Isn't it ironic?

2) It does not make sense to count number of agencies wiretaps in order to save budget. In order to save budget you just give less money to the agencies that do not deliver.

3) Freedom of speech is important, because without such freedom society tends to make wrong decisions (such as supporting abusive totalitarian governments).

4) I'd suggest you to think about how email spam detection works and what improves detection ratio.

Dragging "innocent until proven guilty" principle into such detection system is incorrect, because decision if person is innocent or guilty is made after initial arrest, not before.

5) Most privacy concerns are about Facebook etc., not about government.

BTW, I wasn't able to find a good answer to the question "why privacy is important". Were you able to?

First, I did not say constant. There's a lot of ground between no oversight (as you paropose) and constant oversight (which you pretend is the only alternative).

Second, I was talking about oversight of government wiretaps, not oversight of citizens' lives. There's a rather significant different between eavesdropping and making sure that no one is eavesdropping.

Third, the government does provide oversight for mine and everyone else's actions, and they do it even without wiretaps. They call it police work. The police provide oversight so that abuses are not unbounded. When you say that there should be no oversight for wiretapping until someone complains, the civilian parallel is that police should take no actions except in the face of reported crime. AKA, no crime prevention.

Fifth, no, it's not ironic.

2) It's not an either-or situation. This is like saying that if you run a company, you shouldn't attempt to improve your divisions directly. Sure, if you've got a consistently-underperforming division, the right thing might be to let it go entirely. But that doesn't mean that acceptably-performing or even exceptionally-performing divisions cannot perform better. If a division is wasting money on stupid things, you can and should simply say "stop doing that". Firing everyone is not a net gain most of the time. (Especially in a world where every division is doing stupid things. Firing every government agency that wastes money is the same as disbanding the government.)

3) Wait, am I to understand that in your fantasy world where the government never abuses private information, they do restrict speech? The government that never blackmails because it's "illegal" will forbid speech, which is apparently not "illegal"?

How do you seriously reconcile these views? How to you simultaneously believe in a government that will always do the right thing with respect to privacy and also a government that will restrict speech and enforce a totalitarian state?

4) If you want to compare email spam mitigation to wiretapping, then maybe you should realize that without spam filtering, false positives do not happen. Mail is not "presumed spam" in the case where no spam filtering takes place. On the other hand, with spam filtering, false positives are inevitable. And that's okay, so long as 1) the rate of false positives is sufficiently low, and 2) it's emails going in the spam folder and not humans going to jail.

5) You haven't tried looking very hard if the only privacy issues you can find are with Facebook. More to the point, if you dig in even a little bit, you'll see that many of the privacy concerns with Facebook are based on the fact that after Facebook collects everything possible about your personal life, the government can subpoena that info.

And yes, I found many answers, some of which I already listed. If you land on the no-fly list because of something the government heard you say, that's an important problem. If a government agent blackmails you because of something they intercepted about you, that's an important problem. If you can't speak publicly against the government out of fear that they will leak sensitive information about you, that's an important problem.

Stop pretending that privacy is not important. Or at least prove that you believe what you claim by publicly posting your full name, address, date of birth, employer, social security number, mother's maiden name, credit and debit card numbers with expiration dates and security codes, driver's license number, bank account numbers (with routing info, please), online account usernames and passwords, your present and past sexual partners, any diseases you or your immediate family have, and the last 5 years of tax returns. Absent that, I'm afraid your claim that privacy is not important is rather an obvious sham.

2) I'm not saying under-performing agencies should be fully dissolved. They should be partially dissolved, starting from the head of the agency.

At the same time it does not usually make sense to issue legislation which would regulate what government agencies can and cannot spend budget on.

3) I don't understand what you are asking me here. If it's legal to suppress freedom of speech, government would do it on regular basis and that would make society less efficient and more likely to end up with authoritarian government.

4) I just detected another important mistake you are making. It looks like you think that freedom of an individual has an infinite value.

That's a mistake.

Freedom of an individual is very important, but not infinitely important. It's ok to make occasional rare random mistakes if it significantly improves quality of huge number of people.

Attempt to protect freedom of everyone with 100% certainty is doomed to failure, and the end result is much worse than balanced approach.

5) Let me reiterate: privacy is not important only in comparison with other more important issues, such as freedom of speech, freedom from false arrests, and safety.

Of course privacy has value and deserves some protection. But it is already protected well enough and is not a major concern at this moment.

2) You've said that they should stop funding such agencies. That's not a partial dissolution. Also, removing the head of an agency still has the same issue. It's rarely the best action. Agencies with constantly-shifting heads are less effective due to constant priority and strategy changes.

And this isn't just an issue of budget. It's not uncommon to forbid agencies from doing illegal things or things outside their jurisdiction.

3) If it's legal to suppress privacy, the government would do it on a regular basis and this would make society less efficient and more likely to end up with authoritarian government.

The government owning everyone's secrets gives them additional power and control. It has many potential abuses.

I'm trying to get you to actually think about what you're saying. The arguments you have about freedom of speech largely apply to privacy. By the arguments you've applied to wiretapping, we don't need oversight into freedom of speech abuses. Why pass strict laws protecting speech? Why worry about the "gray area" abuses? Why not allow the government to engage in widespread speech suppression if it makes them more effective?

Why does speech deserve such attention, except that you happen to believe that it's important for society (which I happen to agree with, but which you've provided no meaningful support for)?

4) A 1% false positive rate might be acceptable for spam, where the loss is simply an email, and the fix is simply to scan the spam folder. A 1% false positive is not an acceptable rate for wiretap-driven arrests, because these are humans, and the fix is a long and complex legal process.

5) Speech is not important only in comparison to more important issues, such as freedom from false arrest. Of course speech has some value and deserves some protection. But it is already protected well enough and not a major concern at this moment.

We're apparently not going to agree on whether privacy is important. What I find more bizarre is that you swing back and forth between privacy being important and not. You've made numerous statements in support of unfettered wiretaps. I feel like you actually do not believe what you're saying, or that perhaps you haven't thought it through very well.

That's correct: it's the same as with oversight. There is no need to monitor government about freedom of speech abuses, because such abuses are obvious. If some government agency limits my freedom of speech - I complain and then it's time to act. There is not much to do before anyone complains.

A 1% false positive is not an acceptable rate for wiretap-driven arrests

That's why surveillance might be helpful - it helps to lower ratio of false positive accusations.

But it is already protected well enough and not a major concern at this moment.

I agree that freedom of speech in the US protected well enough to prevent the US from turning into totalitarian state.

So there is no major problem here.

Still the speech is somewhat limited and such restrictions needlessly decrease the efficiency of our society. Couple of examples:

- "Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment" court rulings. That limits availability of quality publications on the topic.

- Persecution of Wikileaks. That keeps government opaque and hides terrible inefficiencies (such as waste of lives and resources in Iraq and Afghanistan).

I appreciate the discussion, but it isn't going anywhere any more. Cheers.