My go to is something along the lines of:

You disapprove of mandatory cavity searches before air travel or entering a school? Sounds you are a drug dealer.

I don't think you understand why people approve of what the NSA is doing, which is why that's usually going to be an ineffective argument. The NSA promises a safer country, and all we have to is let them do a little bit of surveillance behind the scenes. We won't even notice -- it's not intrusive in the same way that a cavity search is. An NSA supporter once asked me if I would have given up the metadata on my phone if it would have prevented 9/11 and saved ~3000 lives. I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed on HN repeatedly, but I think it's still a fair question.

The real issue here is the power imbalance combined with the lack of oversight and accountability. When I talk to NSA supporters, that's what I try to emphasize.

> An NSA supporter once asked me if I would have given up the metadata on my phone if it would have prevented 9/11 and saved ~3000 lives. I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed on HN repeatedly, but I think it's still a fair question.

Did someone seriously say that to you? Did you rebut with "would you give $1 to end poverty globally?"

The real issue is close to this. The real issue is that when the organization is empowered it's up to an individual to say "no" to improper surveillance. That's what's wrong with the "well there are good people behind it and we are all on the same team" argument. When it becomes your job to prevent an attack, and you have the authority to spy more than you think is morally correct, do you spy anyway? Or are you willing to let 3000 people die, and face the music of the world knowing that you could have prevented it but chose not to for altruistic reasons.

That's why the laws must change: to protect the people who want to do the right thing.

To play devil's advocate, if everyone in the U.S. gave $1 to a fund to help the world's poor, that'd be $314 million in aid. Nothing to scoff at, even though it wouldn't end global poverty.

But in any case, I'm not sure if your example is analogous, because $1 from a person is incrementally helpful, whereas having that person's phone data is almost certainly not. This brings me back to the grandparent poster's anecdote -- I don't think that the NSA would have been able to stop 9/11 just by sorting through everyone's texting and phone calls. It just seems infeasible to really deal with all of that information unless the attackers were very obvious through their conversations -- correct me if I'm wrong.

This argument is not a fair question. It is a straw man. The debate has never been about the validity of seizing the metadata on one phone with reasonable suspicion. It is about warrantless wholesale surveillance of hundreds of millions of innocent people, who are being forced to give up essential freedoms on the remote, off-hand chance that, if the stars align a certain way, "the authorities" may stop a hypothetical criminal act. It is about a trade-off where the costs to everyone are exceedingly high and the benefits to anyone are exceedingly low.

> if the stars align a certain way, "the authorities" may stop a hypothetical criminal act.

But that's not the way it is perceived in the general populace. All the relevant authorities - police, government, NSA/CIA/TSA/... - tell you that this surveillance is important and continues to save lives. And they should know, right?, because they have the classified facts.

This narrative is also supported by our modern crime shows like NCIS where dangerous and resourceful terrorists threaten to kill thousands of people every few weeks and the heroes are kept from doing their work by petty bureaucratic restrictions like search warrants. Oh, and of course they save the world in the end, because they are awesome. In the back of their heads viewers know this is hyperbole. But it nonetheless changes the images that come to mind when people think about fighting terrorism.

We need to remind ourselves of the other side of the discussion at every step, because it doesn't help if we live in our little bubble of consent and do not hone our arguments against the views of those that we need to convince.

They had more than they needed to know to prevent 9/11. They didn't connect the dots. How would one more dot have helped?

but the dots they had came from somewhere, right? And those were collected by some release of privacy.

The inverted argument is that, if a known criminal gets sent a letter through the mail, should the government be allowed to open it? Or is privacy that absolute?

The fact that both extremes (this and the postcard argument) seem a bit silly show that there's some sacrifice in privacy to be made.

It's a hypothetical

I've found that this doesn't work quite as well because modesty (the desire not to be seen 'naked') tangles up with privacy and creates a "that's different..." that seems difficult to quickly dismiss.

I think the postcards example hurts his argument.

People send postcards all the time precisely because for the most part they don't care about privacy in their mail. In my personal life I can't think of a single example where I sent mail that I wanted to keep private (outside of maybe mail that had my SS#). I think most people are rather indifferent.

"If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut" The main function of the envelope is to tied a bunch of papers together so they don't get separated in the mail.

So it would be OK if your bank statements came rubberbanded together (or in transparent plastic "patriot envelopes") with your balances showing (for your convenience)? How about credit card statements showing what you owe? The results of that HIV test maybe?

No no no, if you argue like this you have already chosen the wrong battleground for this debate. Your Email and meta data is not open to everyone but only to a (")trusted(") third party: to law enforcement. People (rightly) assume that the stuff that most of the people want to keep private from their peers (conflicts with their spouse, sexual orientation and kinks, financial status, health issues) isn't of interesting to the NSA data analyzer.

The real problems arise if data is put together and interpreted against your will and probably without your knowledge. Imagine an ad network that combines your location profile, your Payback data and name/address and sells that to an insurance company which decides to not have you as a customer, because your are probably overweight (drives by car, no visits to any places associated with sport, buys a lot of food). Or imagine an automated alarm that is triggered when you try to enter the country, because you travel with three coworkers from Iraq and you have written an email to your friend telling him you intend to "devastate the USA" (meaning to beat the American branch of your company in a friendly soccer game after work). You cannot rectify these misunderstandings as nobody is telling you why you now always get the special attention of the TSA or why your insurance application is denied.

This is the stuff I really dread in the current focus on big data.

A great article on the same topic: https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/12...

> People (rightly) assume that the stuff that most of the people want to keep private from their peers (conflicts with their spouse, sexual orientation and kinks, financial status, health issues) isn't of interesting to the NSA data analyzer.

Are you so sure about this?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_...

That doesn't bother me at all. Other than your medical information, I'm pretty sure the government already knows all that information. And I'm not really sure how them knowing my HIV status leave me at a disadvantage.

Well they are currently fixing that part about not knowing your medical information. People are far too willing to give up their privacy if they can save a buck

The ability to read words and figures plainly exposed isn't restricted to the government.

It might if they ever decide that HIV positive folks are too expensive to keep treating.

This is the case with every insurer (unless one operated blind and didn't know what it was cutting checks for?) but government at least answers to anti-discrimination standards. If this became normal practice among insurers, then you'd be entirely screwed.

except that's not in the realm of reality for the US...

I think there's a misunderstanding. The author doesn't mean actual postcards – like holiday greetings and the like – those are actually sent in the public and nobody cares. The author means sending letters without envelopes.

How about asking people how they would feel if curtains were made illegal?