"Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest." - H L Mencken The American Credo: A Contribution toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920)

Not only does he not protest, he welcomes the violation and shames those that "have something to hide" as if exercising one's right to privacy was a crime unto itself.

In recent news, Biden lawyer shopped until he found someone who supported reinstating the CDC's eviction ban, despite the supreme court strongly suggesting the previous ban overstepped CDC's power, but letting it stand for mostly practical reasons.

This isn't about the ban; it's that a president got a strong signal from the supreme court that he can't do X, then did X two weeks later.

'Signal" implies something indirect, subtle, or nuanced in some way. The Supreme Court was very clear in the majority opinion (and lower courts had ruled) that the cdc overstepped its authority, that it had absolutely no power to impose these bans. The moratorium would have to be implemented by congress - it is their job when things like a brazen violation of basic property rights is involved.

That the cdc would go right ahead and roll out a new moratorium is a stunning failure of checks and balances.

I’ve often said we need the next constitutional convention to revise the government in light of society’s progress — this reinforces that view with the heat of boiling blood

They a good idea with "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."

It was inconvenient so they eroded it.

When it came to the black panthers they took away both the 2nd and the 4th.

"They decided to do something utterly illegal and censor the mail of people inside the United States - which they have no right to do. So it had to be set up very delicately as a voluntary thing. We would all volunteer not to seal the envelopes of the letters we sent out, and it would be all right for them to open letters coming in to us; that was voluntarily accepted by us. We would leave our letters open; and they would seal them if they were OK. If they weren't OK in their opinion, they would send the letter back to us with a note that there was a violation of such and such a paragraph of our "understanding." "

Notice the implication that it was reasonable to censor mail going to soldiers outside the country, (in WWII) but not inside the US.

"I get a letter from my wife that says, “It's very difficult writing because I feel that the _____ is looking over my shoulder." And where the word was, there is a splotch made with ink eradicator.

So I went down to the bureau, and I said, “You're not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don't like it. You can look at it, but you're not supposed to take anything out."

They said, “Don't be ridiculous. Do you think that's the way censors work - with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors."

I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, “Did you use ink eradicator in your letter?" She writes back, “No, I didn't use ink eradicator in my

letter, it must have been the____ and there's a hole cut out of the paper"

"I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she said, “Well, where's all the stuff?"

I said, “What stuff?"

She said, “Litharge, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry.”

I said, “Wait a minute - that was a list?"

She said, “Yes."

"That was a code", I said. "They thought it was a code - litharge, glycerine, etc."

Richard Feynman

I feel like censoring the mail of those working on the first atomic bomb is different from intercepting the mail of civilians.

The subjects of the above anecdotes were civilians.

Feynman's story of how he didn't get drafted is pretty well known.

He also tells some stories about how clueless the military was, because they had no concept of nuclear physics at that time, which would be expected.

Like, they didn't realize neutrons that go through water are much more dangerous.

And this is how privacy and rights erode.

The tricky part is "unreasonable."

When someone's using the mail to send anthrax to people, knowing who communicated with whom to trace it to the source is suddenly very reasonable.

Dying from anthrax is a lot less convenient than having record of every letter a person sent or received dry-rotting in a data warehouse somewhere.

> When someone's using the mail to send anthrax to people, knowing who communicated with whom to trace it to the source is suddenly very reasonable.

When someone's using the roads to travel to kill people, knowing who travelled to whom to trace them to the source is suddenly very reasonable.

No wait, that's insane, we should never expect that it is reasonable to conduct mass surveillance on all the roads in the country to find out where people go all the time.

Why do people think this kind of stuff is reasonable and positive for society?

> we should never expect that it is reasonable to conduct mass surveillance on all the roads in the country to find out where people go all the time.

Utility and traffic light poles have cameras and license plate scanners that can capture up to 5000 plates/sec, even in smaller suburban areas, at an increasingly alarming rate.

EZ Pass and similar are scanned in lots of places that aren't toll plazas — at least that is possibly agreed to via a terms of use.

These are facts but they don't answer the question "Why do people think this kind of stuff is reasonable and positive for society?"

Because it solves crimes.

