Privacy peeps, what's your opinion on usage of surveillance for national defence, domestic security, etc. ?
I'm just curious, most privacy-minded people I know generally trip up when confronted with stuff like "yeah, but if surveillance was a thing then that blast which killed 20 people yesterday could have been averted."
I've heard quite a few opinions on both sides, what's yours?

I'd especially like to hear from @linuxxx. And @Floydian. And @Condor.

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@Floydian please mention me when you post your blog!

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I'm sure that if all the people are forced to have the entirety of their lives watched 24/7 there will be no more terrorist attacks any more. Sounds good to me.

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@Teabagging4Life But what if you don't want the government to know about certain things?

@Teabagging4Life that's awfully simplistic...

If people don't want to be seen or followed, they can achieve that.

It's like the talks about "responsible encryption", the general masses will be insecure and the terrorists / illegal businesses will have the strongest crypto to protect them.

@filthyranter @FMashiro OP raised the dilemma of whether privacy will enable terrorist attacks. I proposed a fairly simple solution regarding his dilemma, as I sensed he was implying privacy advocates are at a loss of words when it comes to terrorism prevention. My solution would completely eradicate acts of terrorism, and no one would be allowed to deny being monitored. Your talk is nice and all, but I would rather hear what @RememberMe has to comment about my solution.

@Teabagging4Life my point was that regardless of consent, if you don't want to be tracked, you don't get tracked.

@FMashiro According to OP that enables terrorists to plan and carry out attacks. I get your point of course.

Government urveillance needs to be there because without it we'd be entirely fucked as for security.

WHAT?! LINUXXX BEING OKAY WITH SURVEILLANCE?

There are two types of surveillance:
- mass surveillance
- targeted surveillance

Number two is simple: as soon as a reasonable suspicion is raised, you start surveiling the subject. But, you leave anyone else out of it because they're not suspected of anything.

Number one: surveil everyone. In the hope you'll catch something/someone. Even if that means surveiling innocent/not-suspected civilians.

The biggest problem with any kind of surveillance in my opinion is that as long as the data is stored on central systems, it can be obtained/abused by anyone who's authorized to access it or who is able to get unauthorized access.
"okay but I trust my government and the people in power"
But what if the data is retained for 20 years and some psychopathic maniac gets the power in 10 years? Then you'll have all that surveillance data in their hands. And they can use it however they see fit.

In the case of targeted surveillance, you'll have a few hundred people fucked possibly but that's it.

With mass surveillance, that number might turn into millions.

Also a concern would be when powerful surveillance tools get in the hands of not-so-freedom-friendly regimes.

The targeted surveillance has been proved to work so if kept within strict boundried, fair enough.

The mass surveillance part has not even been proven to work. Hell, a high ranking ex-NSA officer came to the UK to urge the government to stop the mass surveillance as it was proven to not improve security at all.

So why do they want to push mass surveillance so badly? Social control. I can't explain this one easily but I can point to a documentary which explains it perfectly.

@linuxxx documentary please

Corporate surveillance. The big problem here is that its hardly regulated. The good part of the new privacy laws are that mass collection of data without needing consent or notifying the users is not allowed anymore (legally, you still have to be caught in the first place).

The biggest problem of the collected data is that once collected, the companies are the ones which can decide how the data is used/interpreted.

"but I have nothing to hide"

The best example imo is the Facebook case in the uk. The idea was that car insurance companies could get a profile from Facebook to decide the price for a customer. Facebook would look at how firm users where in conversations/posts etc and the more firm someone was in their written language, the more likely they'd see that user to be a faster/more reckless driver and thus a higher insurance risk.

Who knows what data could get you into trouble which you though was completely harmless?

Where corporate surveillance meets the government.

Take the prism program for example, it, according to internal nsa slides, gets a direct flow of data from at least the following companies:
Google
Facebook
AOL
Yahoo
Apple
Microsoft
Amazon possibly
Dropbox

If the documents are true/right, all data that enters these services is directly integrated within this surveillance network.

Meaning that they have access to (assuming you at least use Google, Microsoft and Facebook services):

Browsing history
Emails
Messages
Location data
Call history
Documents and pictures
And so on, and so on.

You're not going to make me believe that all this data is needed to 'prevent terrorism'

Are you a terrorist or is anyone close to you? If no, that already proves the point.

If they give data upon lawful request, it would be an entirely different case because then you're not collecting the data of innocent citizens.

@filthyranter https://m.youtube.com/watch/...

@FMashiro, @Teabagging4Life: interesting. I'm still sorting out my own views on this topic, so sorry, can't comment yet. I agree that it's just not that simple, though.

@Floydian, @linuxxx, and @Condor: thanks! You guys delivered in spades. I'm currently looking up everything you people mentioned.

Sorry I can't reply individually, a bit pressed for time right now.

@RememberMe If you have some spare time, I'd love to hear what you think about my comments! No rush, though :)