Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!helios!archone!byron
From: byron@archone.tamu.edu (Byron Rakitzis)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: The end of privacy... and so what comes next?
Message-ID: <14199@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Date: 5 Apr 91 16:03:56 GMT
References: <10777@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <1991Apr1.180311.5557@eff.org> <63565@bbn.BBN.COM>
Sender: usenet@helios.TAMU.EDU
Organization: College of Architecture, Texas A&M University.
Lines: 33

In article <63565@bbn.BBN.COM> cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) writes:
>mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin) writes:
>}The easy accessibility
>}of personal data makes it easy for the government to exercise
>}its discretion to prosecute us or otherwise make our lives 
>}miserable.

>This is all very hypthetical.  Who gets to decide which are the bad crimes
>and which are the good?  This discretion exists ANYWAY, and crippling
>the police from enforcing the laws, all of them and any of them, is
>pretty arbitrary: if you don't want the police to enforce some
>particular law, shouldn't you be making the law go away, rather than
>trying to so-cripple the police that they _cannot_ enforce it?

>Is THIS what privacy is for: to allow us to *knowingly* flout the
>laws?  Should it be personal discretion as to which laws we use our
>"cloak of secrecy" to hide?  What sort of society is that?

> /Bernie\


Bernie, (btw, I know you are speaking as the d.a.) I don't think this is
very "hypothetical". Maybe it is in the US (though you only have to look
back at McCarthyism to see that it is not) but if you take a hike to almost
any foreign country, you will find governments that have kept files against
their citizens labelling them, for example, as communists, and then denying
them jobs, passports, whatever.

Unless the people you are arguing against are willing to accept the fact that
the law and the government do not always work in the interests of the people,
then I'm afraid you are stuck. They're just pig-ignorant and stupid. But to
say that these arguments are "hypothetical" and far-fetched makes me want to
laugh.