this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Yes. I assumed you were assuming some of us would hold some of the usual centrist justifications for NSA, e.g. there are some serious meanies out there who might want to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor the US again, but risks of this could be drastically reduced by not engaging in military adventurism for sake our our industrialist plutocrats. Essentially, if the US stopped being an outrageous and brutal dick to the rest of the international community, then the numbers who would attack our civilians would be drastically reduced to fringe militant ideologues.
So yes, there are no valid justifications for NSA. It exists because the state and the legal departments of the state regard the US public as an enemy.
I'm certain they've caught bad guys ii would have wanted caught and stopped shit I would have wanted stopped. E.g. I'm certain they've stopped human trafficking.
But the world isn't black and white. They don't need to set us up to be a total f****** police state to do some good in the world
Yes, there's a balance that has to be struck between protection and liberty. Years ago I speculated what could happen if everyone was chipped into a system that monitored their vitals, with the resulting data we could track morbid outcomes (say heart attacks) to their core roots and then track people who are currently experiencing early warning signs and show the TRUE POWER OF PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE
The problem is, of course, so much data can be used for purposes against the interests of the public, and will once there are technicians privy to all that information. This was the original business model of Google: no-one looks at the data except its owner (e.g. I get to look at my own contacts lists) and Google profits from analysis of multiple data points. Only the police got the power of courts to look at the data, to the point where they wanted everyone who happened to websearch a given name, or whose phones were in a radius of a crime scene at a certain time.
You don't want to be a non-white or a known protestor who had business near a crime scene in the US.
So yeah, until we're able to lock up data so no-one but their intended audience has the capacity to read it, even when a court writes a warrant, we can't trust such all-encompassing systems, especially if the state is at risk of turning into an ideology-driven regime. (England, for instance, still has hard feelings between Catholics and Anglicans, and the Irish / UK border is a bit tense these days.)
And unfortunately with the state of data protection, You can never be assured that that won't land in someone else's hands eventually.