Quote from Zed

How many people google "Al Quaeda" on a daily basis? My guess is that it's too many to realistically follow up on. What defines a good reason will be whatever works. The simple economics of it ensures that they won't use it to target people for stupid reasons.

"Too many" is irrelevant, and you're completely missing the point. Whatever works is suspect at best, because the government can decide quite easily that something like Religious freedom is no longer a right and then arrest anyone who is non-christian according to their personal information.

Quote from Zed

Using it to listen in on phone sex is quite clearly gross misconduct on the part of the NSA employees and therefore grounds for dismissal. I never said the system doesn't need to be monitored.

Again you're missing the point. The potential for abuse far outweighs any reason for it's existence.

Quote from Zed

"Your theory of gravity doesn't address the issue of why there are no unicorns so it must be false."

Terrible analogy. You're taking two completely irrelevant things and trying to smear my point by making a ridiculous assertion. I never said anything that wasn't directly related to the subject. Try to stay away from logical fallacies.

Quote from Zed

The Boston bombings happened so clearly PRISM isn't 100% effective. You can't use that to conclude that it is 0% effective. Right now we do not know enough about it to say anything about whether or not it's been useful. "Didn't prevent things like the Boston bombing"? What things? How many other terrorist attacks have hit mainland US in the last five years? (I'm actually not sure what the answer is to that. I have a short memory for other countries' suffering. I'm hoping it's a low number.)

They happened so clearly the reasoning and justifications for having such a system in place are flimsy at best. "It's a matter of national security" doesn't hold water if that security is routinely broken Is this miss the point day? You're taking what I say completely out of proportion so it sounds unreasonable. It still doesn't matter if it's useful in a situation like this because there are still many MANY other alternatives that have been around since long before this big spying operation to figure out who did what. If the bad far outweighs the good, what's the point in it happening?

Going by terrorist attacks, since 2008 there has been 14 "successful" attacks, and even more that were caught before happening. PRISM stopped none of these.

Quote from Zed

Furthermore, if you had the data of half a billion people dropped on you how long do you think it would take to use it effectively? You need something like the Boston bombing to happen before you can even begin to look at what trends indicate a threat.

Then what is the point to having it if it's absolutely ineffective? The Boston bombings happened and do you know how they were caught? Old fashioned police work. That huge database of every single thing those two kids did online wasn't worth shit even after it happened. You're not very convincing.

Quote from Zed

You are talking about problems with the law and then pinning the blame on the law enforcement. You need to draw a distinction there. Crucially, punishments for breaking the law have to take into account the probability of getting caught, otherwise the deterrent doesn't work properly. Take speeding for example. The fine for speeding in the UK is £100 (or it will be once the law is updated in a couple of months) but the odds of getting caught are low (say, one time in a hundred). If law enforcement was perfect then you could charge £1 for every offence and achieve exactly the same effect.

In the same way, once it becomes possible to police piracy 100% we would no longer need big fines. You could literally set the fine at 70p per song and have that fine transferred straight to the artist. 100% enforcement doesn't end by making everyone a criminal - it ends by making every download legal.

I'm talking about problems with the law and blaming the people making the law, not the people enforcing it. You seem to have a different regard for why laws are the way they are, speeding is illegal because it's dangerous and could potentially kill somebody. If law enforcement caught everyone 100% of the time they sped, why would they charge them less just because they were sure they were going to catch them? The point is not just about stopping it, but also teaching a lesson not to do it by having a steep punishment and also to pay for the expenses of the police force. But again, the point about the law being enforced and set by the same people is that there is potential for abuse. Take a look at Turkey, and the reason for all the fucking protests going on over there. It's the same reasoning, the person in charge changed the laws and suddenly the people's freedoms were removed. That's the problem, and I don't see why you can't acknowledge this. The US can and has made radical changes that affect a lot of people, and some people want to fight that, but with PRISM and the NSA spying on everyone, all they would have to do is use a simple query into their database to find anyone after a certain date breaking the new law, even though they don't agree with it. What if the law was something like, "mandatory religious christian studies in all highschools"? That's what happened in Turkey.

Quote from Zed

Now, we can debate whether or not the government would actually bring in those measures. Historically I think sentences may have gotten tougher even though law-enforcement has improved. But this is not a problem with PRISM. Law enforcement is never the problem. The problem is the laws about what punishment goes with what crime, and that is an entirely separate debate.

It's part of the debate and part of the reasoning for why PRISM shouldn't exist, they are not separate. You're trying to divide them up as if one disproves the other but they're all related. Every one of them. The reason people don't want to be spied on is a lack of trust of the people doing the spying. That should be the ONLY thing that matters, some people don't want to be spied on and by BASIC fucking human rights they shouldn't be. PRISM is asserting that no one has that right, and you're backing it up by being apathetic and sometimes aggressive about the fact that you don't care if people watch you therefore no one else should. This is an ass-backwards argument and you've got it all wrong.

Quote from Zed

A company which discriminates against people with strange sexual fetishes is a company which is severely limiting its choice of workers. Again, the economics says they won't do it.

AGAIN you're ignoring the point. That sort of information is out there and can easily be used against you for any reason. It could be for ANY reason that they should not and would not normally be privy to. Why do you keep ignoring the point and attacking the hypothetical?

Quote from Zed

Information like this is absolutely relevant to the company doing the hiring and probably should be available to them. If the data show that ex-drug addicts are worse workers then the company has a right not to hire you on that basis. Same as how companies have a right to know if you have a criminal record.

So you went through a bad stint in your 20s with drugs, pulled out of it and are 30 years clean and turned your life around, and think it's okay for a company to be prejudice about something that happened in your past? But the data shows you're likely to be a worse worker so it doesn't matter about who you are now right? I don't see how anyone could agree with that viewpoint. If I'm 50 what I did in my 20s shouldn't matter if it hasn't applied to me for years.

Quote from Zed

Once again, the problem here isn't the law enforcement, it's the law itself. It's just that the laws were oppressive.

Once again, they are related and cannot be divided in this situation.

Quote from Zed

You live in a democracy, the entire point of which is to prevent oppressive laws. It's the only real advantage you have over authoritarianism so don't marginalise it.

