Making a public post is like standing on a soap box in the park. If you and I go to the pub and I tell you that the Mayor is a crook, then that's between us. If I stand on a soap box and shout that the Mayor is a crook then that's slander and I should either have to prove it or I should be sanctioned.
And yet, once the technology is mature enough (it may already be, just not that cheap too deploy yet), I'm sure the government will integrate CCTV cameras with microphones that can listen in on private conversations between individuals and analyze that in real-time.
I'm also sure the government will shamelessly make the argument that because you're telling something to a friend in a "public place" it means it's not a private conversation, so it's fair game for mass-collection and real-time analysis. It may have already made this argument in some court cases, but I don't recall exactly.
Similarly, your private Facebook posts are already compromised.
What the court does is muddy the distinction between a theoretical reasonable expectation of privacy and the actual expectation of privacy resulting from how things currently are.
As in, I expect conversations in my car to be private, but if all cars had microphones with cell connections my government would argue that I can't expect privacy because clearly my environment already has privacy-compromising features. [0]
It's cyclical and deceitful and until we stop playing ball and change the language, the farce will continue.
To me the issue is proportionality and scale - for example if one person a year out of 100M is suspected of plotting to introduce a killer virus to the general population then (provided the suspicion is reasonable based on evidence) I feel that very few people would object to this kind of surveillance. No more than they would object to the idea that you might be talking directly to someone who has decided to become a federal witness in order to stop you.
On the other hand if the government turns on all connections and starts to bulk process all of them to find "interesting" discussions, and then complies dossiers based on these which are then used to determine probabilities of behaviours... and issue sanctions, constraints and awards based on these.. Well. My bet is that almost everyone would object.
Somewhere between these two extremes, absolute surveillance and extremely limited state power lies the correct position. My own view is that it should be much closer to the limited position than state omniscience, the core question is do you want freedom, or do you want safety. In the modern world you (I, anyone) can't have an absolute of both. Absolute freedom would result in the dominance of lunatics with assault rifles (cf. anywhere in the modern world where state power collapses). Absolute safety means that your neighbours and family will regularly face state sanction - even if by some chance you don't.
The fly in the ointment is that I fear that state omniscience is stable in that a society run in that way could continue indefinitely. On the other hand the extreme of liberty (given assault rifles) is clearly not sustainable (in that school, hospital, roads, power, water, cannot be delivered). So we may see a world in which a core territory (China) is run by big brother and a periphery (to steal William Gibson's term) is allowed to seethe and boil in anarchy.
To avoid this we need to develop civil society and generally learn to get along with each other, and we need to punctuate this with action to lock up lunatics and psychos who are taking advantage of us. We also need to find a way to neutralise a core that is seeking to actively destabilise the periphery. Interestingly I think that HN is one of the very few places where this kind of action can be developed.
This is legitimate if the people being watched have bona fide suspicion of criminal intent, and if the extent of surveillance is proportionate to the social threat.
