The very next sentence I wrote after the part you quoted I said that mass surveillance isn’t good at prediction or prevention, but it’s value after an incident isn’t questioned.
maybe?
a. Mass surveillance doesn’t work today.
b. Basic coffee & doughnuts police work and public tips work better.
It is very valuable, but not for counter terrorism.
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I will go you a step farther than mass surveillance doesnt work. I would posit that if the CIA didnt exist for the past 60 years, the US would be in much better shape, globally.
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This! What’s the cost of treating every Internet user on the planet as an adversary? Is tyranny a solution to terrorism, or a cause?
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Here I am questioning it. Even if mass surveillance helped catch a thousand criminals, which I doubt, it would be a crappy trade for the Fourth Amendment. Even that is assuming it never gets turned against us for political purposes, except it already has. Also assuming the operators themselves aren’t criminals, except we already have verified examples.
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I’ve been thinking mostly about the events in Paris where the fourth amendment doesn’t apply.
True, the Napoleonic Code does things a little differently. The rest of my comment stands.
I don’t like the argument either, but with the additional reason that its logic is faulty: There’s no record of my locked front door ever having prevented strangers from wandering into my house and taking my stuff, yet I can be confident that without a door that would happen all the time.
Of course that isn’t even close to a perfect analogy, as locked front doors are provably effective and mass surveillance apparently is not, but using the absence of foiled plots isn’t a solid way to make that case, as it ignores the possibility of plotters having been discouraged from ever going into motion in the first place.
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