No shit, however that's a very idealistic viewpoint. In reality the US has more corruption and tyranny than would be comfortable within a true democracy. The fact that PRISM exists IS proof of oppression. Guantanamo, PATRIOT, ACTA, SOPA... all these things that exist or were being pushed into existence show that oppressive laws CAN and DO exist within the US. It's not some magical state that is immune to travesties, that is silly, and it has only continually gotten worse. The US prison system is the worst in the world and is continually overcrowded BECAUSE of dumb, oppressive laws that make no sense yet still exist.

Quote from Zed

But even if you lived under Saddam Hussein you couldn't argue with the surveillance. Surveillance worked. It's the system behind it that needs looking at, and that is a separate debate. Otherwise you might as well be throwing in your lot with the people who think they need the right to bear arms so that they can rebel against the government if they want to.

Surveillance might work, but again that's the whole fucking point as to why it's a bad thing. How has this not sunk in yet? Once again, IT IS NOT a separate debate. The whole reason why no one wants it is because of this, and shrugging it off doesn't prove your point of view. Also, I think people should be able to stand up to the government, that was one of the foundations on which America was created. It's why places like Turkey and Syria are and were able to fight back against their shitty oppressive governments.

Quote from Zed

And then what exactly? Am I going to be denied my dream job in North Korea?

Don't be stupid. If legitimate evils in this world had access to this information, you know very well that would be a bad thing. Dictators being able to spy on nearly every single facet of your existence in order to enforce their oppression is always a bad thing. Being facetious about it doesn't give me hope that you aren't sheltered.

Let me put this as simply as possible. It's a problem because that data can be used for any reason. To illustrate this, I'm going to follow you around permanently making detailed logs of everything you do and say. You will not have any choice and you cannot stop me, your entire life will be under my thumb. But that's okay, right? You don't care, you have nothing to hide. Plus, what am I going to do with it anyway? It's just one guy knowing everything about me that doesn't matter. He just wants me to stay in line.

Then you find out I've been posting this online without telling you. I've been making a blog that makes one post a day detailing everything you did, from the most trivial shit to the most embarrassing. There is a large audience of people that follow my posts. You are outraged, half the world is laughing at you for what you do in private. You let me do that believing that I was just recording it to make sure you were doing anything wrong, but now I've betrayed your trust... you thought it was okay but now you feel depressed because you were lied to and your most intimate details exposed to your friends and family. You try to get away from me but you cannot. I am everywhere and you have no say. You ask me to go away but I ignore you and inch closer. There is nothing you can do.

Then I stop. I give up and move on. You are happy because suddenly you're not pressured to keep yourself straight. Then someone else comes along and tells you they're going to start doing the same thing, never mentioning what they were going to do with the information. Do you trust them? You just had a terrible experience with it, so why would you?

This is what people are worried about. They're worried about the government doing all sorts of things with their information and they have no say in it. The government can literally do what it wants, and they don't have to tell you or anyone about it. The debates are linked. No, they are tangled. You cannot talk about one as if the other doesn't matter. In a perfect world, you wouldn't HAVE to be spied on. But because some people think you do, all the risks and all the problems come with it, and they cannot be ignored.

EDIT: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/nsa-surveillance-us-behaving-like-china This article is also a really good read and expresses more or less what I believe, just in case I am fumbling over my words.

EDIT2: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-june-10-2013/good-news--you-re-not-paranoid---nsa-oversight a more comedic approach but again backs me up

EDIT3: I doubt you'll read or watch any of this but it's worth noting because it doesn't seem like you've done any research on the issue whatsoever:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/the-irrationality-of-giving-up-this-much-liberty-to-fight-terror/276695/

http://stopwatching.us/

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/glenn-greenwald-trashes-claims-of-government-oversight-nsa-falsely-claimed-it-cant-give-congress-information/

EDIT4: And here's another clincher if you still think the US isn't lying or doing anything wrong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8

I'm sorry if this isn't debate-worthy material, but it's relevant:

Quote from Automaton

I'm sorry if this isn't debate-worthy material, but it's relevant:

9911e2a7b819a7b12f5/tumblr_mo5suv5z3f1qdc32wo1_1280.jpg[/IMG0]

Quote from Jeff

"Too many" is irrelevant, and you're completely missing the point. Whatever works is suspect at best, because the government can decide quite easily that something like Religious freedom is no longer a right and then arrest anyone who is non-christian according to their personal information.

"Too many" is extremely relevant. The government is not omnipotent. They physically cannot follow up on everyone. You'd need to employ half the population of the country to investigate the other half. I'm going to address all of the points relating to evil government afterwards.

Again you're missing the point. The potential for abuse far outweighs any reason for it's existence.

I'm going to say this here and I'm not going to bother repeating it for the other five times it came up. Every time I talked about a specific example my point was generalisable. I was not ignoring the general point for specific hypothetical scenarios.

Relating to the phone-sex-NSA, my general point is that it's quite clear when abuse of this nature comes up and the people responsible can be punished for it. The NSA is made up of individuals, each of whom is just as accountable to the law as the people they are investigating. Hence why the CIA guy who leaked all this is now hiding in Hong Kong. If and when the system is abused you can punish the people abusing it, and you can do this because "the government" is not a single entity - it is made up of many parts which are fully capable of watching each other.

I'll leave it until later to decide whether or not the costs outweigh the benefits.

Terrible analogy. You're taking two completely irrelevant things and trying to smear my point by making a ridiculous assertion. I never said anything that wasn't directly related to the subject. Try to stay away from logical fallacies.

It's not about what's related or unrelated, it's about incompleteness as a sign of defect. That was your logical fallacy. You do it again here:

They happened so clearly the reasoning and justifications for having such a system in place are flimsy at best. "It's a matter of national security" doesn't hold water if that security is routinely broken Is this miss the point day? You're taking what I say completely out of proportion so it sounds unreasonable. It still doesn't matter if it's useful in a situation like this because there are still many MANY other alternatives that have been around since long before this big spying operation to figure out who did what. If the bad far outweighs the good, what's the point in it happening?

Going by terrorist attacks, since 2008 there has been 14 "successful" attacks, and even more that were caught before happening. PRISM stopped none of these.

To make a less abstract parody: "You hired policemen but crime still happens so your policemen are useless". "It's a matter of national security" does hold water if national security is routinely broken slightly less.

At the moment we don't know of any terrorists who were caught by PRISM, but that's hardly surprising considering the government was denying PRISM's existence last week. Right now we don't have enough information to say whether or not PRISM has helped. Which leads nicely onto your next bit actually...

