Comment Re:Now using TOR after WH threats to invade homes (Score 2) 282
Surveillance does not make people less free. Does an audience at a theater make an actor less free?
What? Are you seriously trying to suggest that the role of police/security forces is comparable to a theater audience? Because I'm pretty sure that the audience pays actors for the privilege of watching them, whereas I am paying the police. I talk about my boss, my wife or my mother very differently when they're standing next to me, so I claim that an observer absolutely does restrict my freedom.
If repressive things happen with the gathered data then that would be a problem but not the surveillance itself.
OK, so when it's a private citizen, we should watch them closely, all the time, in order to identify when they might be thinking about committing a crime, but when it's the police, we should have no restrictions or preventative measures unless someone can document that the police have committed a crime. The crime rate for police is similar to civilians: they're human beings, not gods. They should be held to standards at least as high as you're proposing for civilians, and probably higher, given the special powers we invest in them.