FBI Wants to Invest in Social Media Surveillance Tool

Don't get me wrong, I can see parts of what you're saying is legitimate, I just don't agree with where your focus lies in trading privacy for so-called safety, and not caring about it. Why? because it simply won't work. I'm all for nailing crooks and those that massacre, and destroy. I even hear you about "too much freedom". I know what you mean in a general sense, but without going into a lot of detail, things fall into the subjective camp, for example, it's very easy to slap the fanatic tag on someone if you have an agenda to do so. Edit: "you" as in general sense.

If I understand you correctly, from where I am, I've heard that France is far from free of the trouble you describe, well in the fairly recent past.

Don't know who you're referring to, but there's plenty of nutjobs to go around everywhere, who'll do anything for control. If they preach virtues but aren't virtuous, that's called hypocrisy.

 

Obviously, I won't go into details, this is not the forum for it. And you are right, easy to pervert the law for personal agendas.

Indeed, I'm French but I decided to leave it for a south-east Asian country, which isn't a democracy but where life is way safer and peaceful if you know not to cross lines.

I won't go into religion debates but they were those in the past who burned witches and invaded Arabian lands to purify "their" world. Sure it is centuries ago and things changed but it happened...

 

Back on topic is, I feel, realistic threat models. Some of the things posited above simply don't happen, or maybe a few times globally, per year - because threats normally come from our nearest and dearest, and people are terrible with the salience effect. It would be nice if people were better with rational risk calculations - I can recommend the books by Gerd Gigerenzer.

It's also the case that no society appears mature enough to admit that their calculus of risk and reward is anything other than drivel, hypocritical and smug at that. Security theater. Much of what people put up as a threat miraculously neglects the iatrogenics of any knee-jerk populist control.

We have threats to children that have nothing realistically to do with cctv and much to do with history and the fact we won't admit that we trade lives for money.

It's not the case that anyone can trust their governments at this point, even granted that there are real differences - it doesn't take much for a decent into barbarism, and pervasive surveillance is one of the routes into barbarism as any student of history will know. C'est plus ca change, c'est plus la meme chose.

 

They have already violated in the past and history tends to repeat itself.
To even make such a claim is ludicrous. Do you really believe the sole purpose is for
surveilling terrorist organizations, crime groups and national security threats?

More and more were becoming a "big brother" modern day 1984 George Orwellion society.