James Halperin’s The Truth Machine long ago converted me to the idea that the best way to deal with this is to abandon privacy and the right to privacy as a societal ideal, and hope that our ability to thwart terrorists races their increase in power. Even an opt-in total surveillance system would help a lot by reducing the number of suspects.
I should probably make the case against privacy in a top-level post at some point, but pretty much everything I’ll say will be taken from that book. For example, I bet Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are currently cursing the fact that they don’t have a government-timestamped video of themselves at the time of Meredith Kercher’s murder.
On the other hand, the recent policies of the American Transportation Safety Administration demonstrate how easy it is to implement policies that infringe on privacy without getting any corresponding reduction in risk.
James Halperin’s The Truth Machine long ago converted me to the idea that the best way to deal with this is to abandon privacy and the right to privacy as a societal ideal, and hope that our ability to thwart terrorists races their increase in power. Even an opt-in total surveillance system would help a lot by reducing the number of suspects.
I should probably make the case against privacy in a top-level post at some point, but pretty much everything I’ll say will be taken from that book. For example, I bet Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are currently cursing the fact that they don’t have a government-timestamped video of themselves at the time of Meredith Kercher’s murder.
On the other hand, the recent policies of the American Transportation Safety Administration demonstrate how easy it is to implement policies that infringe on privacy without getting any corresponding reduction in risk.