Comment by TameAntelope
3 years ago
It's illegal to go through someone else's mail, and that was the hypothetical you proposed.
My argument is not that it's fine as long as the likelihood for abuse is low, my argument is that it's fine as long as there hasn't been any actual abuse. When something does happen, we can respond to it.
Until then, it's not reasonable to go through a bunch of worst-case scenarios.
My hypothetical is that if your mail is in the footage Google turns over to the police sans warrant, they can use it as evidence against you. That’s not “going through someone else’s mail”.
All I’ll say is that I’d prefer to stop the thing that will very clearly harm someone before that actually happens, not pretend we haven’t seen a million times before what happens when you give police more power.
And I'm grateful people like you aren't actually able to implement pre-crime divisions!
It sounds arrogant, to me, to be so sure you know what the outcome will be of a given situation, considering all of the necessary ingredients for that outcome have existed for some time and what you claim is "inevitable" has still not happened.
I think we’ve reached an impasse. I’d just like to point out that advocating that companies not give police access to our private lives except when forced to by a warrant is basically the exact opposite of “pre-crime”.
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