Black Boxes in cars...The American Surveillance State.

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-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Maybe not me and maybe not now, but this data is highly abusable for someone within the government, like in the scenario I mentioned to Kraichgauer, and certainly by smaller, local government where the possibility of selective enforcement due to personal grudges and such is much higher. Surely you've heard stories of people who are critical of government or it's officials suddenly getting audited, of critics of the police receiving an unusual number of parking tickets, and other such things? How about the threats made against Chick-fil-A after some politicians disagreed with their political stance? Government is people, and people are cruel, unethical, and vindictive, and I'd prefer to have as little of my personal information, while still living in this society, at the fingertips of people who can use it against me. I just don't think the benefits outweigh the risks, and further, I DO believe in a right to go about one's business in public without being tracked and surveilled absent probably and specific cause, I think such a right is intrinsically valuable.



That you don't have a problem says more about you than it does about me. I think in some ways your government service and background has influenced the way you view governments generally; you were competent and had the best interests of the citizens at heart, as did your colleagues and co-workers, so it's natural to have a similarly charitable view of other government employees elsewhere. I'm a criminal law junkie, I see the worst aspects of government and it's employees on a regular enough basis to not trust any of them with power over me, even if I think the majority are more like you than like the scum I follow. You're a lawyer, does the term "civil asset forfeiture" mean anything to you? How about "forfeiture corridor"? If they don't, Google them, read a few pages, and tell me you'd have any trust in US law enforcement and it's legal system. If that doesn't work, we can talk eminent domain, dig into some of the resistance the Innocence Project has encountered, maybe some confidential informant stuff...



I am proposing something as serious as a Constitutional Amendment here, so you can be damned sure that repairing the damage that SCOTUS has done to the 4th Amendment would be high on the list of things that I'd build into said Amendment. Right at the top of the accompanying legislation would be criminal penalties and forfeiture of any qualified or professional immunity to privacy violators, which should solve a lot of the problems right there.
(as an aside, this is one place where being a libertarian in the US sucks; a conservative court will screw you on the 4th Amendment, while a liberal one will gut the 2nd.)



A lot has changed since 9/11 and the Patriot act, and further, who's to say when they make other than "direct" use of information gleaned from electronic surveillance? I could go the full paranoid route and point out that the current regime is happy to assassinate citizens without due process at all, but I don't think we've gotten quite that far domestically yet. Suffice it to say that I'd be far happier with a state that "can't" do something as opposed to a state that "isn't supposed to", though it would take a lot more than what I'm proposing to get there.



But it's much easier to sell the public on a simple "Right to Privacy", it sounds more grand and is the kind of thing that's easy for people to get behind and harder for people to oppose. I'm a pragmatic, remember, so I have no problem using a rhetorical trick that I know to be effective, even if I normally don't like what it's used for (laws named after dead children, almost always terrible).



It's the difference between following me and tagging me with a GPS tracker, a distinction I'd think even someone as legalistic as you would have to acknowledge. Especially troubling to me is the storage aspect and the way in which these technologies are deployed in such broad ways; I'd have far less of a problem with facial recognition, for example, if it was used to scan for people on a hotlist or who had warrants out and discarded the rest, rather than logging everyone and storing all of that data permanently. As I said, I view the ability to NOT have someone know where I am whenever I'm outside my house as an intrinsically valuable one eligible for elevation to Right status, no matter what the alleged value of tracking may be.



Again, says more about you than about me.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense ... vered.html

This seemed relevant.

Government is also subject to the Rule of Law. In our countries, government is subject to vastly more scrutiny in its practices and in its decision making that any other institution. You don't seem to be considering the fact that we do hear these stories. Now that does not mean that government should be free to keep information of whatever and any kind indefinitely; it does not mean that government should be allowed to use information for a purpose other than the reason for which it was collected; it does not mean that one deparment of government should be able to see information held by another. But all of these restrictions can be readily created in statute and enforced by the courts.



No doubt it does colour my perspective. But I refuse to believe that the integrity or competence of the public service in the United States is that much less robust than the public service of Canada. Our own police services and prosecution services have demonstrated their shortcomings on many occasions. But as often as not, those demonstrations have either taken place directly before the courts, or have served to bring abuses back in front of the courts.

As far as forfeiture is concerned, I agree that many practices are abusive. But if bad or corrupt officials are going to run roughshod over the fourth amendment, what makes you believe that they would be any more respectful of an amendment concerning a right to privacy? If your concern is about the competence and quality of your public servants, then take steps to improve those things. Since government must exist--on some scale--it is a fool's game to pretend that smaller government is the answer to incompetence and corruption. If incompetence and corruption exist in government, the size of government will not protect you from them.

