Privacy and Security are not opposites
Bruce Schneier explains What Our Top Spy Doesn't Get: Security and Privacy Aren't Opposites
... If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it's true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.
We've been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often -- in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric -- that most of us don't even question the fundamental dichotomy.
But it's a false one. ...
Comments
Thanks for posting this piece. If there had been more advocacy on this issue starting 35 years ago, with the enactment of the Bank Secrecy Act, we might still have a Fourth Amendment today.
The article says that police states have less street crime. That isn't necessarily so. There may, in fact, be more street crime in police states. Police states control the crime data which is published. They also control how crime data is recorded and classified; i.e. a mugging may be recorded as an incident but not a pick-pocket, vandalism may not be classified as a street crime but as a much more serious offense. There are no independently auditable sources for that data. You also have to question the fundamental honesty of a police force unrestrained by such abstruse ideas as due process or criminal procedure or the rights of the accused.
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January 29, 2008 6:42 PM