Then what is the point to having it if it's absolutely ineffective? The Boston bombings happened and do you know how they were caught? Old fashioned police work. That huge database of every single thing those two kids did online wasn't worth shit even after it happened. You're not very convincing.

My point was that it would take a few years for it to become useful. As you said right at the start, are you a threat if you google "al quaeda"? Probably not, but we don't know until we've seen what proportion of people who google "al quaeda" later go on to bomb things. And we can't know that until some bombings happen. It's not that it's ineffective, it's that it hasn't matured yet.

Besides, if it's a completely ineffective tool then none of these walls of text matter anyway. It can't be used or abused if it just doesn't work.

I'm talking about problems with the law and blaming the people making the law, not the people enforcing it. You seem to have a different regard for why laws are the way they are, speeding is illegal because it's dangerous and could potentially kill somebody. If law enforcement caught everyone 100% of the time they sped, why would they charge them less just because they were sure they were going to catch them? The point is not just about stopping it, but also teaching a lesson not to do it by having a steep punishment and also to pay for the expenses of the police force.

So why don't they charge £50,000 per infraction? It's because the punishment is meant to fit the crime. If you catch people 1% of the time with a £100 fine then the expected cost of speeding is £1. If you catch them 100% of the time with a £1 fine then the expected cost of speeding remains £1. You should give lighter sentences when you can be certain of catching people in order to keep the expected cost of crime constant. Same (if not greater) deterrent effect, less welfare loss.

So you went through a bad stint in your 20s with drugs, pulled out of it and are 30 years clean and turned your life around, and think it's okay for a company to be prejudice about something that happened in your past? But the data shows you're likely to be a worse worker so it doesn't matter about who you are now right? I don't see how anyone could agree with that viewpoint. If I'm 50 what I did in my 20s shouldn't matter if it hasn't applied to me for years.

The data mining will determine whether or not it's relevant. If people who did drugs 30 years ago are no worse then anyone else then the company would be silly to exclude them. If those people are statistically worse then the company has a right to know.

This works for any example. Either what you did does make a difference to someone or it doesn't. If it does then the person, whether he be an employer, a student, a policeman, or whatever, needs to know. If it doesn't make a difference then it won't come up. There are entire businesses out there dedicated to working out what data is relevant to recruiting, for example, so whatever drugs you did 30 years ago are not going to be taken into account without good reason.

Don't be stupid. If legitimate evils in this world had access to this information, you know very well that would be a bad thing. Dictators being able to spy on nearly every single facet of your existence in order to enforce their oppression is always a bad thing. Being facetious about it doesn't give me hope that you aren't sheltered.

No. I'm sorry but I cannot see your point here. Kim Jong Un could peruse the data to his heart's content but there is fuck all he could do with it unless someone's been reciting nuclear launch codes.

If you're talking about the data the US collected on foreign nationals then yes, maybe he could use that, but according to your reddit link the dictators are already getting that information for themselves.

Let me put this as simply as possible. It's a problem because that data can be used for any reason. To illustrate this, I'm going to follow you around permanently making detailed logs of everything you do and say. You will not have any choice and you cannot stop me, your entire life will be under my thumb. But that's okay, right? You don't care, you have nothing to hide. Plus, what am I going to do with it anyway? It's just one guy knowing everything about me that doesn't matter. He just wants me to stay in line.

Then you find out I've been posting this online without telling you. I've been making a blog that makes one post a day detailing everything you did, from the most trivial shit to the most embarrassing. There is a large audience of people that follow my posts. You are outraged, half the world is laughing at you for what you do in private. You let me do that believing that I was just recording it to make sure you were doing anything wrong, but now I've betrayed your trust... you thought it was okay but now you feel depressed because you were lied to and your most intimate details exposed to your friends and family. You try to get away from me but you cannot. I am everywhere and you have no say. You ask me to go away but I ignore you and inch closer. There is nothing you can do.

People literally apply to be in that situation. It's called reality tv. Did you notice how boring that shit gets? No one will be watching you until the data tells them they should be.

But again, the point about the law being enforced and set by the same people is that there is potential for abuse. Take a look at Turkey, and the reason for all the fucking protests going on over there. It's the same reasoning, the person in charge changed the laws and suddenly the people's freedoms were removed. That's the problem, and I don't see why you can't acknowledge this. The US can and has made radical changes that affect a lot of people, and some people want to fight that, but with PRISM and the NSA spying on everyone, all they would have to do is use a simple query into their database to find anyone after a certain date breaking the new law, even though they don't agree with it. What if the law was something like, "mandatory religious christian studies in all highschools"? That's what happened in Turkey.

It's part of the debate and part of the reasoning for why PRISM shouldn't exist, they are not separate. You're trying to divide them up as if one disproves the other but they're all related. Every one of them. The reason people don't want to be spied on is a lack of trust of the people doing the spying. That should be the ONLY thing that matters, some people don't want to be spied on and by BASIC fucking human rights they shouldn't be. PRISM is asserting that no one has that right, and you're backing it up by being apathetic and sometimes aggressive about the fact that you don't care if people watch you therefore no one else should. This is an ass-backwards argument and you've got it all wrong.

Once again, they are related and cannot be divided in this situation.

No shit, however that's a very idealistic viewpoint. In reality the US has more corruption and tyranny than would be comfortable within a true democracy. The fact that PRISM exists IS proof of oppression. Guantanamo, PATRIOT, ACTA, SOPA... all these things that exist or were being pushed into existence show that oppressive laws CAN and DO exist within the US. It's not some magical state that is immune to travesties, that is silly, and it has only continually gotten worse. The US prison system is the worst in the world and is continually overcrowded BECAUSE of dumb, oppressive laws that make no sense yet still exist.

Surveillance might work, but again that's the whole fucking point as to why it's a bad thing. How has this not sunk in yet? Once again, IT IS NOT a separate debate. The whole reason why no one wants it is because of this, and shrugging it off doesn't prove your point of view. Also, I think people should be able to stand up to the government, that was one of the foundations on which America was created. It's why places like Turkey and Syria are and were able to fight back against their shitty oppressive governments.

Whether you like it or not, law-making and law-enforcing has to be a separate debate. We cannot just pick and choose which laws we want to obey. What right do you have to say "this law is a good law and this law is a bad law"? And it is absolutely not on the government to make their enforcement lax enough that you can break the law if you want to. The entire point of a law is that it applies to everyone and the entire purpose of the government is to make sure that laws are imposed to the best of their ability. What would be the point of legislating against rape if they weren't going to prosecute rapists? What would be the point of copyright law if they didn't try to catch people pirating music? We can argue about whether PRISM is a cost-effective form of law enforcement (just like SOPA got shot down for being shit at its intended purpose), but you absolutely cannot argue that they shouldn't be trying so hard to enforce the law in the first place.

