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Post by Fidite Nemini on Nov 17, 2015 11:58:51 GMT -6
I personally don't see the big deal with widespread surveillance. In a country with civil liberties that involve not being able to arrested without cause or convicted without presenting evidence, what does it hurt to have the government monitor my texts? I could give two shits that Big Brother knows when I'm taking a shit. Granted, encryption is still a serious concern (especially as we approach the possibility of quantum encryption), but every tool that can be used to better understand what kind of threat people pose is valid, in my book. Civil encryption means nothing in the face of defending against threats. Anyone who wants to can encrypt his communication and people have been doing that for several decades. So what if your average harmless citizen can now secretly send his shopping list to their spouse? The guy who's sending the instructions on how to assemble a bomb is going to encrypt it anyway. There are tons of easily available options that are incredibly hard to detect unless you specifically know what to look for. There is absolutely nothing gained from pushing an anti-encryption agenda. Another obvious argument is agency being undermanned/overtaxed by the sheer volume of information. If you start monitoring everything, how do you propose to find the couple suspect clues? It's literally trying to find a needle in a hay stack. And it's not like you can just use a plain auto-filter, because messages are not conveniently tagged as terrorist mail by their senders. I mean, they even missed or plain ignored very specific warnings about the recent attacks from other goverments, which was most definately tagged as critical information. Also, costs. All that information? That has to be stored somewhere until it has been processed and then saved for a mandatory amount of time so if anything does occurs with relevance to it, the agency can come back to review it. All those storage devices have to be bought, maintained and staffed accordingly. The only threats they could possibly find by surveilling unencrypted civil communications are wannabe-terrorist idiots who blurt on how cool their shiny new car bomb is and how he's totes gonna blow up dat president, lol ... and if that kind of people pose a credible threat, then maybe people should stop pouring funding into a money furnace and start training police and such to some respectable standard where they'd be able to handle those people, meaning you have more pressing matters than browsing through Mrs. XY's christmas list just in case she wished for some weaponized uranium ... |
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