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tavavex 8 hours ago

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.

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.