You get a chance to stand up to your government every four years. That is the difference between the US and Syria. You don't fight your government by force, and if you tried you would lose. That is how it should be. If the election is won by someone who makes Christian teaching mandatory then evidently the people have spoken and that is what the law should be, and that law should then be enforced as much as possible. Neither of us would like it, but I'm sure there were some people out there who were unhappy when the slaves were freed. Yes I'm making that comparison. We can be as sure as we like that freeing the slaves was good and enforcing religious beliefs is bad, but our own certainty doesn't make us right. People on the other side are just as certain too. That is why we have to obey all the laws, whether we like them or not, and that is why the government needs to enforce the laws even over people who voted against them.



Like I said, the way the US government has gone about this seems to have been wrong. It should not have been necessary to do it secretly and it may well be time for you to sack them when the next election roles around. But the issue was not the privacy infringement.



Incidentally, I'm going to Romania for the next 9 days. I expect an essay to be waiting when I get back :p

Quote from Zed

Relating to the phone-sex-NSA, my general point is that it's quite clear when abuse of this nature comes up and the people responsible can be punished for it. The NSA is made up of individuals, each of whom is just as accountable to the law as the people they are investigating. Hence why the CIA guy who leaked all this is now hiding in Hong Kong. If and when the system is abused you can punish the people abusing it, and you can do this because "the government" is not a single entity - it is made up of many parts which are fully capable of watching each other.

But hasn't the American government repeatedly failed to do that? Look at crimes committed by soldiers/by the military that went completely off the grid until someone leaked them, to Wikileaks for example. It isn't only about the fact that someone is watching, but also whether you can trust that person to actually use the information in a responsible way.

Besides, if it's a completely ineffective tool then none of these walls of text matter anyway. It can't be used or abused if it just doesn't work.

I don't understand how you could arrive to that conclusion, even though it is ineffective it is still gathering information that then would simply be waiting to be abused.

So why don't they charge £50,000 per infraction? It's because the punishment is meant to fit the crime. If you catch people 1% of the time with a £100 fine then the expected cost of speeding is £1. If you catch them 100% of the time with a £1 fine then the expected cost of speeding remains £1. You should give lighter sentences when you can be certain of catching people in order to keep the expected cost of crime constant. Same (if not greater) deterrent effect, less welfare loss.

Lets apply your analogy to rape rather than speeding, should people get less jailtime for raping someone simply because a bigger percentage of rapists is caught?
No, the fine shouldn't have anything to do with the actual number of people caught, only how severe damage they could have possibly caused doing what they were fined for. You are looking at the punishment as if it should be determined by how successful policemen are, rather then the actual crime committed.

If you're talking about the data the US collected on foreign nationals then yes, maybe he could use that, but according to your reddit link the dictators are already getting that information for themselves.

So because of that giving them more and possibly easier options to gather this information is good how?

You get a chance to stand up to your government every four years. That is the difference between the US and Syria. You don't fight your government by force, and if you tried you would lose. That is how it should be. If the election is won by someone who makes Christian teaching mandatory then evidently the people have spoken and that is what the law should be, and that law should then be enforced as much as possible. Neither of us would like it, but I'm sure there were some people out there who were unhappy when the slaves were freed. Yes I'm making that comparison. We can be as sure as we like that freeing the slaves was good and enforcing religious beliefs is bad, but our own certainty doesn't make us right. People on the other side are just as certain too. That is why we have to obey all the laws, whether we like them or not, and that is why the government needs to enforce the laws even over people who voted against them.

But this is exactly what many people voted against for, watch the Youtube video Jeff linked, it shows how Obama literally lied. He wasn't just sugarcoating the truth like politicians do, he did exactly what he had promised to stop. This again brings up the lack of trust between the American government and its citizens. But also thinking that the minority is completely irrelevant when it comes to running a country is terrible, it isn't like Obama had 99% of all the votes, there are always huge groups of people who go against the actual party that wins the election. For example, in my countries resent elections the two winning parties had less then 50% of the total votes, it would be tyrannical to simply say "the people have spoken" and ignore the other 50%. People also have a right to fight for their right every second of every day, not just every four years. If there is something that their government does that is to their displeasure they should speak out, regardless of how many voted for it.

Quote from Zed

"Too many" is extremely relevant. The government is not omnipotent. They physically cannot follow up on everyone. You'd need to employ half the population of the country to investigate the other half. I'm going to address all of the points relating to evil government afterwards.

Again, you're not addressing the central point and focusing instead of hyperbole. Instead of responding to the actual meat of the argument, you instead chose to cut it out and focus on something that I've already pointed out doesn't matter. I will not comment on this because it's not relevant to the issue. The government does not have to be omnipotent for PRISM to be abused.

Quote from Zed

I'm going to say this here and I'm not going to bother repeating it for the other five times it came up. Every time I talked about a specific example my point was generalisable. I was not ignoring the general point for specific hypothetical scenarios.

You didn't do a good job getting your point across then. All I see is dodging the central issue and instead trying to smart-ass your way out of the hypothetical scenario.

Quote from Zed

Relating to the phone-sex-NSA, my general point is that it's quite clear when abuse of this nature comes up and the people responsible can be punished for it.

And MY point is that when the abuse comes from THE top level, the people who would otherwise do the punishing, there is little to no way for a punishment to occur. That's when the government needs to be taken out. You keep ignoring this.

Quote from Zed

It's not about what's related or unrelated, it's about incompleteness as a sign of defect.

Incompleteness IS a sign of defect when what's incomplete is related. When I was referring to relatedness, I was talking about how what you were snidely degrading with your remark made perfect sense in the correct context. Unicorns and gravity have nothing to do with each other, when you're detailing gravity, the existence of a fictional animal doesn't come in to question at all, ever. When you're arguing that a tool for catching terrorists AND violates human rights has never caught a terrorist therefore all it has done is violate human rights, then the incompleteness is extremely relevant as to why it has done nothing but bad things. If I had said, "This tool for catching terrorists has never discovered the Higgs Boson and is therefore bad" then maybe your analogy would work. It was a silly remark, a terrible analogy, and your logical fallacy.

