Posted on 07/03/2013 4:34:42 AM PDT by Kaslin
Many libertarians, outraged by how our government spies on us, call me a "traitor" because I'm not very angry. I understand that the National Security Administration tracking patterns in our emails and phone calls could put us on a terrible, privacy-crushing slippery slope.
But we're not there yet.
Some perspective:
We are less closely watched by government than citizens of other countries. There are about 3,000 government security cameras around New York City, but London has 500,000.
Some people in London love that, believing that the extra surveillance deters crime and catches terrorists. I thought government cameras helped identify the Boston Marathon bombers, but Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told me that those cameras provide an illusion of security at a nasty price.
"These cameras reveal very private information -- where you go, who you go there with," she said. "They can record you going into the sex therapist's office, the gay bar, the abortion clinic, any number of places that you would probably not want other people to know that you're going. "
She says that loss of privacy doesn't even make us safer.
"It isn't necessarily how we found the Boston Marathon bomber. There were a lot of things going on there ... eyewitnesses identifications, cameras that were not government-owned (often cellphones) and eventually the fingerprints of the older brother ... if the cameras were really successful, there would be no crime in London."
But "no crime" is too much to demand. I'm convinced that widespread use of cameras is one reason crime is down in America. Some criminals are caught, and others deterred.
It does make a difference if cameras are controlled by a city government or a private department store. No store can lock me up. But I hate to get bogged down in the surveillance debate when there are so many other ways that government clearly threatens our freedom and our finances, while accomplishing nothing.
Thinking about the NSA revelation, I also thought about other things my government does that I really hate. Within a few hours, I had a list of 100 -- it was surprisingly easy. I encourage you to start a list of your own. Here are just a few example of horrible, destructive government:
-- Government (federal and local) now employs 22 million Americans. That's outrageous.
-- Government runs up a $17 trillion deficit and yet continues to throw our money at things like $100 million presidential trips, million-dollar bus stops and pork projects, as well as thousands of programs that don't work.
-- It funds a drug war that causes crime and imprisons millions, disproportionately minorities. That's horrible.
-- It spends your money on corporate welfare. And farm subsidies. And flood insurance that helps higher-income people like me build homes in risky spots.
-- Government keeps American Indians poor by smothering them with socialist central planning. It does this despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the obvious failure of socialism everywhere. That's evil.
-- So are "too big to fail" bank bailouts. And other bailouts.
-- I'm furious that there are now 175,000 pages of federal law. No one understands all the laws, but they keep passing more. How dare they!
NSA spying seems less horrible than these other abuses, especially if data mining might prevent terrorism.
I suspect people are outraged by the NSA in part because new threats seem scarier than old, familiar ones. That's a trick government itself exploits all the time: Each new drug, each new health threat, each new dictator is made to sound like the most horrible thing ever.
We should be wary of treating the new danger as if it's the biggest danger.
I don't suggest that we should be passive about data mining and surveillance. But we should not let the latest threat make us passive about the old ones, some of them much more clearly wrong.
What we already know about government is even scarier than what they know about us.
I don’t think this author gets it.
They speak of all the laws that nobody understands. -That leaves them up to GOVERNMENTAL interpretation.
Trust me, ALL of us are ‘guilty’ of some infraction or another -that they can find in all these nonsense laws.
So when you sqwawk about our government and they don’t like it, they have every bit of info on YOU. They’ll find SOMETHING on you. Just ask the filmmaker who got blamed for Benghazi.
This spying amounts to: WHEN they need to silence you, they will have EVERYTHING in your life from which to pick something by which to do so.
Soon, we will not even be able to gripe about it like we do here on the FR. Wait and see.
He doesn’t get it. He’s a sex-and-drugs libertarian, not a free speech and freedom from surveillance libertarian.
The problem is they are not looking for terrorists, but rather tea party.
To a point, I respect Stossel for his free market views and for having broken himself of leftist thought, which can’t have been easy in his circles.
But when you’re mentioning worse stuff the government does, you might want to mention protecting the killing of babies and other “inconvenient” people.
Because all the rest is just material.
Love ya John, but you’re wrong here.
Like drugs the interaction between thousands of laws can be devastating. If the government wants to make your life miserable and bankrupt you in the process as demonstrated by the IRS scandal, the government has unlimited resources to persecute(as distinguished from prosecute) you. The government has far too many powers as it is and we should be cutting back those powers rather than expanding them.
He’s probably more of a “I don’t want to piss off my big-government worshipping employers at foxnews and lose my show like judge Napolitano did” libertarian.
I thought surveillance cameras were installed to create more criminals and revenue.../s
Non sequitur. Completely ignores the fact that this is the USA and our FedGov was given no power to run a surveillance based police State.
Which is a libertine, not a libertarian. Yes, you are free to be as hedonistic as you want to be. You are NOT free from suffering the consequences of making such horrible life choices.
With freedom, comes PERSONAL responsibility.
That has never slowed him down before... This is a serious departure for Stossel.
I don’t know if he’s actually libertine in his personal life, or if it’s just philosophical. I’ve been reading his books and articles for years, and he mixes very sensible commentary about the damage of overregulation, for example, with mindless promotion - “What consequences?” - of drugs and promiscuity.
Nah. He just knows where the end of his leash is. He’s just bright enough to do the math in his head so he doesn’t get his chain jerked hard to get him back in line like some of the the big guys in talk radio and cable “news” have in the past.
For instance.....Some perspective...We are less closely watched by government than citizens of other countries.
No need for any perspective here. Regardless of whether it's 3000 cameras, or 500000 cameras, or 1 camera, all are equally damming, and all should be done away with. The Stossel of 10-ish years ago would have made this point, I think.
Lame. Our tyrant is not as bad as their tyrant. (I feel better already)
It was a private security camera that captured the images of the Boston Massacre. Private companies can do what they want.
Stoessel is correct that this government already is abusive. Just the national details t proves that. He’s downplaying a terrible abuse of power with the NSA crime. They collect data and sift through it to target political enemies, that is, anyone who makes them the least uncomfortable.
Same old BS. Our government isn't putting us in gulags like some many others (yet), ipso facto we are much better off and should complain about other, more important things than having all aspects of our lives spied upon. Which will eventually lead to the gulags. Example: a 19 year old teen jailed without trial, apparently indefinitely, for tasteless online remarks.
It seems like he’s trying to say that if a situation or a government action, is not “the worst,” it’s not bad.
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