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Princess_Stargirl comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion
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After reflection, I think this is my true rejection of total government surveillance. There are plenty of relatively unproblematic actions that are technically illegal but most people do anyway (soft drug use, copyright infringement, etc.), but right now few people are prosecuted so few people are particularly bothered by the laws. Introducing total government surveillance without repealing such laws first would essentially give arbitrary powers to law enforcement.
There's also the problem of industrial espionage. If the government is able to spy on people, then corporations will be able to get the police to spy on people from other corporations.
Funnily enough I'm writing something about the 'right' to privacy right now, and that comic is one of the best principled arguments I've come across. [This may tell you something about the field.]
The counter is that laws can be changed, and a lot of current laws are only popularly accepted because they are unevenly enforced. E.g. if the middle class were at any real risk of arrest from drug possession sentences would be nowhere near as harsh.
Yeah. I'd like to eventually go from unreasonable laws that aren't actually consistently enforced to reasonable laws that are actually consistently enforced, but unless both components switch at the same time there are going to be troubles in the process (arguably worse problems if the enforcement component switches sooner than the reasonableness component). Also, there's the problem that not everybody would agree with which laws would be reasonable, e.g. there are plenty of middle-aged and older people (in Italy at least) who seem to actually believe that marijuana had better stay banned (yes, most of those people probably have only a vague idea of what marijuana actually does, but still).