Comment by AnthonyMouse
1 year ago
> That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument.
The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? If you had perfect enforcement then it would obviously be the latter, because you'd arrest the murderers without harassing people who buy guns for hunting or self defense etc.
But law enforcement isn't perfect, so there is going to be some spillover where some murderers wouldn't have been caught. Then you have to get into debatable questions like, if it was illegal for them to buy a gun, would they have just bought a gun illegally, or used some other kind of weapon? If there are a lot of murders happening, how many of them could be prevented by using more resources to catch them or e.g. legalizing drugs to reduce gang activity, without banning guns? The pro-gun argument is that the positives outweigh the negatives and/or we're better off doing the other things to prevent murders instead.
You can ask similar questions about Palantir and mass surveillance, but that doesn't mean you have to come to the same conclusion, because it has different positives and negatives and ability to be mitigated if you do it.
In particular, preventing abuses by governments is much harder because you'd be relying on the government to prosecute itself, which is notoriously ineffective, especially with programs that are insulated from public accountability through secrecy. Meanwhile the negatives are much more dangerous because of the speed, scale and severity at which an already-existent mass surveillance system can be converted into a tool of mass oppression when there is a change in administrations. And the positives are muted because the legitimate goals of mass surveillance can also be achieved -- often at lower expense, given how much it costs to sift through a firehose of >99% false positives and innocent behavior -- using traditional targeted investigative methods.
I think I agree with your message, even if I don't, I appreciate you addressing the topic. But what it made me realize is this: there is no Palantir that civilians can purchase that will "aggregate data" of the police that the public can meddle through. That is the core difference, and explains why I feel the way I do. Thank you.
> The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)?
I disagree with your framing. The bill of rights specifically guarantees both the right to bear arms and the right to not be unreasonably searched.
That's because the bill of rights enumerates some of the rights people have against the government rather than the other way around. But that doesn't really get you out of it
Suppose you have a private mass surveillance system, where people "voluntarily" (i.e. because the market is consolidated and every company is doing it) give up their data to a private company that keeps a big database. Then the company "voluntarily" informs on citizens to the government (because the company wants to be on the government's good side), or imposes penalties for crimethink all on its own. Is that okay then? Should we be satisfied with it because it's not the government? Nope. Still a big problem.
The reason isn't that it's the government, it's that it's a bad trade off.
Suppose you're the "good guys" and trying to catch terrorists. There are 330 million people and 50 terrorists. If you have a mass surveillance system with only a 0.1% false positive rate, the system is totally useless. You have 330,000 false positives and investigating all those dead ends would be a huge waste of resources that would be better spent using traditional investigative methods on traditional leads.
Now suppose you're the bad guys trying to catch resistance fighters, with the same mass surveillance system. 0.1% false positive rate? Okay, round up the 330,000 people and execute them all without trial. Way cheaper than having to sift through them. Very effective system when you don't have to care about that guilt or innocence stuff.
And that's what makes the system so dangerous. It's only useful in proportion to how little you care about innocent people, and the extent to which an entity does is a thing that can change over time, so it's massively dangerous to leave a system like that sitting around without vigorous efforts to dismantle it.