Quote from Zed

To make a less abstract parody: "You hired policemen but crime still happens so your policemen are useless". "It's a matter of national security" does hold water if national security is routinely broken slightly less.

Once again the point has gone over your head. Do you just omit parts of what you read from processing? I clearly state: "When the bad outweighs the good." Does hiring a policeman impede my human rights? No. Does hiring a policeman allow for better reasonable enforcement of the law? Potentially. There is likely little to no down side to hiring a policeman. Therefore, hiring a policeman is a reasonable way to fight crime. Does PRISM allow for effective enforcement of the law? Potentially. Does it impede my human rights? Absolutely. Therefore, it is NOT a reasonable way to fight crime. It doesn't hold water if national security is broken slightly less at the expense of every single person's personal freedoms. You might be comfortable with it, but not everyone is, and given that it is an actual human right, it's not okay for anyone to take that a way.

Quote from Zed

At the moment we don't know of any terrorists who were caught by PRISM, but that's hardly surprising considering the government was denying PRISM's existence last week. Right now we don't have enough information to say whether or not PRISM has helped. Which leads nicely onto your next bit actually...

No, we don't. But we have evidence that it has already had a negative effect, and this is what matters most at the moment.

Quote from Zed

My point was that it would take a few years for it to become useful.

It's been 6 years now, and all we have are broken rights and the sheltered defending a clear violation of said rights.

Quote from Zed

As you said right at the start, are you a threat if you google "al quaeda"? Probably not, but we don't know until we've seen what proportion of people who google "al quaeda" later go on to bomb things. And we can't know that until some bombings happen. It's not that it's ineffective, it's that it hasn't matured yet.

Besides, if it's a completely ineffective tool then none of these walls of text matter anyway. It can't be used or abused if it just doesn't work.

That's silly. Of course it can. If it doesn't work at finding terrorists doesn't mean I can't abuse it to dig up dirt on you.

Quote from Zed

So why don't they charge £50,000 per infraction? It's because the punishment is meant to fit the crime.

Are you joking? There are many laws where the punishment far outweighs the crime. What about possession of weed? People end up in fucking jail for that. 15 year olds taking nude pics of themselves for personal use getting actually charged and possibly being forced to register as a sex offender... you have such an idealistic view of the world, it astounds me. Do you not actually know about any of this stuff? I'm legitimately confused about this. You say "punishments for breaking the law have to take into account the probability of getting caught, otherwise the deterrent doesn't work properly" and yet ignore factual evidence of this not applying even in existing US laws, or not taking in to account that laws exist that make no sense yet continue to be defended.

Quote from Zed

If you catch people 1% of the time with a £100 fine then the expected cost of speeding is £1. If you catch them 100% of the time with a £1 fine then the expected cost of speeding remains £1. You should give lighter sentences when you can be certain of catching people in order to keep the expected cost of crime constant. Same (if not greater) deterrent effect, less welfare loss.

Okay, say we can catch 100% of speeders so we set the fine at $1. Except, I don't give a shit about losing $1. I can afford $1. I think to myself, "Man I really am late for work, but if I rush I'll get caught and fined." But then I remember that it's only $1. In this situation, I am likely to think that I can pay the $1 because then I can speed on my way to work. If you reduce the punishment regardless of how effective it is to get caught, people are going to accept that punishment, and I have lived this. I used to kick people from IRC for spamming, and I could catch people 100% of the time on it due to scripts I have that check the rate at which messages come in. It would happen every single time, but the punishment was just being kicked. You could just join again immediately after. The result? People ignored the punishment and kept spamming anyway. Then I upped the ante, and started timebanning people for 30 seconds. People still spammed, but it went down a lot after this.

Your theory falls apart completely when you take this in to account. I HAD 100% effectiveness and it didn't do shit. The punishment needed to have a certain impact for it to get through to people, otherwise they didn't care. I would easily speed all the time if it only cost me $1. $1 is absolutely nothing, and people would realize that.

Quote from Zed

The data mining will determine whether or not it's relevant. If people who did drugs 30 years ago are no worse then anyone else then the company would be silly to exclude them. If those people are statistically worse then the company has a right to know.

I don't agree with that. This is the same reason I don't get car insurance from companies that use statistics to determine your rates. I believe in being personal, and a company should make a decision to hire someone based on who THEY are, and not who other retards that may have had a similar problem are. Do you think it's fair that young males generally have higher rates than any other person, even though that individual hasn't yet had a chance to prove who THEY are? Companies don't have a right to know anything that personal about anyone. You are basically saying it's okay for a company to get in to your facebook and sift through it for any thing they might not like about you.

Quote from Zed

No. I'm sorry but I cannot see your point here. Kim Jong Un could peruse the data to his heart's content but there is fuck all he could do with it unless someone's been reciting nuclear launch codes.

If you're talking about the data the US collected on foreign nationals then yes, maybe he could use that, but according to your reddit link the dictators are already getting that information for themselves.

He could do a lot with it, provided he finds what he's looking for. Remember PRISM isn't just tracking US citizens, they have information on everyone who has ever used most of the biggest sites on the internet, which is most countries. If someone with evil intent can find a way to use this information to their own gain

Quote from Zed

People literally apply to be in that situation. It's called reality tv. Did you notice how boring that shit gets? No one will be watching you until the data tells them they should be.

Are you fucking kidding me? Again you are completely missing the point, and relating it to a situation that doesn't even compare. Reality TV? Really? Maybe you missed the part where: 1) They know exactly what they're getting in to. 2) They can opt out at any time. 3) They aren't followed around 24/7. 4) There are ACTUAL legal restrictions for it. I can't believe you just ignored everything I said, missed the point and then said something that stupid. I'm trying not to lose respect for you, but come on. You're not even in the same ballpark here, you're in a closet with the lights off, your fingers in your ears screaming nonsense.

Quote from Zed

Whether you like it or not, law-making and law-enforcing has to be a separate debate.

Whether you like it or not, it isn't. That's all there is to it. If you're not willing to except this, then you clearly don't grasp why people are upset and will continue to live in blissful ignorance. And that is just sad.

Quote from Zed

We cannot just pick and choose which laws we want to obey.

Yes, we can, but there is a criteria. We have a right to disagree with being wiretapped against our will. We have the right to abolish an unjust law. In fact, it's in the declaration of independence:

"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."

