Les Bonnes Choses

Tada! All it took was a little bit of asshattery to bring me to the keyboard again.

Today I'm going to talk about something that was covered in one of my intro-psych classes that I probably zoned out on: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Go ahead. Check out the link in a new window. The stuff at the bottom: that's less negotiable than the stuff at the top. In other words, if you die before reaching Nirvana, that's maybe not so bad compared to, say, living the last few years of your life with CF and being unable to breathe. Note the second tier from the bottom: your immediate survival doesn't hinge on these things, but they come in a close second, and impact that lower tier in many important ways. Note also that just about every item in this second tier is a hot-button political topic. That's actually quite interesting. If you're at all interested in pursuing politics, you should probably make a mental note about that.

Anyways, I always thought the small-c conservative side was all about reducing the size of government. That is, unless, you're talking about a needlessly expensive and onerously invasive program that, if nothing else, at least gives the impression that the reigning party has got your back on at least one of these second tier items.

A quote from the linked article:

"In the U.S., interceptions have become a business model, so there are cases where large telecommunications companies have set up entire branches where 200 employees sit in a room, and all they do is assist law enforcement with interception and monitor requests, but they make money on every request that comes in."

In other words, he says, the government is paying private companies to spy. 

 This strikes me as wrong on so many levels. First, suppose the Canadian government follows this model, and allows private companies to conduct surveillance. For profit. Capitalism works like this: an entity provides a good or service for money with the intention of minimizing the cost of providing the good or service, and maximizing the price charged. And when shareholders are involved, the market has inexplicably decided that the best model to follow is the one adopted by aggressive cancers: if you aren't continually growing, you're failing. So what's a board of directors to do? Well, for one thing, they're going to want to charge as much as possible for this service. And for another, well, I'm sure you can find a friend who has worked in a call center. Ask them if they would recommend it as a career choice. Also ask them what proportion of their coworkers they would trust to keep the streets safe.

Even if this service is run entirely as a non-profit endeavour, if you authorize 200 people to poke around people's emails and skype conversations, that's 200 chances for some idiot to use ILOVEYOU for a password. I'd give it 3 years, tops, before either a disgruntled former employee makes the news or else one of these snooping centers is hacked.

And finally, the fact that the cost of this exercise is going to be borne by taxpayers and consumers (who are also taxpayers, so they get to pay up twice) reminds me somewhat of the good old mobster scenario where a couple of goons bring their victim out to the middle of nowhere and toss them a shovel. Not only is the victim going to get a slug between the eyes, but he also has to put in the work to dig his own grave.