I was on a jury where the police were able to track down a hit and run driver who killed a teenager within about 45 minutes due to red light cameras.

There are lots of things that we could do to solve crimes but we don't because of the negative effects of doing them.

Torture is a good example.

Torture is not a good example. If you torture someone enough they will tell you whatever you want them to tell you in order to stop it.

Mike Baker talks about why it was pointless for the CIA to torture someone and why when they train people how to handle being capture, they tell them to tell the truth with a little information redacted.

Solving crimes is a minor bonus for society. If they had prevented the driver from killing the teen, then that would have been a much more compelling argument. But people running after a fatal crash doesn't make situation much worse, and the incentive to avoid fatal crashes doesn't change massively if you know for sure that you will be caught rather than being almost entirely sure.

In most of the comments about solving crime, its never about prevention but rather retribution.

Can't they already track people that way using car or phone gps?

That depends on who controls the software running on the car or phone. Determining your position via GPS does not emit any signals that can be detected; it's a purely passive process. If malicious software installed on the phone records the GPS data and later transmits it, then yes.

However, cellphones in particular do require the cellphone network to track at least which cell they're in in order to work, so in practice controlling a cellphone network gives you a pretty good idea of where all the subscribers are.

This is a big problem, and we need to figure out how to stop it if we are to enjoy the sort of freedom from government surveillance that people everywhere enjoyed since the Paleolithic until about 01998. The 20th-century results of giving too much power to governments are not promising.

Something doesn’t become a good thing just because it’s possible and/or been happening for a while.

In general, it becomes a good thing if it helps more than it harms.

Yes, they can.

"Reasonable" changes over time, with available technology, and with the tolerance of the public. People don't much care for "We could've stopped that murder / caught that murderer, but we didn't use the resources available."

If there's a murder on a street corner, do we expect the cops to not pull camera records from every nearby store with an outward-facing camera?

In my experience, cops won’t do any detective work anymore unless it directly affects them. Your house is broken into and the thieves dropped their wallet with their ID? The cops will not follow up on that and get your stuff back. Murder? Hardly.

Murder and theft are treated very differently (but yes, theft is under-prosecuted... The police are under-incentivized to pursue it because insurance usually makes the victim financially whole).

Why would it be reasonable? Police and intelligence agencies already have tremendous powers and resources to figure these things out with targeted surveillance. Untargetted surveillance is many steps too far.

Not to mention, a trove of communication like this is a major risk to every citizen: it can leak, it can stolen, it can be used by corrupt agents to blackmail or otherwise coerce most people, especially in the age of sexting, dick pics, etc.

I believe Franklin said something along the lines of anyone who gives up freedom for security doesnt deserve freedom at all.

That's an oft-misunderstood quote.

The Penn family was trying to buy their way out of having their American land-holdings taxed by offering to pay mercenaries to protect the Colony (in a single lump sum). Franklin was arguing the Colony should assert its sovereign right to tax the family.

The "essential liberty" in question was the liberty of a government to levy tax as it saw fit to provide for a common defence.

Not really an American thing, every country does this, including opening diplomatic post. The problem is that intelligence communities operate in complete secrecy with very little oversight so we rarely find out.

I wonder if they digitally x-ray a lot of them like they can with paintings these days.

Spycatcher, Peter Wright, 1987-

"Around twenty Post Office technicians worked at these tables opening pieces of mail. They wore rubber gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, and each man had a strong lamp and a steaming kettle beside him. The traditional split-bamboo technique was sometimes used. It was ancient, but still one of the most effective. The split bamboo is inserted into the corner of the envelope, which is held up against a strong light. By turning the bamboo inside the envelope, the letter can be rolled up around the slit and gently pulled out Where a letter had an ordinary typed address it was sometimes torn open and a new envelope typed in its place. But to the end of my career we were never able to covertly open a letter which had been sealed at each edge with Sellotape. In those cases, MI5 took a decision as to whether to open the letter and destroy it, or send it on in an obviously opened state."

