Comment by dhbradshaw

I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain.

And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.

We concurrently see failures on both the "attempts to preserve liberty" and "attempts to preserve security" front, so let's stop arguing about abstract principles.

Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful.

It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.

I would like it a lot better without the mention to the "West", which, as usual, is a code word for: "I want to pretend my point extend outside the USA but I have absolutely no knowledge of how true that is. I don't intend to do any research because that would demand efforts from me so bear with my casual imperialism". Queue the purely American historical lesson following.

> “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

No, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security".

> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile.

Also totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.

>giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security

When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime.

I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus.

All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.

For those unfamiliar it's worth learning about Blackstone's Ratio. Blackstone was extremely influential to the writers of the US constitution.

I think it should come natural to engineers because I see it as similar to failure engineering, but for the legal system. When you engineer a bridge, building, or even a program you build failure modes into them. Not to cause them to fail but to control fails. A simple version is "fail open" vs "fail closed". A bank safe that fails, fails closed. It is locked and you need to drill it open. Same with an encrypted harddrive but no drill... But a locked door in a public building will typically want to fail opened, least you trap people inside during a fire. A more complex example is the root of a conspiracy. When a tall building collapses you tend to want it to fall in on itself so it doesn't take out neighboring skyscrapers...

So Blackstone's Ratio (and Franklin's recounting) is similar. It asks "which mode of failure is better? That innocent man are condemned or that guilty men go free?" This is a question we must all ask ourselves least we back ourselves into a corner. There's no perfect solution. We don't want failure, we should reduce it as much as possible, but if/when it fails, which outcome do you prefer?

I'll link the wiki but the topic is so famous you'll find a million and I'm pretty sure it's taught in every law school in America

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

> It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

While I agree with Henry, and intend for _my_ life and social impact to fall there, "where the U.S. was intended to fall" is a misnomer here. That quote was one man's opinion. The U.S. is millions of living beings who, if they have liberty, should get to do whatever they want with it (which in itself is an oxymoron).

I think part of the problem is a temptation to believe that we can have out cake and eat it too.

If the people on charge of deciding when to use the cameras were morally perfect, we have all the upside and none of the downside.

The problem is we live in a fallen world and that will simply never work.

Nevertheless it is a siren song that causes us to repeatedly make the wrong trade

we could have liberty and privacy and security if the people in charge wanted us to. But they don't and they've convinced enough people that they don't either.

If the police actually did their job, took property crimes seriously and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously, then we really wouldn't have to be setting up our own surveillance to make up for lacking local government services. But here we are, I'm not sure why libertarians think we don't have a right to defend ourselves (using new tech to make up for a lack of policing) when the city won't?

I frankly see it as a liberty to be able to use this tech, and it would be tyranny to prevent us from using it.

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Unfortunately for us all, the assault on liberty even done of the “normies” have started noticing recent, is only the latter stages of this assault on on America that has been going on for arguably 180 years ago.

Many in American history have noted that America is a kind of natural fortress protected by ocean moats. What that assumption just did not take into account is how America’s enemies would take action against America with that assumption taken as granted. It has come in the form of endless amounts of infiltration, subversion, corruption, and pollution… as any half-witted strategist and saboteur would have done. America was simply not sophisticated enough to realize that massive threat, because the leaders relied on that assumption that the USA is an impenetrable fort; never considering what happens if your fort is infiltrated through the many different means you open yourself up to being infiltrated.

America, a genuine America or whatever one can scrape together to consider as such, not just one that emulates and imitates like some kind of container cult, is really not long for this world. Another 20 years and Americas simile stops existing in anything but name only, if that, since there’s not even any reason or incentive anymore to keep the name out the branding at that point.

What do we call this place post America? Maybe we just come right out and just call it Oceania.