Quote:
Originally Posted by Blade
The cameras are designed to catch criminals. I'm not a criminal. Anyone can stare at me till they go blind.  What is it going to do - make my teeth fall out?  Give me cancer? Make me bankrupt?  |
Ah, the "I have nothing to hide" defense. Great. We'll just put cameras inside everybody's house, so we can catch any conceivable illegal behavior and nip it in the bud. That'll be a good way to enforce restrictions on sexual behavior, too. The biggest problem with those laws has always been the difficulty in enforcing them.
Besides making a mockery of the Bill of Rights -- why should we have any restrictions on searches and such if we've got nothing to hide? -- you ignore the most basic tenet of conservatism, which is that in a limited government, most things are simply none of the government's business. By volunteering to bend over and let them videotape every waking and sleeping moment of your life, you give the government carte blanche to become interested in every little thing you do.
What about all those little things that aren't illegal but are still private and embarassing? Maybe you're having an affair; maybe you pick your nose. Maybe you drink too much. Maybe you like lounging around in your backyard in the nude. All those things become available to the government in this surveillance society you're so okay with.
But of course we know the government would never stoop to using such information for mundane political purposes, right?
Read a history of government abuse of surveillance data to understand why a surveillance society is simply undesirable, philosophical and Constitutional considerations aside. You can start here:
http://midtopia.blogspot.com/2006/05...its-stage.html
Read down to get the examples of both past and current misuse of "security threat" designations and gathered information.