This is Alan Dershowitz' argument for "torture warrants" [1] applied to pervasive surveillance.
If that association bothers you, please reconsider glossing over the assumption that pervasive surveillance is inevitable and unstoppable.
If anything, is it not less inevitable than abuses during a particular interrogation that rise to the level of torture? If we're unwilling to give torture the approval of regulation, we ought to be even more unwilling to give the less-inevitable pervasive surveillance that kind of approval.
(To clarify: I'm comparing the inevitability of individual acts of torture with pervasive surveillance, not inevitability of pervasive torture with particular technological ability to mass-surveil. Of course the technical ability to do something may be inevitable, but not the transformation of Western cities into Panopticons.)
I think it's a fair comparison, but here's where it breaks down. The technology already exists and is already widely deployed. I think the reporting has not kept up with the facts on the ground. If the battle against widespread deployment of cameras and microphones is already lost, it comes down to a utilization battle.
For now I think we see parallel construction obfuscating much the tech is actually being used and giving it cover against constitutional challenges. As that changes, the Supreme Court will have to grapple with how much of this Panopticonal evidence can be used in court.
Drive around the Bay Area and almost every single intersection has CCTV aiming down at driver's faces & license plates in all directions. I must assume that's all recorded indefinitely and also feeds license plate and facial recognition systems.
Torture (by US military and domestic police) already exists, and is employed more widely than the general populace seems to care about. This has been going on a long time. Is the fight against torture already lost, in which case we're just down to figuring out utilization?
> almost every single intersection has CCTV aiming down at driver's faces & license plates in all directions.
I'm not against trying to reign in the surveillance that exists. By all means, lets push for ways to do so. The difference we have is that you seem to be more interested in how best to use all this cool tech than in any sort of principle opposing it.
What is inevitable about all those street cameras? Do they just grow out of the poles like branches on trees?
Homeland Security grants fund the installation, so it's "free money" for the cities and states, which turning it down can cause negative press. In very limited circumstances we do see taking this free money too far can blow back on the city, like the case of buying surplus armored vehicles that serve no purpose and cost money to maintain.
But installing a camera is, on it's face, an ethically neutral point. So it's hard to motivate a strong political force against it. Maybe the analogy is that we're outfitting the interrogation rooms with bottled water, or maybe towels. The bottles of water or towels on their own are completely benign, and could even be used positively. Trying to stop the proliferation of bottled water is probably a lost cause.
So I think the key point we are disagreeing on is that while torture is inherently evil and wrong, CCTV is not, so I think your analogy is flawed. You can use torture towards a positive end, but that doesn't make the torture right, it's the ends justifying the means. You can use CCTV towards a positive end where the entire process is morally just from start to finish.
This is why I think while there's a fight to be fought against torture of any form, and it's a fight that humanity must win, in the case of surveillance it is not a fight over whether the capability will exist, because the price of total surveillance goes to zero over time, and the existence of total surveillance of its own right is morally neutral. It goes down to how the capability is utilized.
For example, we will eventually have the cryptographic and AI capabilities to implement strong controls over the utilization of a total surveillance apparatus to guarantee it confirms with constitutional requirements. Obviously there are many people (in government) who would not want to cede control over their surveillance systems to a program which guaranteed adherence to a strict code of conduct around how information is ingested, processed, correlated, and ultimately reported for further action. But it is not beyond our human technical capabilities to construct such a system over the next ~50 years, and clearly it would have an immense positive effect on solving and likely deterring many crimes.
If that association bothers you, please reconsider glossing over the assumption that pervasive surveillance is inevitable and unstoppable.
If anything, is it not less inevitable than abuses during a particular interrogation that rise to the level of torture? If we're unwilling to give torture the approval of regulation, we ought to be even more unwilling to give the less-inevitable pervasive surveillance that kind of approval.
[1] http://www.spectacle.org/0202/seth.html
(To clarify: I'm comparing the inevitability of individual acts of torture with pervasive surveillance, not inevitability of pervasive torture with particular technological ability to mass-surveil. Of course the technical ability to do something may be inevitable, but not the transformation of Western cities into Panopticons.)