>Sometimes I get a whiff of nostalgia from posts like this. As if everything was great back in the good old days, where the police weren't able to hassle you, when laws were fair and simple.
People keep repeating this reasoning. I can't understand why.
"Everything" doesn't have to have been "better in the old days", and nobody, except strawmen, argue that.
But SOME aspects of the old days, e.g pertaining to LESS fucking SURVEILLANCE, were. That's enough to be angry about and want to reverse course on that particular front.
>Of course that was only if you were a white anglo cis straight christian.
Which is totally beside the point.
Did somebody argue here that slavery was good? No, people just argue that modern surveillance (and legal-code-overload) is bad.
Not to mention that surveillance today is bad for everyone: "white anglo cis straight christians", homosexuals, blacks, and what have you.
> But SOME aspects of the old days, e.g pertaining to LESS fucking SURVEILLANCE, were. That's enough to be angry about and want to reverse course on that particular front.
> Did somebody argue here that slavery was good? No, people just argue that modern surveillance (and legal-code-overload) is bad.
Which is true but a little myopic. Until the Warren court decided that wiretapping required a warrant, law enforcement could surveil your communications at any time for any reason. For the individual the legal situation is much better now, in spite of the obvious erosions of protection and regressions, than they were "back in the day."
>Which is true but a little myopic. Until the Warren court decided that wiretapping required a warrant, law enforcement could surveil your communications at any time for any reason.
Only they couldn't do 1/100 of what they can now. Even wiretapping a single person required a few days work, people listening, unwieldy tape machines to record and replay it, etc. No AVR with stop words, not automatic routing, no DSP etc.
Not to mention that people didn't share 1/100 of what they do now over then snail mail and telephone.
Pragmatically, logistically, and by the norms of the era, only few people were eavesdropped on. Communists, politicians, industrialists, journalists, etc. Now it's everybody.
>For the individual the legal situation is much better now, in spite of the obvious erosions of protection and regressions, than they were "back in the day."
How is it better? The individual can be crashed now under the Patriot Act, various child porn laws, and whatever they can come up with. That a few laws also pay lip service to individual privacy I wouldn't count much on.
> Only they couldn't do 1/100 of what they can now.
Again, true but rather beside the point. I want the limits on intrusive government power to be constitutional, not technological.
> How is it better?
There's a lot that can be said about this, but short answer: a lot of the things they're doing are (thanks to the Warren court era's findings regarding civil liberties which I mentioned) actually unconstitutional under the law. There's a reason why they keep these programs so secret and it's not that they don't want "the terrorists" to know that we can listen to their phone conversations. It's because they know they are, to be generous, pushing the envelope of what is legal.
I see a lot of hopelessness regarding these topics right now but there shouldn't be. If people keep shining light on these secret programs, there will be reform.
There was lots of government surveillance and invasion of privacy of (say) gay men back in the "good old days". Maybe it's just because the white anglo christians are affected by government surveillance and intrusion that's new?
My point isn't "this old thing was bad", my point was "this thing has been happening to lots of people before, now it's happening to everyone".
>There was lots of government surveillance and invasion of privacy of (say) gay men back in the "good old days". Maybe it's just because the white anglo christians are affected by government surveillance and intrusion that's new?
My point isn't "this old thing was bad", my point was "this thing has been happening to lots of people before, now it's happening to everyone".*
For one, if it happened to "lots" (in reality: far fewer) and now is happening to "everyone", this extension of reach automatically makes it far worse.
Second, even considering a single target person, the breadth of this, the automation, the easiness, and the retrieval and cross-search capabilities, make it several orders of magnitude worse than what was happening to people before.
Compared to the breadth, scope and capabilities of modern surveillance, J.E. Hoover was a total amateur.
Also "government surveillance" of "gay men"? When? For who? A few prominent figures people wanted to blackmail?
Also "government surveillance" of "gay men"? When? For who? A few prominent figures people wanted to blackmail?
Police, based on where they socialized. The modern gay rights movement started in the USA with the Stonewall riots, when LGBT people fought back & rioted after yet another police raid of where gay & trans people congreated.
People keep repeating this reasoning. I can't understand why.
"Everything" doesn't have to have been "better in the old days", and nobody, except strawmen, argue that.
But SOME aspects of the old days, e.g pertaining to LESS fucking SURVEILLANCE, were. That's enough to be angry about and want to reverse course on that particular front.
>Of course that was only if you were a white anglo cis straight christian.
Which is totally beside the point.
Did somebody argue here that slavery was good? No, people just argue that modern surveillance (and legal-code-overload) is bad.
Not to mention that surveillance today is bad for everyone: "white anglo cis straight christians", homosexuals, blacks, and what have you.
We should not mix up orthogonal issues.