That's a good question. Is depends on how we define "secure" here. I am sure there were slaves that had work, a roof over their head and at least food. Considering this they were secure, but in regards to freedom? Basically not allowed to have a free will. Having a look at today's society most people need to work all their life's to secure their needs but pay it with their freedom. Sorry if I missed they point here, to come back to the topic: there is no question that we need our government, but with not against us
Prisoners have work, a roof over their head, food, and are monitored around the clock. The issue is when you lose all privacy, but the "guards" are free to abuse you, then you don't have security or privacy. I put guards in quotes for a reason.
The point is, having less privacy doesn't make people more safe. If less privacy means your neighbor has more information to use against you then you're not safer. It ultimately boils down to how the collected information is used, not whether or not it gets collected. It's not possible to predict how it will be used without knowing who will have access to it and what the laws are and will be, and even then there is the possibility of leaks.
It's all about access control. Privacy is about access control. Information collected for national security should only be accessed by the minimum amount of human beings possible and the information should only be used in a narrow way. But this isn't what tends to happen, as mission creep and politics can over time turn a legit national security fear into a political persecution, or fear of terrorism one year could be fear of criminals the next year, constantly redefining the reasons to exploit the information collected.
You say today's society is one where most people work all their life to secure their needs and pay for it with their freedom? Do you not see something wrong with that picture? If we are working so hard, so that we can be a little less free each year, yet our security at best remains the same, what are we working for?
In terms of the actual threat of dying in a terrorist attack, it's extremely low. Violent crime is also in sharp decline. Yet every year we still are asked to give up more freedom out of fear of some less than single digit probability or risk or accident. At what point do we reach a conclusion that the situation is pathological, and not even based on reason anymore?
For example, during the debate around encryption there were politicians talking about how we need to backdoor everything, people saying law enforcement should have access to all information in pursuit of crimes, and so on. They say because they couldn't unlock a smart phone which terrorists used, that the laws should be changed or that Apple should be forced to unlock the phone. But where was the discussion on risk statistics, where is the risk literacy in the general public to know there is a greater chance of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack? And that most of the sorts of crimes, including cyber crimes, are extremely rare events, and encryption is even more rare.
Yet this will not stop politicians from trying to demonize encryption, digital currencies, and digital currency users. It might be true that some criminal activity is going on but my point is that it matters whether or not people are being harmed, whether violence is involved, the numbers and risks statistics, the probabilities, so that we know whether all of this monitoring and surveillance is protecting us from a legitimate danger or whether we are being spooked into accepting a level of surveillance we don't actually need.
That's a good question. Is depends on how we define "secure" here. I am sure there were slaves that had work, a roof over their head and at least food. Considering this they were secure, but in regards to freedom? Basically not allowed to have a free will. Having a look at today's society most people need to work all their life's to secure their needs but pay it with their freedom. Sorry if I missed they point here, to come back to the topic: there is no question that we need our government, but with not against us
Prisoners have work, a roof over their head, food, and are monitored around the clock. The issue is when you lose all privacy, but the "guards" are free to abuse you, then you don't have security or privacy. I put guards in quotes for a reason.
The point is, having less privacy doesn't make people more safe. If less privacy means your neighbor has more information to use against you then you're not safer. It ultimately boils down to how the collected information is used, not whether or not it gets collected. It's not possible to predict how it will be used without knowing who will have access to it and what the laws are and will be, and even then there is the possibility of leaks.
It's all about access control. Privacy is about access control. Information collected for national security should only be accessed by the minimum amount of human beings possible and the information should only be used in a narrow way. But this isn't what tends to happen, as mission creep and politics can over time turn a legit national security fear into a political persecution, or fear of terrorism one year could be fear of criminals the next year, constantly redefining the reasons to exploit the information collected.
You say today's society is one where most people work all their life to secure their needs and pay for it with their freedom? Do you not see something wrong with that picture? If we are working so hard, so that we can be a little less free each year, yet our security at best remains the same, what are we working for?
In terms of the actual threat of dying in a terrorist attack, it's extremely low. Violent crime is also in sharp decline. Yet every year we still are asked to give up more freedom out of fear of some less than single digit probability or risk or accident. At what point do we reach a conclusion that the situation is pathological, and not even based on reason anymore?
For example, during the debate around encryption there were politicians talking about how we need to backdoor everything, people saying law enforcement should have access to all information in pursuit of crimes, and so on. They say because they couldn't unlock a smart phone which terrorists used, that the laws should be changed or that Apple should be forced to unlock the phone. But where was the discussion on risk statistics, where is the risk literacy in the general public to know there is a greater chance of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack? And that most of the sorts of crimes, including cyber crimes, are extremely rare events, and encryption is even more rare.
Yet this will not stop politicians from trying to demonize encryption, digital currencies, and digital currency users. It might be true that some criminal activity is going on but my point is that it matters whether or not people are being harmed, whether violence is involved, the numbers and risks statistics, the probabilities, so that we know whether all of this monitoring and surveillance is protecting us from a legitimate danger or whether we are being spooked into accepting a level of surveillance we don't actually need.
Stephen Brill runs those risk numbers in a TWENTY-FIVE PAGE article in this month's Atlantic magazine. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/are-we-any-safer/492761/