If you remove the tech from dropping of atomic bombs, you still have firebombs, gas attacks, and myriad other weapons that may or may not be considered either war crimes or simply too destructive to allow. You can still extrapolate and / or build analogies from the older models to the new one.
Why can't we remove the tech in this context? Is the issue that the tech allows surveillance of public conversation to happen cheaply at scale, and that creates a fundamentally different scenario from someone saying things in public being overheard? Because I'd argue it does not; if one says things in public one should expect authorities to overhear the thing too because they're also in public.
One simple difference that jumps out to me straightaway is the a gaping gulf between "decided to check it out" and "wrote down the names of everyone there and stuck it in a state-owned filing cabinet"
People aren't taking umbrage with the cops knowing there is a protest, or attending one, you're right, that would be unreasonable.
> you still have firebombs, gas attacks, and myriad other weapons
All are post colonial-era technology.
By analogy to your argument, if we can only address surveillance as if colonial-era technology was used, then we can only address military actions that way. What if someone set off a colonial-era explosive? Not a big deal, right?
I think I see what you mean if we're talking morality. If we're talking law, this is exactly the rabbit-hole people end up going down trying to justify or un-justify the Second Amendment in an era where the weapon is a 60-to-1 force multiplier for body count, not a 1.5-to-1 (in that if two men approach you with a knife, and you have a colonial rifle, you can probably reliably shoot one of them and then you're on equal footing with the other).
The law has all kinds of pockets where they wrote it when people were on horseback... But it still applies.
> The law has all kinds of pockets where they wrote it when people were on horseback... But it still applies.
That's not how it works. It can't be ignored, but even words change meaning over years (and are often imprecise to begin with). The Supreme Court changes intepretations - a lot, recently.
You actually really can’t extrapolate too much from existing weapons when the nuke was dropped. The singular, overwhelming devastation of that one weapon radically altered international politics forever.
Tech might change scale, but we still had surveilence, secret police, masacares, etc in olden times.
If anything, in olden times many of these types of things were considered normal. As hard as it might feel like it is to see it, we have come a very long way when it comes to morals of wars & state violence. If nothing else at least we mostly feel like its "wrong" now.
I didn't claim otherwise and it's irrelevant to my point, regardless. The point is that you can't exclude technology from the issue - surveillance with modern tech and with pre-industrial tech are very different things. Now you can do almost complete surveillance of the population (just track phones and you know everywhere everyone goes).
(Also, where and when specifically are you talking about? The 1950s US? State intelligence agencies didn't really exist, afaik, before maybe the (20th century?).)
I'm just saying these issues aren't new. One of the reasons the us had limited domestic intel services back in the day is that they were scared of this sort of thing.
As an example the surveilence practised by soviets or east germany was much more invasive despite not having phones.
I'm saying they are new, because the technology is different - like saying 'transportation isn't new' when comparing horses and airplanes. The technology is inseparable from the issue.
> One of the reasons the us had limited domestic intel services back in the day is that they were scared of this sort of thing.
Do you have evidence of that? Many people are scared of it now, and that does limit it to some degree, but not a lot.
> As an example the surveilence practised by soviets or east germany was much more invasive despite not having phones.
They were enabled by technology far more advanced than the colonial era. They did have phones and they tapped them, tapped rooms, etc., and used communication tech to centralize and disseminate the information, as well as using mass communication to implement propaganda.
If we remove the tech from the dropping of the atomic bombs, what's the big deal?
You can't remove the tech; it is intrinsic to the issue.