Schmidt and Google claim to be "progressive" but that kind of rationale of "nothing to hide" would mean that every progressive movement would have been shut down in its early stages had this kind of tech and surveillance been available at the time because it went against what was currently judged as right by the people in power
It's the classic dilemma: "People ask 'Can we do this?' and rarely ask 'Should we do this?'"
I don’t see how this implies anything about a particular political ideology being more virtuous. Why would you even think that?
Nobody thinks they're evil, people can rationalize all sorts of crazy behavior.
I do, because evil is banal. Rationalizing crazy behavior is what evil usually looks like. Larger evils occur when "trivial" problems are ignored, allowing the deviant behavior to be normalized. Intentions are not relevant, because it's easy to rationalize away the craziest of behaviors.
"No one involved in an extralegal activity thinks of themselves as nefarious. I'm a businessman, okay?" - Quark, DS9 S6E25