Legal Creep, or Why Privacy Matters

It's the legal creep of many, many laws like this. Pass a law that circumvents the law to break up the Mob back in the 40s, used to go after anti-Vietnam War protestors in the 60s and low-level drug offenders in the 80s and beyond.

Hell, even the smallest example works:

When Mandatory Seatbelt laws were put into effect the public were promised they were only for Insurance purposes (insurance wouldn't cover you if you weren't wearing one). They called people who brought up the idea of "Seat Belt Checkpoints" "Fear mongers." Within 5 years of the law passing the police started setting up Seat Belt Checkpoints to ensure motorists were wearing their seatbelt. Today we have "Click it or Ticket" and cops will pull you over if they see you driving without one. No one questions it because a Seatbelt does make you safer. And perhaps you agree with the law as is, but that's beyond the point. The point was promises were made about how the law "would never be used" when it was initially passed, and it's used exactly that way today.

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There is a logical fallacy called "Reductio ad absurdum" or "Reduced to the absurd". Whenever someone raises a fear about how the law could potentially be used those proposing it accuse them of Reductio ad absurdum. Using the absurdly dramatized versions of how authorities could do something, but never would waste their time.

IE if you told those proposing the use of military style weapons, tactics, and vehicles against "hardcore drug kingpins and traffickers" back in the 1990s that one day those laws would be used to send a military chopper and a SWAT team with assault rifles after a 90 year old woman with a single marijuana plant... you'd be told you were using a reductio ad absurdum argument. That that characterization of what the laws could potentially be used for was absurd, and you were a frivolous person to make such an argument.

However (as those who were on Reddit yesterday saw) that's exactly what happened. And it happens with frequency now, military level force against low-level drug users.

Legal creep always always always happens. Its impossible to prevent future lawmakers and authorities from abusing a law passed with good intentions if it makes their abusive actions legal.

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So authorities pass a law to reduce privacy rights and go after Pedophiles, Child Pornographers, Terrorists, and Human Traffickers. They say that those privacy reductions will never be used for other things, and promise to monitor themselves. And they say anyone who argues against the privacy reductions is protecting terrorists and pedophiles. Then a few years later we have this, the Government Computers logging and reading every email sent regardless of content and it is perfectly legal for them to do so. And even still if you argue against it the argument is "so you want to protect terrorists and pedophiles?! Do you really think the government cares what your email to grandma said? Don't be a cook man, it's a small sacrifice of privacy in order to make sure terrorists and pedophiles are caught."

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