The most important reason for privacy is that without it, social norms calcify.
If a norm is outdated, oppressive, or maladaptive in some way and needs to be changed, it becomes very difficult to change the norm if you cannot build a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
It is even harder if you cannot even talk about building a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.
For many norms, like the taboo on homosexuality which was strong in the US and Europe until recently and is still strong in many places today, the taboo and threat of ostracism are strong enough that people need privacy to build critical mass to change the norm even when the taboo is not enshrined in law, or the law is not usually enforced. This was the mechanism of "coming out of the closet": build critical mass for changing the norm in private, and then take the risk of being in public violation once enough critical mass had been organized that it was plausible to replace the old oppressive/maladaptive norm with a new one.
But yes, obsolete/maladaptive/oppressive norms are often enshrined in law too.
> revolves around being able to do illegal things.
The problem is, what is legal today might not be tomorrow. Especially depending on the regime in power at the time.
Mass surveillance can implicate someone in a crime if later on some regime decides that what they did or where they went is now a crime when it wasn't before.
Remember the push back against Apple's proposed client side scanning of photos to look for CSAM? What happens when the hash database starts including things like political memes, or other types of photos. What used to be legal is now not, and you get screwed because of the surveillance state.
Absolutely no data should be available without a warrant and subpoena, full stop. Warrants issued by a court, not a secret national security letter with a gag order either. Warrants only issued with true probable cause, not "acting suspicious."
Absolutely all your data is available for sale by data brokers. Need to get rid of those first. Then the government would need warrants where they don’t need warrants to just buy your data.
If you've worked in government, you'd know that that bar for getting a subpoena or warrant is far lower and less strenuous than getting a purchase order.
Which is also a problem that needs fixed. A search warrant should be extremely difficult to get. "The person is suspicious and we think we will find xyz illegal item" is not enough. An arrest alone shouldn't be enough either. Police/detectives should have to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that what they are looking for is actually there to get the warrant.
The standard for a warrant is probable cause, which is more stringent than reasonable belief.
Reasonable belief is what allows for police to take warrantless actions. Cop sees someone in a neighborhood walking around looking inside car windows and trying door handles. He now has reasonable belief enough to temporarily detain that person and ask what he's doing. No arrest or search may be conducted.
vs.
A court issued warrant requires probable cause. Cop let the suspect go in the first example (as he should with no probable cause for an arrest), and the next day someone in the neighborhood reports that their car was broken into and their laptop stolen. Cop checks local pawn shops and finds the laptop, the person that sold it to the pawn shop is the same person the cop stopped last night.
NOW the cop has enough probable cause to seek a search warrant to look for other stolen items.
Point being, reasonable belief or reasonable suspicion isn't and shouldn't be enough to search or detain. You need probable cause, and that probable cause needs to be affirmed by a judge and a warrant issued.
No, I had my wording mixed up. I meant to say probable cause, not beyond reasonable doubt.
The problem is the standard for probable cause is becoming too low. The courts often just rubber stamp warrants. We need systems in place to make sure warrants are only issued when the facts presented are so compelling that there is no possible doubt that probable cause doesn't exist rather than just the bare minimum to get rubber stamped by a judge.
Insufficient corroboration is already basis to refuse a warrant, but in practice that doesn't always happen. You are at the mercy of the police and court system and if you don't have the resources (money) to appeal and get your conviction overturned, you get screwed.
Generally, laws can't be applied retroactively. If you're in a regime that ignores that, then there really isn't a sense of law anymore to worry about.
A binary view is incorrect. Governments not having records of Jews would not have stopped the Holocaust. But this killed some people who could have escaped.
And the problem is not limited to retroactive laws. Phone scanning was another example in their comment. A regime could use this to restrict future communication even if they did not punish past communication.
The idea that US citizens actually give a fuck about defending anything is laughable. All of this is performative virtue signaling.
US literally has ownership of guns codified into constitution, specifically to allow citizens to defend themselves from oppressive regimes that fit CBP to the letter (i.e violence against US citizens), however a CBP officer is yet to be shot in a confrontation.
Its to the point where Trump can literally start confiscating guns, and the amount of armed resistance will be negligible, and most of it originating from organized gangs. When it comes to all the "dont tread on me" people, when armed forces are surrounding their house, and the chance of losing the easy comfortable life they have lived for the past 3 decades is very real, all of them are going to bend over and lube up so fast that they will get whiplash, without a doubt.
For good reason. Being "investigated" for illegal things is a key way to violate personal liberties. If you believe in freedom, you have to accept that some people who are not nice people benefit from those human rights. You may find yourself an "enemy of the people" for a variety of reasons.
In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.
The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.
Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.
The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.
>The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant.
Or Trump can just put legal pressure on cell providers and they will bend the knee like everyone else, and CPB can easily have that data without problems.
Lets not pretend that that is the line they won't cross.
Those companies have been selling the data to the government without warrant for quite some time actually. No pressure necessary. Cops have money and Verizon wants it.
I want you to tell me in exact words that you firmly believe that when the current regime starts requesting records without any legal oversight, cell companies won't comply, because users trust is worth to them more than shareholder value.
But regardless, I always find it funny that most of the rhetoric for personal liberties revolves around being able to do illegal things.