"Denman's proudest memento was a framed letter which hung on the far wall. It was addressed to a prominent Communist Party member whose mail was regularly intercepted. When the letter was opened the Post Office technicians were amused to discover that it was addressed to MI5 and contained a typewritten message, which read: "To MI5, if you steam this open you are dirty buggers." Denman classified it as "obscene post," which meant that legally he had no duty to send it on to the cover address. "

Reason is such a good institution, their reporting has a freedom-oriented mindset but their journalism is top notch. FYI it’s a non-profit and donations are tax deductible.

If you are interested in other freedom-oriented non-profits I highly recommend:

Institute for Justice https://ij.org/

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) https://www.thefire.org/

Cato Institute https://www.cato.org/

> their reporting has a freedom-oriented mindset

If by freedom-oriented you mean right-libertarian, which os very much not the only understanding of “freedom”, you would be correct.

For alternative assessments of the above:

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundatio... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Institute_for_Ju... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Individ... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute

Many seem to associate themselves with libertarian ideals. All have been funded by the Koch brothers.

Yes - I used the term "freedom-oriented" but they are small-L libertarian organizations. Libertarians are freedom-oriented and advocate for private / market-oriented solutions to problems rather than government solutions

Their use of the term freedom is manipulative. There's no freedom for the propertyless in a Propertarian - essentially neofeudal - society, and they know it. It's 100% propaganda.

Private solutions ≠ market-oriented solutions.

Markets are emergent phenomena that exist where ever there are free people. They are so natural that even in Soviet Russia markets were endemic, as well as current North Korea. If there exist products people want to buy, and prices are not fixed at gunpoint, there will exist markets.

This is simply not true. And to argue that some sort of minuscule trading is comparable to today's market economies would be ridiculous. There are a lot of stories in colonial history where the colonialists complain that they need to discipline (or euphemistically "civilize") the native population because they have no concept of labour and property - basically they are "lazy" subsistence farmers and need to be introduced to the market, a.k.a. wage labour through the creation of artificial scarcity (e.g. by the colonialists claiming to now own the land and demand a return, or by requiring a tax in the colonialist currency to cover for their "war costs").

Ha yeah libertarians are the kind of people who want to replace the police with private security. I have absolutely no delusions about what kind of society they would create- and as someone who isn't a millionaire there's nothing in it for me.

Yes these are expressly libertarian outfits. Liberty is a good thing! Also, the Koch Brothers fund a lot of things, including criminal justice reform: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch...

Wait wait wait wait wait wait, Rayiner. Liberty is a good thing. It does not follow axiomatically that libertarianism is a good thing. Libertarianism has a quirky and unpopular orthodoxy, one that equates drivers licenses to "a license to make toast in your own damn toaster", and creates utopian New Hampshire townships that are ultimately overrun by bears.

Give me liberty, as the saying goes, but also drivers licenses, and hold the bears.

Libertarianism isn't bad on spec. But it is not reasonable to suggest that people shouldn't be made aware when their sources are all libertarian, as these ones are, for the same reason that it's good to know if your sources are Jacobin, Current Affairs, and In These Times.

Sure, insofar as we’re also willing to go around saying “liberal newspaper the New York Times says, …”

We do that incessantly!

> Libertarianism isn't bad on spec

How is it not? It's deeply anti-democratic, basically handing over power to corporations and wealthy people. It's not like its biggest proponents are advocating "a great reset" where all people will start at zero property again or something, it's just a power grab for the already propertied.

Since I'm not a Libertarian, I'm the wrong person to ask to mount a defense of it.

Alright. I'm just annoyed that such obviously reactionary stuff get the benefit of the doubt constantly, and to add insult do injury, call it freedom.

The same reason the ACLU challenges the no-fly list also serves to challenge driver's licenses, and actually exposes that we are accepting very strong prior restraint on the right to travel. You can keep people from driving, but not proactively.

Some other arguments though, yes, they go too far.

I'm not even saying Libertarians are wrong about drivers licenses, just that they're idiosyncratic and unpopular on that issue, and it's worth knowing what you're getting yourself into if you take their word for everything. I think Reason is generally pretty sane! (But they were idiosyncratic and unpopular on the opiate crisis, by way of example.)

I didn't say anything about "who will pave the roads", you did. But I mean, there's a reason that keeps coming up! Regarding seizing the means of production: see my previous comment, where I said that is indeed an ideology you'd want to be aware of.