you're right, I didn't think about it. I take it back, it's not that obvious that it offers meaningful safety benefits.

Still, I suppose if the probability of being caught goes from 1% to over 50%, it might be enough to scare off even the spur of the moment criminals.

Also, a decent fraction of crimes are at least somewhat planned or even repeated, and those should be affected by the chance of being caught.

On the other hand, there are also more things I didn't think about. Suppose surveillance actually catches all car thieves. Will most of them go get a job? Or will they just switch to crimes that are harder to detect with surveillance? My guess is that most criminals will either stop committing crimes or spend most of their life in jail. But I may underestimate the creativity and capability of criminals.

> partly offsetting its crime reduction benefits

No, potentially outweighing them. There is no reason to think surveillance cannot enable more crime than it solves, and the more surveillance you have the more likely that gets.

Possibly.

Although if I have to guess, the new crimes it enables are less destructive than the ones it catches. As an example, a mugger has a risk of killing or seriously injuring the person. On the other hand, someone who steals surveillance data for blackmail purposes will not cause nearly as much harm.

No expert on US law, but I think mass surveillance is illegal. So yes, there is a very direct connection between surveillance and criminality.

An argument can be made that any prevented crimes are not published, with the intent of lulling would-be criminals or terrorists into a safe sense of security - that is, that communicating via a certain platform is safe enough, not knowing the NSA is listening in.

And on the other hand, what makes you feel safer: no news at all, or "1000 potential terrorist threats thwarted through surveillance". The former is dull, but dull is good right? The latter is stressful on both sides, on the one hand that apparently there are at least 1000 terrorists active - and what about the ones they didn't catch - and on the other that the government is listening.

So that's my theory; if government surveillance is effective, it's kept under wraps so it remains effective.

> An argument can be made that any prevented crimes are not published

Between the police fighting for funding, media fighting for content (Florida man), and police force for recognition (police posing with stashes of money/drugs/guns), I'm not sure there's much strategic hiding going on.

I do believe higher levels of surveillance will have higher levels of inhibition for petty crime.

But it will not inhibit white collar crime (such as corruption or fraud etc). It won't inhibit crimes of passion. And it won't inhibit premeditated crimes that require lots of planning and hardcore execution (like drug/human trafficking etc).

Apparently the appearance of surveillance was enough. "The cardboard cutout cop":

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/10/the-cardboard-c...

It's classified

Based on this leak, probably not for long

Well, a policeman on the beat or patrolling in a car is surveillance.

Based on that surveillance does work.

The question is rather at what level surveillance does not meaningfully reduce crime anymore but becomes a (political) control tool.

I still differentiate between public and private spaces.

I do believe surveillance and the threat of surveillance does heavily undermine public trust in a society and its institutions and that this can be easily deduced by reasoning. Good thing trust is not an issue in 2019...

Ever wondered why so many constitutions around the world forbid surveillance?

I believe the studies about people becoming dumber...

In my country I'm more afraid of police than of thugs, tbh