> draft good legislation to curb potential abuses

No such thing. Unless it is mathematically impossible for the government to abuse you, then you will be abused.

That sounds like an argument for anarchism. I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion.

What seems to me to have worked is understanding that a government is necessary, that it has the potential to misbehave, and therefore we should carefully design laws and processes to constrain it. I would like to see opponents of mass surveillance do this, which seems more productive than what I normally observe.

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matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> That sounds like an argument for anarchism.

Fundamentally impossible. Power structures are inherent to all human social activity. Even if we instantaneously abolished all governments and all power structures, new ones would spontaneously form immediately after.

> I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion.

People's inability or unwillingness to take things to their logical conclusion is why mainstream political philosophy is doomed to fail. If you want to test principles, then you must assign extreme values to all variables and see how the system copes. Everybody breaks under this simple test.

> we should carefully design laws and processes to constrain it

Those already exist and are routinely ignored. The US government routinely disregards the rights of its own citizens, and nothing happens, all it has to do is say the magic words "national security" and it all goes away. Every once in a while, evidence of abuses somehow surface and they are so egregious that they have no choice but to do something about it, but due to survivorship bias you must assume the abuse is far more prevalent than what you're actually seeing.

Only structural solutions meaningfully change this calculus. It must be impossible for the government to abuse you in any way. Anything short of that will fail.

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tavavex 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, it is an argument that the best way not to abuse something is to not have access to it. If you enshrine a ban of total surveillance on a deep and universal level in a country, it'll be a lot more difficult for a future bad actor state to reinstate it. We need the most extreme legal hurdles that can exist. More importantly, if the technology isn't actually physically installed, it becomes even more of an uphill battle for a future corrupt government. Your proposal is for surveilling everyone but making a pinky promise that no one in the chain will ever be corrupt at any point in the future, because all it would take at that point is changing some words on a page, refusing to prosecute an abuse of power, using some loopholes or pushing a software update.

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slibhb 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The modern legally bound nation state has done much better at guaranteeing rights and protecting freedoms than any other configurations despite the fact that it's constained largely by "pinky promises" (i.e. laws, courts, etc).

	▲	finnthehuman 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of those exist because of fairly strong “don’t get close to this” rules or culture. There are certainly areas where our democracies had good properties that slowly erroded too.