What Are the Costs of the Surveillance State

THE WORST STEWARD

While I love the environment and wish that my children and their children, etc…have a healthy environment in which to live – I know that the government is the ABSOLUTE WORST STEWARD OF THE ENVIRONMENT.

Not only does “common ownership” bring problems of diffusion of responsibility.  There are no incentives to preserve resources unless they are owned by private entities who have a stake in the capital value of the property or resource.

A similar situation exists when the government “owns” resources and leases out the rights to extract them.  It is in the interest of those leasing to extract as much as possible in the amount of time allotted – and since they do not own the property (just what they can extract) they have no interest in preserving the capital value.

See Murray Rothbard for more on this:

Also see the Antony Sammeroff of the Scottish Liberty Podcast on this:

This is all to make the point state above:

The government IS the absolute worst steward of the environment.


 

SCARE STORIES

Couple what we know about the government above, and the penchant for the left for wanting to preserve the environment.

They even had scare-stories about the “environmental impact of spam email”:

Internet security firm McAfee reports that the 62 trillion junk e-mails sent in 2008 gobbled up enough electricity to power more than 2.4 million homes for a year.

Spammers be damned: Junk e-mail is a huge waste of energy – Scientific American – (April 16, 2009

And the environmental impacts of “the Internet” itself:

The internet releases around 300m tonnes of CO2 a year – as much as all the coal, oil and gas burned in Turkey or Poland, or more than half of the fossil fuels burned in the UK.

What’s the carbon footprint of … the internet? – The Guardian (August 12, 2010)

And the solution is always a tax or more control:

Here’s one radical idea: a tax of a penny or cent per message sent. Obviously this wouldn’t be ideal from the perspective of digital access, and it might be impossible to implement. And no-one likes an extra tax. But it would surely kill all spam instantly. The funds could go to tackling world poverty, say, or to help unlock a global emissions deal by supporting adaptation and technology transfer payments. The world’s carbon footprint would go down by a substantial 20 million tonnes even if genuine users didn’t change their habits at all. The average user would be saved a couple of minutes of their time every day and an annual fund of up to £170bn would be made available.

What’s the carbon footprint of … email? – The Guardian (October 21, 2010)


WHAT ARE THE COSTS OF THE SURVEILLANCE STATE

If the stories from nearly 10 years ago are to be believed; and the amount of data being used having grown exponentially ever since:  what impact does government spying have on the environment?

From revelations by Edward Snowden about PRISM where nearly every transmission is split and siphoned off (does this double the bandwidth required?  More?) to the new revelations from Vault 7 where audio and video may be transmitted from your devices, not only without your consent, but without your knowledge; all the while using ever more bandwidth.

How much slower is the internet as a result of this?  What burden does this put on providers?  What negative impacts are a result of all of this additional bandwidth use?

Where is the left on this?  

Shouldn’t this be their new global warming/cooling/climate change/save the whales/hybrid electric/you can’t choose your lightbulbs or shower heads/recycling/etc… cause?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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