*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, August 15th, 2013 8:46am PDT - promote requested by original submitter blankfist.

It's a cryin' shame more folks could give a fuck about this particular Hydratic head of the beast of Babylon, innit? The fact that folks here with above-average Q's would rather use their meat to defend the machine or wallow in infotainment??-Quite telling and tragic, business as usual on planet chump.

My Q is way above average. My P is, sadly, very average.

Let me paraphrase the host's position, "I was fine with it, so long as they just used it to persecute brown-skinned folks. But now they might use the data to find out I'm cheating on my taxes I'm outraged!"

Wow, the judge has lost a lot of weight.

Thought experiment: Would you prefer a world in which privacy was still paramount, or a world in which there was no privacy whatsoever? That is, either your emails aren't read, but it's very easy to cloak clandestine activity. Or would you prefer the latter, in which even your neighbor can read your emails at the click of a button, but you can read Barack Obama's. Discuss.

I prefer a world not governed with either/or questions and ideas consistently involving only extreme ends of the spectrum, but rather one where reasoned compromise and rational forethought rule the day.
Sadly I seem to be a minority.
If I must choose one over the other, I would always choose the choice that offers more freedom, and I realize that freedom is dangerous.

Privacy and freedom are orthogonal. Privacy both grants freedom and takes it away. You're talking like there is a clear path for a centrist to take on this matter. My thought experiment was meant to expose a hypocrisy in too commonly held ideals. "Information should be free!" is often taken to mean that we should be able to access whatever information we want. On the other hand, "big brother" is a pejorative describing dystopian violations of individual privacy that reasonable people holding the former position often use.

We can't have it both ways. Either we get to know what people are up to (e.g. terrorists, banks, lobbyists, politicians, government agencies, etc) while coping with oversight of our own activities. Or we lock down all the information and cope with the inevitable cheat avoiding detection.

You can play the game of trying to break it down case by case, but the fact is surveillance can't really be implemented piecemeal. Once you decide to collect the information, you sort of get what you get.