I would agree that a person ought to be able to see whatever surveillance records exist on themselves.

However, allowing any member of the public to see all surveillance records, on anyone, strikes me as just compounding the problem--now my private information isn't just seen by the government, it's seen by everybody.

Right, but that's why no reasonable congressman would want your information, because that would also make his/hers available just like yours. The result would be that sensitive personal information would be very unlikely to be collected.

I don't think so; I think the result would be that people who had the power would simply bend the rules behind the scenes to make sure any information they didn't want revealed wasn't revealed, much as they do now.

You're welcome to let all of your private information out for everyone to see if that's what you believe. But people like me who do not want to do that should not be forced to.

> The sooner we adapt with the life where all surveillance records is public the better.

I strongly disagree.

I don't necessarily want to, I'm just being realistic and pragmatic.

>But people like me who do not want to do that should not be forced to.

No one is forced to but the inconvenience and the cost of keeping thing private will go up and up.

Being realistic and pragmatic doesn't need to mean being defeatist.

> the inconvenience and the cost of keeping thing private will go up and up

Only if citizens let governments continue to increase their surveillance activities with no oversight and no pushback.

Whether its done through less privacy or more privacy doesn't really matter.

>Only if citizens let governments continue to increase their surveillance activities with no oversight and no pushback

I would rather push for more openness and transparency, open up the surveillance for everyone to reduce the information asymmetries.

Or pushing for technology that enable citizen to survilance the government.

Does it though? I mean, I feel that trite little saying misses the point. Even in normal society we have obfuscation, camouflage, deception, data dumping, signalling.

Plus data isn't just something one generates and consumes ad infinitum. It takes resources, those resources generate additional layers of data, and then the reciever/ interpreter requires both different levels of sophistication, sensitivity and mutually exclusive risk/reward trade offs in how to access, use and interpret said data.

Already there is more information available on most people than any individual can access or consume. I don't think having "even more" is going to solve any problem...

perhaps it's more accurate to say information is like water. Its generally leaky and gets everywhere, but that doesn't mean that lakes and rivers don't form. And while it's notionally plentiful, that doesn't mean it's equally accessible or utilised by everyone or that different players don't have equal levels of ability to exploit it.

I'm fairly sure they already are. Any records of interest get some sort of classified label preventing their release until long past when they matter.