Maybe you're comfortable simply being told what to do and blindly following it, but those of us who think freely disagree with the serious human rights violations coming from the US government. Violations that are legal, and shouldn't be.

Quote from Zed

What right do you have to say "this law is a good law and this law is a bad law"?

The right as a human. The right as someone who knows and understands my own rights. I have the ability to recognize when something is wrong because I can tell when my personal freedoms are being violated.

Quote from Zed

And it is absolutely not on the government to make their enforcement lax enough that you can break the law if you want to.

No one ever said it was. It's on the government not to make stupid fucking laws.

Quote from Zed

We can argue about whether PRISM is a cost-effective form of law enforcement (just like SOPA got shot down for being shit at its intended purpose), but you absolutely cannot argue that they shouldn't be trying so hard to enforce the law in the first place.

You're still just not getting it. It's like you see laws as irrefutably fool-proof and 100% reasonable. They shouldn't HAVE or ENFORCE laws that in themselves are wrong. Being legal to spy on your citizens is WRONG. In fact, you've already admitted this, and that was the whole reason I said that what you were saying was immoral. You've admitted that it's a bad thing to have your rights violated. Why are you even arguing any more? You said you're arguing right-to-privacy, but you're not even doing that. You're just arguing futile points that reasonable people can see past.

Quote from Zed

If the election is won by someone who makes Christian teaching mandatory then evidently the people have spoken and that is what the law should be, and that law should then be enforced as much as possible.

I take it you ignored all my links, because if you had watched at least the YouTube video with candidate Obama VS. president Obama, you'd have noticed that *GASP* people LIE in politics!!! Imagine that??? I know in your perfect world where laws are reasonable and elected officials never lie or do anything wrong it's hard to grasp, but bear with me here. Candidate Obama DIRECTLY contradicts everything President Obama says, and they're the same fucking person. People will do any say what they want to get where they are. "Having a chance to stand up every 4 years" doesn't mean SHIT when the system is clearly broken. Very CLEARLY broken. It's not unreasonable for people to be told what they want to hear and then have that person do the opposite. I'm not talking hypothetical here, this is what has happened, and if you think that's okay then again, you need to join us in reality.

Quote from Zed

But the issue was not the privacy infringement.

Tell that to the people who have an issue with the privacy infringement.

I'm terribly sorry for the spam guys, but I just want to acknowledge zed and Jeff for the fucking long as shit posts. Wow. Unfortunately I won't do the same since in on a phone. My idea on the whole subject is that I don't personally see that much of an issue as long as there are some things in place to protect the citizens if the government fuss any incriminating evidence on them that isn't relevant to terrorism. It's still an invasion to privacy, so I wouldn't want them snooping around in my affairs. There's no telling with our government.

What arch-angel said reminded me of this as well. Not only is this "tool" shitty because of the invasion of privacy, but it's also completely ineffective and simple math shows how not only is it ineffective but actually incriminates more innocent people than catches terrorists, so people who think it's okay as long as the people who aren't doing anything wrong are protected are absolutely wrong.

Recent revelations about PRISM, the NSA’s massive program of surveillance of civilian communications have caused quite a stir. And rightfully so, as it appears that the agency has been granted warrantless direct access to just about any form of digital communication engaged in by American citizens, and that their access to such data has been growing significantly over the past few years.

Some may argue that there is a necessary trade-off between civil liberties and public safety, and that others should just quit their whining. Lets take a look at this proposition (not the whining part). Specifically, let’s ask: how much benefit, in terms of thwarted would-be attacks, does this level of surveillance confer?

Lets start by recognizing that terrorism is extremely rare. So the probability that an individual under surveillance (and now everyone is under surveillance) is also a terrorist is also extremely low. Lets also assume that the neck-beards at the NSA are fairly clever, if exceptionally creepy. We assume that they have devised an algorithm that can detect ‘terrorist communications’ (as opposed to, for instance, pizza orders) with 99% accuracy.

P(+ | bad guy) = 0.99

A job well done, and Murica lives to fight another day. Well, not quite. What we really want to know is: what is the probability that they’ve found a bad guy, given that they’ve gotten a hit on their screen? Or,

P(bad guy | +) =??

Which is quite a different question altogether. To figure this out, we need a bit more information. Recall that bad guys (specifically terrorists) are extremely rare, say on the order of one in a million (this is a wild over estimate with the true rate being much lower, of course – but lets not let that stop us). So,

P(bad guy) = 1/1,000,000

Further, lets say that the spooks have a pretty good algorithm that only comes up falsely positive (ie when the person under surveillance is a good guy) one in one hundred times.

P(+ | good guy) = 0.01

And now we have all that we need. Apply a little special Bayes sauce:

P(bad guy | +) = P(+ | bad guy) P(bad guy) / [ P(+ | bad guy) P(bad guy) + P(+ | good guy) P(good guy) ]

and we get:

P(bad guy | +) = 1/10,102

That is, for every positive (the NSA calls these ‘reports’) there is only a 1 in 10,102 chance (using our rough assumptions) that they’ve found a real bad guy.

Here is the source.

Under ideal circumstances, that's 10,101 people who are labelled terrorists that are not, and the NSA's algorithm likely isn't 99% accurate. I suggest reading the rest of that article as well because it has info from an actual NSA whistleblower that backs up the statistics.

I feel that this is appropriate:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video
An interview with the whistleblower.

I cannot be fucked to go through the [quote ] process again.


I believe that it should be possible to design an ideal system, even without ideal people in it. As I said, and as you acknowledged, what has gone on with PRISM appears to be bad. However, this does not mean that a well-designed society requires a right to privacy. I know it's in the human rights act but that doesn't mean it should be. Appeal to authority is not a good argument. My argument in this post will be that if the flaws in the system were fixed there would be no issue with privacy.

First of all, your electoral system is broken. If people are completely ignoring their campaign promises then you need a system to punish them for it. One way of doing that is in the next election, but Obama has no next election (also, WHY? What the fuck were Americans thinking when they imposed term limits?) and it's also quite slow. My proposal would be that for any new law the opposition party should have the power to call a referendum if they believe it is likely to be unpopular. To prevent the system being abused, the losing party would be required to cover the costs of the referendum (which looks like it would be about 10-20% of the amount they spend on presidential elections - significant but not crippling). This doesn't directly punish a lying president, but it is a system which prevents those lies from making laws against the will of the people. This is not the only way you can do it. It probably isn't the best way. But the point is to show that there are ways for laws to be the will of the people, even though the current American system doesn't use them.

