Wow, all that effort to maintain the appearance of an argument while agreeing with the exact point I was making all along!
I don't think so. Either you stated your original point unclearly; I understood it imperfectly; or you're cherry-picking my responses, removing qualifiers and nuances, to make it appear as if I was agreeing with you.
Bottom line: Freedom means allowing others to do what they want, even if it's something you don't appreciate or with which you don't agree. (Paraphrased from something I read on Vox, years ago.) It is properly constrained only by "Your right to swing your fist stops at my nose." Thus I'm free to pursue my interests as I see fit, so long as they don't infringe on the rights of others to do the same.
We
do agree that prior restraint is an unfortunate necessity, "because people." Where we diverge, drastically, is in the end justifying the means.
... I suspect you enjoy the verbal tussle, ...
I do!
... and perhaps the sound of your own voice just a little bit. Tell me I’m wrong.
*tsk* Shall we do a word count of our respective posts to this thread to see which of us has the higher average word count?
Good point. The presumption of innocence is a core principle of our legal system, and this is quite likely the real heart of the issue for many people here. I agree with this principle by the way, but see my response to your next point.
The point I made to which you're responding does not speak at all to the presumption of innocence. It speaks to the right of one to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches," regardless of
who wishes to conduct the searching. More succinctly: The right to be left alone.
Okay… So, ethics would ‘demand’ one take action only if and when one happens to stumble over ‘it’.
I did not claim that at all. I
clearly wrote
my ethics demand I don't go poking around in other peoples' stuff to see if maybe they're doing something with which I disagree.
An analogy. This may be before your time, but only as recently as a couple decades ago or so, homosexuality was still widely-regarded as an aberration, immoral, etc. in most of the U.S., and engaging in homosexual... uh... "relationships" illegal in most U.S. jurisdictions. Civil libertarians (among which I count myself) took the position of "What happens between two consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedrooms is neither the government's nor my business." That did not mean all civil libertarians necessarily had any particular opinion on the morality of homosexuality. It meant, simply, they felt it none of their business.
There’s burying one’s heads in the sand at one extreme, and Orwellian surveillance at the other, and a very blurry and contentious line somewhere in-between.
I take issue with "burying one's head in the sand" as a characterization of people who do not wish to have demanded of them their papers on the off chance they don't have a right to be where they are.
Let’s be honest here—Apple knows that CSAM is proliferating on their servers.
No, they
believe or
suspect it, but they cannot
know it. Likewise, certain U.S. legislators, the NCMEC, and other activists
believe or
suspect it, but they cannot
know it. What they want is for Apple to go on a fishing expedition to validate their assumptions.
In law, believing or suspecting a thing does not rise even to the level of reasonable articulable suspicion, much less probable cause. There are reams of U.S. Court decisions affirming this.
Now you may be inclined to argue "But that applies to law enforcement. Apple is not law enforcement." To which I would respond with two arguments: 1. If Apple is being coerced into the action by elements of the U.S. government, as has been reported (for whatever the hell
that's worth), I'd argue it's a distinction without a difference. 2. Is the NCMEC not essentially an agent of the U.S. government?
From Wikipedia:
The
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (
NCMEC) is a private,
nonprofit organization established in 1984 by the
United States Congress. In September 2013, the
United States House of Representatives,
United States Senate, and the
President of the United States reauthorized the allocation of $40 million in funding...
And up till now, they’ve been playing the ‘wise monkey’ who knows it’s much easier to sell a nice simple marketing message like ‘what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone’ than to publicly admit they have a problem and a responsibility to address it.
And, again, I'll argue: It's no more Apple's responsibility to address my use of the products I've purchased from them than it is a manufacturer of any other product.
An analogy: Driving while impaired by alcohol is a known problem. Would you be comfortable with all automobile manufacturers being coerced by your government into installing breathalyzers in all automobiles to prevent their owners from operating them until they've proven they're not impaired?
A bricks-and-mortar retail store has staff, and each of those staff have eyes, and you understand that when you enter the store, ...
False equivalency. For one: You're on their property, not yours. Secondly (and I concede this is an argument based on assumption, therefore a logical fallacy): They're interested in preventing loss-of-revenue due to theft, more than actual crime, per se.
Apple has proposed a technology here which is more like the shop door scanners.
No, because they're placing the scanner on
my property, not theirs. If they were doing the scanning on their servers your analogy would hold.
[N.B.: Very, very poor analogy follows]
There are people who strongly object to the practices employed at Costco and Sam's Club of checking shoppers' carts when they're on the way out. Some of these people object so strongly they refuse to give these stores their custom. What Apple wants to do would be roughly equivalent to stationing these people on customers doorsteps or in their cars.
In both scenarios: If I don't like the scanners on their property, I can avoid them by the simple expedient of staying off their property. But, if they place their scanners on my property, I cannot
assuredly avoid them.
(Please don't argue "But if you don't..." That would be begging the question. Which would, in turn, oblige me to make a slippery slope argument. Which would, in turn... I don't think we need to go there
again, do we?)
