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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be the security is not important if you aren't doing anything wrong guy.... but I use a printer to do things like print a picture for my kid to color. What the hack are you doing with you printer to need pre dotted paper?

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Your kid, enjoys the nice things in life in part thanks to the thankless work of activists. Lot's of freedoms we have today are because of people who put themselves under great risks to benefit the rest of us. They might be printing pictures for their kids or evidence of powerful entities doing things they shouldn't be doing.

So it's nice that you print stuff for your Kid, but what about those who print for societies sake?

That's the most important argument. The second has to do with the vast number of different kinds of abuses that will occur--that you previously couldn't even imagine would--when we give up our privacy^1

[1]-https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/09/police-ro...

I'll be honest. I like to reserve the ability to one day do something "criminal", if I have to. If I'm desparate and have to feed my family, and have no other option, I'd like to be able to resort to petty fraud. If the government in my country turns more authoritarian, and into a dictatorship, I'd like to be able to break some laws, too. I can imagine how a printer might be useful in either case.

Also, many things that are legal now, are only so because people have been blazing the trail by breaking laws before. Think marijuana, homosexuality, ... heck even things like religious freedom, freedom of speach, democracy a few hundred years ago.

The idea isn't that everyone needs this privacy every day. The problem is that someone will need this privacy one day and this monitoring will have made it impossible. Think whistle-blowing, anonymous tipping. Think challenging the power in place.

I heard that quote in a Snowden interview though perhaps he was quoting someone else: it's not because one has nothing controversial to say that one shouldn't support free speech.

I'm just not sure printer dots is the fight to make. So many other fights. Snowdon as far as I know never printed off documents. So not sure how it would apply to him.

printing documents that could expose government corruption, without fear of backlash or even death?

If we all lived in a perfect world then we wouldn't need a way to print things without being tracked.

It's about making "hard to track" the norm, not the exception.

Similar ideas apply when using Tor, VPNs, do-not-track, etc for "innocent" internet browsing.

I don't even own a printer myself. However, I don't think you need to be doing something wrong to not want to be tracked by others.

Isn't this just another "If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide" argument?

I need pre-dotted paper so that the next Reality Winner or the next Edward Snowden can print documents showing unconstitutional government activity without fear that the dots will give them up.

Why wouldn't I want pre-dotted paper?

It is the principle of the thing. You know, live free and all that jazz.

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