Oh, hugely picky point: the verb is "to survey," not, "to surveille." You are being surveyed by CCTVs, not surveilled.[/rant]



Precisel how many volumes do you suspect that this will fill? You haven't even defined what will be protected by such a right, and now you're talking about criminal penalties for people who violate those undefined protections? If you're a criminal law junkie, then you know full well that vagueness or ambiguity in statute is a recipe for disaster when it comes to prosecution. And if you think government is ineffecient today, can you conceive of the kind of gridlock that would occur when every public servant undertakes a privacy audit of every action, every day?

I work with the private information of a wide range of my department's clients every day. And I handle that information in compliance with the Privacy Act without the need for vague, constitutionally mandated criminal penalties hanging over my head. If you're going to walk down this dangerous path, all you are going to do is ensure that no one with two clues to rub together is ever going to go into the public service, and you will wind up in a death spiral of incopetence and corruption.



I think you're dreaming in technicolor (tm) if you suppose that you can ever get to a point where government "can't" do what it wants. The entire principle of the Rule of Law is predicated on the idea that there must be a framework to prevent government from doing what it is capable of, but oughtn't.



If you're pragmatic, then why are you proposing something impractical? Your descending to the level of the Lumpenproletariat when you should, I suggest, be trying to create a legislative scheme that would actually work.



I see no weight in the distinction. Having voluntarily entered the public sphere, I still don't see a privacy interest that merits protection.

The problem, as I see it, is that if being anonymous is a right to be protected, then certainly the CCTVs and the trackers are problematic. But so, too, is the person in the street. If I have a right to be anonymous, then no one has the freedom to look at me, notice my presence or interact with me in public. Nor I with them. How do you reconcile your right to anonymity with someone else freedom to say, "Hi?"

You can always retreat to private space--and in that private space, you can be as anonymous as you like. But I fundamentally disagree with the principle that you can carry the aspect of private space with you in a public field. I think it runs completely contrary to the nature of human societies.



Well, I was raised and trained in an environment in which the highest principle is, "peace, order and good government."

dream on.

ruveyn

@Visagrunt

I'm at a stage of quote pyramid fatigue, so I'm just going to write a general response.
If I'm coming across as vague, it's not because I don't have very specific ideas in this area, it's because I'm not a legislator (or a litigator for that matter), and writing as if I were crafting an actual law would be both tedious and pointless at this stage and on this venue. Now if this was a law forum or an advocacy group and I was putting forward and actual proposal for action and not just speculating on what I'd like to see, I'd be more interested in drilling down to details and spelling everything out in a way that is clear, concise and specific, but I just don't see the need in this stage of discussion, I'm merely putting my opinions forth for discussion.

I'm mentioning penalties before specifics for a particular reason, that I've seen privacy rights get trampled again and again due to insufficient "motivation" to respect them on the part of law enforcement, so though I on principle dislike things like mandatory minimums, I'm making an exception in this case because I think instilling respect for privacy in law enforcement is the more important principle.

As to this possibly hindering the actions of the state on criminal matters; good. We're far too efficient here at putting our citizens in jail, I WANT it to be a messy, expensive and tedious process, so that the police and prosecutors are forced to look for alternative solutions. I have a similar complaint about private prisons, as I'm normally keen on privatization due to efficiency, but in this area I think efficiency is a bug, not a feature. I also have a moral issue with locking people up for profit, especially when that evolves into lobbying for more ornerous laws and/or bribing judges for harsher sentences all to pad your profits, both situations having already happened. I could also get into reforming the plea bargain system while I'm on the subject of the justice system, but that would take us far afield indeed.

To answer why I think this would work when the 4th Amendment has been so thoroughly perforated, I guess you could say I see it as the first stage of treating a wound. This would be like the splint and dressing, stabilizing the injury and stopping the bleeding, while greater structural changes would be needed in order to solve the systemic problems. I'd certainly use the penalties to ruthlessly weed out as many individual bad actors as possible up front, which would be another step in addressing the greater issue both in the case of the people removed no longer poisoning the system directly, and the strong message being sent to those who remain.

Smaller government wise, I would most certainly dismantle DHS, starting with the outright elimination of the TSA, an agency with literally nothing to show for it's 10+ years of existence and numerous violations of citizens privacy. Personally, I'd still eliminate the agencies even if I knew for a fact that it would guarantee another 9/11 every 10 years, as that is just where I stand on trading liberty for security.

Also, I'm not demanding a right to be anonymous in public, I'm demanding a right to not have my movements tracked by automated surveillance when I've done nothing wrong. Again, there is a difference there that I think you're failing to acknowledge.

Now you'll have to excuse me for a bit, as you can imagine my posting has gotten a bit *focused* since Thursday, and I've got a lot of irons in a lot of fires at the moment...

I don't have to dream it. I live it every single day that I go to work.