history
Freedom or Safety?
by kurtis
Tue 24 Dec 2002 15:36:13
Well I read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/23/technology/23PEEK.html?ex=1041397200&en=dea9a8d5d5487b99&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE ">this</a> on slashdot and it got me thinking so now I'm curious what the folk of thraxil think of the concept? The way I see it ... you have a long slippery slope between freedom and safety. Absolute safety allows for no freedom ... thought police and such. Absolute freedom allows for no safety ... true anarchy. Before 911 civil liberties were doing really well but these days it seems that people are willing to give up freedoms in order to be (or feel) safe.
So which is it? I imagine people in manhattan probably have a significantly different point of view on this than crazy anarchist types like myself ... but it seems the government is only going to use our national tragedies to further its own grip on our personal freedoms ... which is a tragedy in itself. I believe that if the founders of this country (who were the anarchists of their time) knew just how much control our government had over us or could even conceive of how much privacy we have given up ... they would be disgusted.
However people ARE terrified and I do admit terror can inhibit freedom as much as government control can ... so I find myself unsure of how to stand on this. My instincts tell me that freedom is more important than safety ... that I'd rather be dead than be a slave. Anyone?
comments
kurtis - Tue 24 Dec 2002 15:37:13
OR ... fuck me freedom OR safety. grr ... anders we need to be able to edit previous posts. Mother fuck fuck. GRRRRR. Gotta go break shit now.emile - Tue 24 Dec 2002 15:38:13
click on the title, then at the bottom of your post is an "edit this node" link.lani - Tue 24 Dec 2002 15:39:13
what really irks me is that i think that terrorist activity can be avoided or damage minimized without TIA. ok, so maybe the federal agencies do need to be able to share information, but do they really need to be able to monitor such a large population in order to do it. would TIA have predicted the sniper attacks? and what are they going to do with false negatives?anders pearson - Tue 24 Dec 2002 15:40:13
we had enough information to have prevented the sept 11th attacks. it was just buried in the noise of all the other information we'd collected. so what is our plan? create even more noise. brilliant. Bruce Schneier likes to point out that the main limiting factor in most of these plans for gathering tons of info in the hopes of catching terrorists is the rate of false positives. eg, if you have facial recognition software in all the airports that is 99% accurate (that's better than most real software does), and you have a large airport that 10,000 people come through every day, that means that you get about 100 hits a day. that means that the security people at the airport have to pull aside 100 people a day and do a more thorough check on their id and records. since actual terrorists account for way, way less than 1% of the population, the overwhelming majority of the people that are searched turn out to be false positives. that's a pretty extreme case of crying wolf. you can imagine that after a week or two of searching 100 people a day without actually finding any terrorists, most security people would just start assuming anyone it flags is because of a software error, not because they're a terrorist. if it were just that the TIA stuff is going to be <em>totally ineffective</em>, i wouldn't worry much about it; the government wastes tons of money on ineffective things all the time, that seems to be what government excels at. but having all that information collected and sitting in a big database opens things up for abuse by corrupt officials in a big way. it may not catch terrorists, but if you want to single out a certain person (perhaps a political enemy) and dig up dirt on them, it could prove to be very useful.