Regarding punishment for speeding, you're picking a tiny part of the example. Maybe charge them $1 per second per mph above the speed limit. Or add fractions of a percent to their tax bill so that rich people don't get more right to speed. The point wasn't that punishments should be negligible for 100% enforced offences, it was that they could be less. With your IRC example the correct punishment with 100% enforcement is 30 seconds, but if you could only catch people one time out of ten then you might have to ban people for a day to stop them doing it. Gunnii brought up rape and whether we should relax the punishment for that. I'd say it depends on how much you want your punishment as retribution and how much as deterrent. Although if people are committing rapes despite knowing with absolute certainty that they will be caught then they probably need to be isolated from society anyway. You also brought up the fact that people are being given harsh sentences for petty crimes like marijuana possession, but again, I'm not trying to give an account of how things are. I'm trying to talk about how things should be. Clearly sentences haven't been reduced as policing techniques have improved, but I believe that they should have been.

I can't remember how that issue got into our talk about privacy. I think it was something to do with how you shouldn't worry too much about minor crimes you may have committed once. We were discussing it so I thought I should address it. Anyway.

Whether or not companies should have access to information about you. Let's take a simple example about a job on the assembly line of a factory, because it's the kind of thing where it's easy to see how your productivity contributes to the company's earnings. Right now companies have no information about you. You will be paid an amount equal to the average employee's productivity. No matter how good you are, the wage you will be offered is going to be the wage they offer everyone, and that can only be as much as they expect the worker to produce. If the company has more information about you then they can get closer to paying you the right amount. Imagine that there's a training course you can take to become more productive on this assembly line. The company knows that people who have taken the training are, on average, more productive than people who haven't taken it, so they ask every job applicant whether or not they have taken the training (slightly infringing on their privacy in the process) and pay more to people who have taken the training. It's possible that one individual who hasn't taken the training is just naturally gifted and is more productive than one particularly stupid individual who has taken it, but on average they will be paying people closer to the wage that they deserve. If the information about whether or not you were trained was not available to the company then they would have to pay everyone the same, harming the good workers and benefiting the bad ones. The more information you give the company, the better they can be at determining how good you are going to be and the closer they can get to making the right decisions.

You complained about insurance companies discriminating against male drivers, but that discrimination gets them closer to charging you the right amount. I'm going to put this next sentence in bold because it's important and this is a big block of a post which you might only be skim-reading. You are always so focussed on the negatives that you miss the positive. The fact that male drivers are charged more is reflected by the fact that female drivers are charged less. Insurance companies are able to give them a discount because they know that on average they crash less. Sure, you get some reckless girls and some careful boys, but insurance companies don't yet know that in advance. If they didn't know about the male/female statistics then they would have to charge everyone the same average, which makes things less fair. You want to be charged an individual rate? The solution isn't more privacy, it's less. Those companies that collect extra driving data are literally infringing privacy in order to work out who is a good driver and who isn't. That's not them not giving you a chance to prove yourself - that's them doing their level best to make sure that you get the rate you deserve. If you want to be with an insurance company that knows nothing about you then you are going to be charged more because of bad drivers dragging the average price up.

Is PRISM an effective law-enforcement tool? As far as I am aware, we don't know. Something may have come up in the news last week - I was out of the loop. Your link which claims it's made things worse is broken for me. Regarding the fact that it will throw up more false positives than true ones, yes. That's why you don't use it as evidence, you use it as a starting point for further investigation. Is a man a terrorist if he has read lots of extremist Islamic literature online and just bought a load of fertiliser? Probably not, but I'd quite like someone to double check and I'm glad the information is available. In terms of general law enforcement, I think the ideal would be a complete blanket of CCTV cameras with technology that allowed to to track someone over a large area. If someone's house is broken into, access the CCTV from the event and ask the computers where this man is now. If it makes you feel better then you could make it so that cameras are either only in public places, or so that any cameras in a person's house are only accessible with a court order after it is known that a crime has been committed. I know that this isn't what PRISM is, but it is kind of a privacy thing. Once you eliminate privacy you make it possible to catch 100% of criminals, which leaves only crimes of passion and terrorism, and maybe some undetected fraud. Does the cost outweigh the benefit? The cost of crime in the UK is officially estimated at £59.9 billion per year. That's a couple of percentage points of GDP, just under £1000 per person. PRISM allegedly only costs $20,000,000, although getting complete CCTV coverage in every urban area would probably be a few dozen billion. Even then, the cost is paid off very quickly. Economically it wouldn't be a bad investment unless it came close to the trillions.

Is there a cost, as you claim, from the intrinsic value of privacy? Only if you're worried about abuse, and in our perfect society we've already dealt with undemocratic laws. Let cameras in private places only be accessed with a court order, and the same for using camera tracking technology. Let PRISM only look at data anonymously unless one person is identified as a potential threat, at which point investigation should be overseen by managers internally to avoid listening to phone-sex, etc. It needs to be public knowledge what data is collected, although obviously not what patterns constitute a threat.

I said I wasn't going to bother with the massive lengths of quotes but there's one thing I really need to address.

Quote from Jeff

Quote from Zed;1004486

Whether you like it or not, law-making and law-enforcing has to be a separate debate.

Whether you like it or not, it isn't. That's all there is to it. If you're not willing to except this, then you clearly don't grasp why people are upset and will continue to live in blissful ignorance. And that is just sad.

I provided a coherent logical argument for why the two debates are separate and you're just saying "no no no no no" without any kind of reasoning. The simple fact of the matter is that privacy infringement is a law-enforcement tool. It's the very basis of it. Taken to extremes you could argue that investigating the scene of a murder infringes the murderer's right for you to not know who he is. The only valid debate relating to law-enforcement techniques is whether or not they are effective. Your argument appears to be that the government shouldn't be able to know everything about you because they could misuse this information to enforce a bad law. I don't understand how you can deny that this is literally asking the government to make it possible for you to break the law. It wouldn't matter if the law in question was a ban on insulin, that is still a ridiculous argument because it defeats the very idea of "law" in the first place. A law without enforcement isn't a law at all, it's a request.



I can understand why you might be upset about not being able to break the law if the law is bad, but the solution isn't to make it possible to break the law. The solution is to prevent the existence of bad laws. In your current system you have many bad laws, but the debate about PRISM is the wrong one. You should be debating how to get rid of those bad laws which PRISM (or similar privacy-infringing systems) could enforce.

