On Wednesday, September 22, 2021, 9:04:46 PM, Adam Petty wrote:
Brian,
You raise interesting questions here about the Right to be Forgotten. I
suspect this will become a significant social conversation in the United
States in the coming years. (We can only guess which side Left and Right
will respectively take at that time.) I would love to hear some
liberty-informed dialogue both for and against, if anyone else wants to
chime in.
On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 5:02 PM Brian Holtz <brian@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Starchild, I wonder how you feel about laws enforcing a so-called
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten. It would be bad
enough for government to conduct mass surveillance of public spaces. It's
potentially far worse for government to police all the data stored and
shared by private citizens, using rationales like anti-pornography,
copyright, "right to be forgotten", privacy, anti-crypto, protecting
children, etc.
I'm a big fan of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance. I'm a big
fan of police having to run bodycams. I'm a big fan of citizens recording
and sharing imagery of government abuses and other injustices. Bryan Caplan
points out that in our society, nobody dares say the government is
providing too much democracy, too much healthcare, too much education, or
too much environmental protection. I worry that "privacy" will join these
Four Horsemen of Statism. Libertarians should be willing to say that
governments often do provide too much of each of these five things.
On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 4:15 PM Starchild <sfdreamer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I would note also that not everything that's bad for freedom is
itself a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle or otherwise in direct
violation of libertarian ethics.
The collection of mass data on others (including video footage)
by voluntary sector institutions or individuals not working for government
is a good case in point. While such data collection is not itself
un-libertarian, such data, once collected, may be turned over to government
actors, whether voluntarily or otherwise, and then become a tool of
oppression. It's worth considering in any given case, "What is the person
or organization collecting this data likely to do if confronted with a
governmental demand to turn it over to them?"
I believe it behooves libertarians to evaluate laws, policies,
and actions based not only on our traditional (and still very much valid!)
questions, "Is this voluntary?" and "Does this violate anyone's rights?",
but also, "Will this tend to make society more libertarian, or more
authoritarian?" and "Will this do more to further individual rights and
liberty, or institutional power and government control?"
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
On Sep 21, 2021, at 3:48 PM, Jeff Chan wrote:
On Tuesday, September 21, 2021, 12:13:32 PM, Brian Holtz wrote:https://reason.com/volokh/2020/04/22/automated-license-plate-readers-the-mosaic-theory-and-the-fourth-amendment/
Looking for pointers to libertarian analyses of license plate cams.
Example:
should
My default position would be:
- owners of private property are free to record and share information
that is visible from that property using "ordinary" means
- private citizens using public rights-of-way are free to record and
share information that is visible to them via "ordinary" means
- organizations with police powers (e.g. governments, not HOAs)
intonot operate mass-surveillance systems, but can issue search warrants
informationsuch systems
I worry about government mass-surveillance, but I also worry about
"privacy" laws that give government the power to restrict what
traceable,private individuals can record and share.
Hi Brian,
Those positions look generally reasonable to me. I too would be
interested in any formal libertarian positions/theory.
To me, anything a private individual would be able to see in a public
space should be ok to record, same as seeing it visually and writing
down a note (or creating a memory) of what one saw, but arguably less
fallible to human frailties such as cognitive biases and errors.
Government force, including police state surveillance, should be
severely restricted by law and government should follow its own laws
(it often doesn't; and "who guards the guards?" Quis custodiet ipsos
custodes? ).
That all said, the entire world is moving towards a police state and
possible world socialist government police state. China's massive
surveillance system including facial recognition, etc., and "social
credit scores" fit perfectly into that paradigm, which unfortunately
is a template for most other governments. And all of it fit's
perfectly into Klaus Schwab's fascistic "Great Reset". Please study
and understand it.
But perhaps the most insidious tool for government control over people
are impending central bank digital currencies. They are fully
unalterable; a permanent record of every transaction and transactee inprivate
the formal economy; a perfect tool for police states to tax, track,
punish, control the entire economic lives, cradle to grave, of
everyone who uses government money. And they are also outlawing
cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchanges with the formal economy.
All of this is in the public record, public legislation, etc., in the
U.S., EU, China; it's not conspiracy theory.
Sorry for going slightly off topic, but government (video and other)
surveillance networks fit into this scheme perfectly, so it's not
totally unrelated.
In Liberty,
Jeff C.
--
Jeff Chan
mailto:webmaster@xxxxxxxx
http://rkba.org/
"Switzerland exported democracy to America by being a shining,
stable example of freedom which America's founders imperfectly
copied. It did not invade America and replace its government."