Lindley,
There's another question to be asked: Why should the government be monitoring every single person in such detail that it could actually extrapolate such things about everybody? As I understand it, the government is not supposed to just go spying on everybody.
As far as I'm concerned it is a violation of a person's privacy even if a computer does collect all that data and creates a profile like that even if nobody looks at it. The computer was programmed deliberately with the intention of gathering huge amounts of information on people, analyzing and organizing that data, and using inferential reasoning to make conclusions based on it.
If I took a camera with a motion sensor, pointed it into an innocent man's bedroom window (and, for the sake of the argument, they weren't in the room or even the house when I put the camera there), then left for two weeks; whenever they entered the room, the camera started rolling. It captured pictures of that person taking their clothes off, going to sleep, waking up, having sex with a number of people, and other such stuff, would that person consider it an intrusion (and for the sake of the argument, they weren't in the room, or even in the house when I collected the camera, two weeks later), even if I never looked at the footage recorded by the camera?
I think they would. The fact is, I shouldn't be pointing a camera into someone's bedroom and taking pictures of them, whether I look at the footage or not.
The way you say it sounds reasonable, but a system like AQAINT if it's at all like Total Information Awareness, is supposed to take all that data gathered and organize it into dossiers on everybody. This system would be however so detailed that it would even develop insights into that person's personality and even thought processes. Even if they didn't look at it immediately, there's always the possibility they'd eventually look at it and would now know pretty much everything there is to know about you or some other person when they did. With all that information at their fingertips, it's virtually inevitable that they would look into people they probably had no good reason to for one reason or another...
Why should the government be devoting such efforts to monitor every aspect of every person's life (including American citizens) without warrant, with complete disregard to the Constitution, to try and deduce every knowable fact about everybody?
Correct, but this is not a tradeoff, this is essentially the irrevocable elimination of privacy for the sake of security. As I see it, if you live a society in which you have no privacy from the prying eyes of an all-intrusive government, you don't have much security either...
CuttingEdge100
There's another question to be asked: Why should the government be monitoring every single person in such detail that it could actually extrapolate such things about everybody? As I understand it, the government is not supposed to just go spying on everybody.
As far as I'm concerned it is a violation of a person's privacy even if a computer does collect all that data and creates a profile like that even if nobody looks at it. The computer was programmed deliberately with the intention of gathering huge amounts of information on people, analyzing and organizing that data, and using inferential reasoning to make conclusions based on it.
If I took a camera with a motion sensor, pointed it into an innocent man's bedroom window (and, for the sake of the argument, they weren't in the room or even the house when I put the camera there), then left for two weeks; whenever they entered the room, the camera started rolling. It captured pictures of that person taking their clothes off, going to sleep, waking up, having sex with a number of people, and other such stuff, would that person consider it an intrusion (and for the sake of the argument, they weren't in the room, or even in the house when I collected the camera, two weeks later), even if I never looked at the footage recorded by the camera?
I think they would. The fact is, I shouldn't be pointing a camera into someone's bedroom and taking pictures of them, whether I look at the footage or not.
The way you say it sounds reasonable, but a system like AQAINT if it's at all like Total Information Awareness, is supposed to take all that data gathered and organize it into dossiers on everybody. This system would be however so detailed that it would even develop insights into that person's personality and even thought processes. Even if they didn't look at it immediately, there's always the possibility they'd eventually look at it and would now know pretty much everything there is to know about you or some other person when they did. With all that information at their fingertips, it's virtually inevitable that they would look into people they probably had no good reason to for one reason or another...
Why should the government be devoting such efforts to monitor every aspect of every person's life (including American citizens) without warrant, with complete disregard to the Constitution, to try and deduce every knowable fact about everybody?
Correct, but this is not a tradeoff, this is essentially the irrevocable elimination of privacy for the sake of security. As I see it, if you live a society in which you have no privacy from the prying eyes of an all-intrusive government, you don't have much security either...
CuttingEdge100
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