That's silly. Plenty of people have been busted for prostitution without being politicians. For example, NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer busted a whole bunch of people who weren't politicians:
http://www.artharris.com/2008/03/11/bald-truth-exclusive-ag-...
http://nypost.com/2008/03/11/bane-of-the-brothels-is-hoist-b...
As for special surveillance of PEPs, sounds like a good thing to me. Can you think of a reason that our politicians should not be subject to extra scrutiny?
Meanwhile half of Washington is doing the same thing, with the full knowledge of people like the NSA, and the facts are sure to come out if they take a meaningful stand against their agenda.
The example of the soviet election is also an excellent one. They knew every bit of information about every candidate, and merely had to expose the ones that didn't toe the line properly as the criminals or terrible people they were.
Just like every single other person ever, they did something illegal or unsavory at some point in their life.
Make no aspersions, the kind of information the NSA holds is complete and total political power.
Now, an interesting question is, what happens if everyone knew almost everything? This is the alternative scenario. If the end of privacy is more ubiquitous and democratic, the power of the secret services would shrink. It might lead to a change of our laws and social norms to something that more realistically represents our reality.
I'm not optimistic that this would be a good or even better world, but this is the best argument I've heard from the people who are not afraid of the end of privacy. I would count Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt into that group, but also many of my friends.
Which norms and laws would change? I can imagine that e.g. the use of certain drugs like cocaine and sexual behaviors like sado maso and yes prostitution would be the first to be tolerated by the majority. In some societies, that is already the case. A more difficult to swallow reality might be pedophily. I'm quite sure that child abuse would always be unacceptable but simply being pedophilic might be accepted as normal for a certain percentage of the population.
I find the logic of Schmidt and Zuckerberg to be extremely self serving, where can we know all the details of their online and offline life, like they seek to know about ours?
Death of privacy indeed, but for who?
True. Good point. But is information asymmetry becoming larger or smaller? I would argue that it becomes smaller, but I have nothing to prove it.
An anecdotal example out of my memory, is Kofi Annan saying in an interview, that he started to use Google, more and more instead of having to ask his assistants. Another example are journalists, able to uncover secret CIA locations with Google. Or a single whistleblower, Edward Snowden, able to leak a good part of the NSA's secret operations with just a USB stick. Sure, the NSA has more knowledge than ever. But the average Internet user, too, has unprecedented access to personal information of strangers. Just knowing your real name will likely allow me to find your location, employment, a picture of you and much more. So has the information asymmetry between us and the NSA grown or shrunk?
I think the asymmetry is becoming larger. Certainly in absolute terms we all have more information about one another than we did before, but the problem now is not having the information, it's searching through it to find the relevant information. Or being able to act on the information.
What can you as an ordinary individual do with a publicly available list of corrupt government officials? What can a corrupt president or FBI director do with a publicly available list of political opponents?
If for instance gays and atheists are exposed as "deviants" in the media, but corruption and hiring prostitutes are downplayed as something "every politician is doing", then it doesn't really matter who shares what: The openly gay, atheist politician will have a hard time (and perhaps be put in prison) while the corrupt ones walk free.
Sure. But they are also formed by our personal observation. If you would find out that lots of your colleagues, friends, family members and celebrities behave in 'strange' activities, those activities might not be perceived as strange after a while anymore.
Of course, you're right to point to the negative examples of Russia, Iran and Germany. Laws and norms can change both ways. This has been the case with antisemitism. It used to be quite accepted to be Jewish during the Second Reich in Germany but wasn't anymore in the Third. As another example, as far as I know, the Dutch had census data about the religion of every citizen, which only became a problem when they became occupied by Germany with its laws against Jewish.
But what now? Its all to easy to imagine a future with hardly any privacy. How will it look like? How should it look like if we take the end of privacy as a given, at least as a gedankenspiel.
Popular opinion might change, but as we've seen laws can change much more quickly, and even things that most people would consider normal could become a punishable offense.
At that point, for the people who already have the data on their lives out there, it will be too late to do anything about it, while the people who have been smart enough to live "perfectly normal" lives with the correct political and religious views, or those who can hire people to cover their tracks, will be better off.
If there is one thing Zuck has said that was true was calling his users "dumb fucks" for uploading all their private information.
Regarding "PEP" surveillance, I would say that transparency is good, but there is nothing transparent about a process whereby people's activities are reported to data collection centers in secret, and then through some unknown and mysterious process culled and sorted.
Public scrutiny is good. But selective secret scrutiny, scrutiny only of politicians who threaten powerful constituencies, is a disaster for democracy.
What's the problem with that?
> Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who [frequently breaks the law].
Getting laid is a basic need, like breathing, eating and parking a chocolate hostage.
All three of these are things that have always, do, and will always happen. Accepting that, legalising it, and overseeing it results in fewer deaths, less violence, heath care for prostitutes, extra tax income, and a transparent democracy.
Amongst other benefits.
The misery they cause the people who get caught up in their personal psychodrama is unacceptable. But I think this type of problem is orthogonal to politicians who engage in illegal activities (e.g. being gay hasn't been illegal for a long time), it is more of a loss of perspective.
It doesn't seem particularly bad though, it's not like he had embezzled millions or committed crimes. Or actually... that is what most politicians do or have done, and even once it's known they usually can still keep their career.
Eliot Spitzer was Governor of New York, former AG of New York, famous gadfly of Wall Street, and a top contender before the 2008 election to be Obama's pick for Attorney General, when it was discovered that he was paying prostitutes.
The explanation as to how this information was discovered is as follows: he paid for these "services" using a wire transfer to the madam, who had created an "anonymous" corporation to collect payments, as a convenience to her wealthy and famous clients. According to Wikipedia, "The investigation of Spitzer was reportedly initiated after North Fork Bank reported suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by Patriot Act provisions, enacted to combat terrorist activity such as money-laundering." [1]
Every bank is required by the Patriot Act to file "Suspicious Activity Reports" regarding certain activity to FinCEN, which reports must be kept secret from the person being reported upon. SARs are typically filed electronically, and then centralized in FinCEN review centers, where patterns are analyzed and information is distributed to law enforcement personnel. Spritzer was being monitored because one of the chief criteria used in determining whether a SAR should be filed is whether an individual being monitored is a "Politically Exposed Person" or PEP (that acronym is actually used actively). [2]
In other words, by explicit provision of the Patriot Act and US DoT regulations, all financial activities of politicians must be monitored and reported on in secret by financial institutions.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who frequents call girls. It was Spitzer's own self-destructiveness that created the opportunity for this take down. But you have to ask, if it weren't for his aggressive anti-Wall St. stance, would he have been targeted? Perhaps he wouldn't have been. There are certainly similar transgressions committed by less "problematic" politicians that never leak. For instance, even after the whole Spitzer hullabaloo, we don't know who any of this madam's other clients were, even though it was reported that some were famous politicos.
What's most significant here, though, is that we don't need to speculate about how this power can work to the advantage of certain interest groups.
In this case, broad-spectrum surveillance may have resulted in Eric Holder becoming AG at the height of the financial crisis, instead of the one man perhaps most qualified by experience and temperament to prosecute financial crimes, Eliot Spitzer.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scan...
[2] http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-Cons...