Cato Unbound: The Digital Surveillance State

5 thoughts on “Cato Unbound: The Digital Surveillance State”

1. More reading here:

   http://www.schneier.com/essay-309.html

   Money quote from the Cato story: “We’ve gotten so used to the ‘privacy/security tradeoff’ that it’s worth reminding ourselves, every now and again, that surrendering privacy does not automatically make us more secure — that systems of surveillance can themselves be a major source of insecurity.”

   Put all that stuff in a bucket, and people will start looking for the bucket.

     Pat CahalanQuote  Link

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2. Cato is getting Greenwald to write for them? They’re about as far apart on the political spectrum as it’s possible to be.

     KatherineQuote  Link

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   • to Katherine

     @Katherine, Good. Maybe they’ll learn something from each other.

       NorthQuote  Link

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   • to Katherine

     @Katherine,

     Cato Unbound brings together people of many different viewpoints to disagree civilly and constructively, on issues that are interesting to libertarians. That’s the goal. We don’t pick people to write based on sharing a common viewpoint. That would be boring, and no one would read it.

     With that said, Glenn Greenwald has already written for Cato, to great acclaim. He is a prominent civil libertarian who has done excellent work on privacy, detainee treatment, habeas corpus, and free expression. Why wouldn’t we want him to write for us? I’d say he is a lot closer to Cato ideologically than you suspect.

       Jason KuznickiQuote  Link

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3. The Koran, if not other Islamic Holy books, condone, promote and incite the killing of unbelievers. We already know muslims are willing to engage in suicide attacks in order to promote their faith and political values. Does every “Arab” or Muslim subscribe to these fanatic beliefs. No. But a worrisome proportion do. How shall we protect ourselves and how do we prevent a mega-disaster of a nuclear device set off in a large American city? There is a significant issue of cost-benefit ratio here; extreme surveillance (paranoia, if you will), versus sensible defense and protection, versus freedom of religion and speech. I submit the Muslims have to bear the responsibility of our possible erroneous mischaracterization of them since they have been the one who have endangered our side. 9-11 is the smoking gun we fear. Islam is not a mere “religion”; they represent a significant political enemy and the religion, to boot, brings absolutely no intellectual benefit to our society. It is aggressive, mindless. misogynistic, medieval, hostile to Western values and superstitious. We do not need any of it.

     John Nernoff IIIQuote  Link

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