"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.