Quote from Gunnii

But PRISM isn't the ideal system, and it does not have the ideal people in it either. I don't see how a well-designed society automatically means people start having no thoughts on other snooping around their personal life. In the ideal world, people wouldn't need to worry about their privacy because there would be no reason to infringe upon it. In the ideal world, with a well-designed society, PRISM would be entirely useless.

I specified "without ideal people". I also said PRISM appears to have been bad (although I've read more about it since posting and the data collected looks to be very limited and only usable on individuals with a court order) and that my post is more about why privacy isn't good rather than why PRISM isn't bad.

This is something I have thought about much, but no matter how unfair or dumb it may seem there are no such laws in existence(for now at least). We can keep on saying "if this" or "if that" but the fact remains that in the real world things aren't this way. This is why something like PRISM is extra bad, not only is it infringing upon peoples privacy, but also the guy who allowed it to happen can't be punished for breaking his campaign promises.

[see above comment]

Obviously the punishment for a crime is a deterrent rather then retribution. People would rather have someone avoid the crime all together rather then being able to do him absolute justice. Then you go again about a hypothetical-ideal world. We aren't talking about what should, or should not have been, we are discussing what happened. Punishment for possessing marijuana shouldn't be as severe as it is, but it is. I don't think many people disagree with your ideal world example, but this kind of a world will never happen so going on about it like it somehow strengthens your arguments is a futile waste of time.

I don't see why you think it's so unrealistic. It requires one relatively small change in the law-making process and for people to understand basic statistics/economics. [and also see above again]

I'm breaking the next paragraph up so I'm putting lines in to highlight where it starts and stops.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

People should have the right of a certain amount of pay to start with. Then with time they could prove to be more useful then others and that should give them the right of more pay or a better position. This is how today's society is meant to be set up like, though the spread of wealth shows that it obviously isn't.

That's not how it works. I could go into more detail about labour economics if you like, the end result is that companies have to pay wages equal to the amount a worker produces multiplied by the value of each good, ie. the value of that employee to the company. For one thing, a company generally has a fairly good (not perfect) idea of how much an employee will produce (a pizza delivery guy does roughly 3 deliveries per hour, for example).

I don't see how a training seminar is somehow worse then the company snooping around your private life, past deeds don't always reflect the current individual.

I certainly never said it was worse. I was using it as an analogy. Whether or not you have taken the training is a fact about you. The more facts the company knows about you, the better they can gauge your productivity. Past deeds don't always reflect the current individual, but on average you can get a damn good idea. Sometimes you'll miss the mark, but taken over a large population there'll be a big gain.

These kind of background checks should only be necessary in regards to things that might potentially be harmful to your co-workers. The company being able to see what kind of porn you browse is a complete waste of time for both the one collecting the data, and the one processing it while considering whether you should get the job.

Exactly. That's why it won't be taken into account. Data sifting is done by computers which accurately determine what factors are relevant, so there wouldn't be any need to bother the HR guys with pornography information. Unless it's relevant of course, but even then it's more likely that the computer would just spit out a score for each person rather than the data itself.

Realistically of course companies would never be given this kind of information. I think I was just using it as an example of how information gathering can benefit both parties. I'm fairly sure I intended my post to be mainly about the law-enforcement benefits of privacy infringement, in which case humans would certainly never get to see the information until a suspicious pattern flared up. As is the case with PRISM at the moment. I dunno, I was pretty tired when I wrote my last post. The other possible line of argument is that once this data is available to everyone fetishes will stop being interesting, but that would be taking a ridiculously long-term view and would involve closer-to-ideal people in the system which was something I was trying to avoid.

Taking a group survey where every individual stays anonymous isn't an infringement upon their privacy. If they would start sharing the name of people it would.

Not sure where this came from so I'm going to ignore it. Quoted for the sake of completeness.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

I feel that you are sort of contradicting yourself here. On the one hand you talk about the fact that jobs should not generalize pay because individuals are different, but that does not matter when it comes to how much you pay for insurance(the surveys the insurance companies base their statistics off are generalizations about the studied group and sure as hell don't fit every individual)?
People are different, and there is no way to put anything in a one-size-fits-all perspective. People should not get payed for work, or pay for insurance, based on gender or something similar, neither should they have to give their insurance company or employee the right to go through their whole personal life. There should rather be a baseline which you then stray off of as the company collects relevant data about you. You shouldn't need to reveal your personal life to your employee or insurance company, apart from the parts that are actually relevant. PRISM did not just collect relevant information about people.

I think you've missed something. I said that it's best not to give two different groups of workers the same wage. In the same way, it's best not to give two different groups of drivers the same price. If group A is generally more productive than group B then you should offer higher wages to people from group A. If group A generally crashes more than group B then you should charge members of group A more for insurance. They're both exactly the same logic applied to different situations. It won't always be perfect but it gets you closer to the right amount than the alternative, which is to give the same rate to both A and B, benefiting the worse group and harming the better one. The more information you give, the more groups you can split people in to. We both agree on the ideal - that all individuals should be differentiated and paid/charged the exact right amount. It's just that you seem to think we can get there by magic.

"Only if you're worried about abuse" is the key thing in this debate. People are terrified of abuse. Not only is PRISM in its nature very easy to abuse, but the American government has repeatedly proven to abuse their power when it comes to gathering information about people. PRISM isn't looking at the data anonymously and the people in charge of it are, judging by history, not very trustworthy. We don't live in an ideal world, it will never happen and a tool like PRISM simply makes it to easy for the bad to rise up in people.

PRISM is looking at the data anonymously unless a specific request is made to a FISA court with grounds for suspicion. [I tried to find a source for this but I can't remember the article. Check back later.] And again, we appear to be talking about different things. Is there any reason why privacy would be necessary if the system were fixed?

I don't really have much to argue here. While I do agree that these are somewhat different subjects, saying that they are entirely separate debates is a bit far fetched. As you said "A law without enforcement isn't a law at all, it's a request.". One is directly bound to the other, saying that these are entirely separate just doesn't work out.

You could argue that the government is unable to make some laws simply because they can't enforce them. They are unable to ban humming in the shower, for instance. So in a sense, the limits of law enforcement are the limits of the law. It doesn't follow the other way though. The limits of the law should not be the limits of law enforcement. Law enforcement should be as perfect as we can possibly make it, and then the laws should be restricted by other means such as democracy.