Comment by freeopinion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeopinion | Hacker News Reader

I would be interested in learning the thoughts of those who have thought deeply about the role of anonymity in democracy.

I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?

My interest is not one sided. I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy. But I also have an intuition that institutional privacy for a government is harmful to democracy. I think most would argue that a reasonable amount of governmental privacy is important to national security. I tend to favor the bare minimum. Most people I know disagree with me on that. I enjoy exploring both sides and trying to move beyond intuition for my position.

Any links or references to reasoned arguments on all sides are appreciated.

> I am intrigued how often people with the attitude that if you aren't don't anything wrong you shouldn't mind being observed apply that philosophy in only one direction. I see people who are upset that Snowden would leak and provide visibility into government actions, but don't blink that the revealed actions were actually the government spying on its own citizens. So governments are entitled to privacy, but their citizens are not?

I am strongly in the pro individual privacy camp FWIW, but I'm bored so I'll take a stab at steel-manning the premise that governments are entitled to privacy while individual people are not:

One of the obligations of governments is military defense. Governments are required to protect their people and the reality of war necessitates the keeping of some secrets. Failure to recognize this reality would constitute an abdication of their duty as a government. On the other hand, private persons are not permitted to wage war (this is why governments are obliged to defend their people, because they forbid people from doing it themselves.) Since people are not allowed to wage war on their own, the "realities of war" justification for governments keeping secrets doesn't justify people keeping personal secrets.

Rebuttal to the above: throughout history and particularly in the 20th century, tens of millions of people were killed by their own government. While governments may need to keep some secrets to effectively defend their population against external threats, people also need the right to keep secrets from their government to defend themselves against that domestic threat, which is every bit as real and concerning as the external threats.

Thank you. I appreciate the effort.

Counter point: You characterize military actions as "defense", but personal actions as "war". If individuals are not permitted to defend themselves, neither should governments be allowed to wage war.

In fact, individuals are allowed to defend themselves. Even something as simple as a door lock is a means of defense. Are they not allowed to keep their lock combination secret? I think this is the type of secrecy most people are willing to afford the government. They don't want everyone to know the launch codes for the nuclear weapons.

But let's take some different examples. I think that the government should have to disclose how much they pay to develop a new park. I don't think I should have to disclose how much I paid for my new patio. But if I don't disclose that information, how can we be sure the lumber supply store is paying its fair share of taxes?

I think the government should have to disclose that they produced and distributed specific propaganda. I don't think I should have to disclose the same. Is that fair?

> I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy.

I don't think this is true. People need social pressure of some kind to cooperate. It could be positive pressures like getting positive feedback from peers, or negative feedback in the form of shame from peers.

Authenticity is important here, to ensure that one's peers can provide accurate feedback (both positive and negative). Anonymity breaks this model, allowing people to pretend to have one viewpoint in order to reap the positive rewards, while simultaneously allowing them to dodge the negative feedback for antisocial behaviors.

You needn't look further than the behavior of pseudonymous commenters on the Internet to see this play out. So many "normal" people are capable of being complete assholes online because they're able to hide those actions from those who can impose social consequences.

I mean, if I found out a close friend was the kind of person who demonstrates the kind of casual cruelty that online trolls exude, I might stop being their friend.

That's not too say that the benefits of privacy are all bad. Vulnerable people certainly benefit greatly from privacy, especially in adversarial environments... But perhaps the answer in less adversarial environments (i.e. direct/indirect democracies) more often isn't "more privacy", but "less judgement"?

The other framing for this question involves trust. Anonymity undermines trust, but trust is _required_ for coordinated action. From this perspective isn't pretty obvious that democracies and privacy pursue opposing goals.

Put differently, when it comes to voting, I don't think it's a good idea to incentivize lying--or worse still, actively promote it as a positive. If making votes public causes negative externalities, perhaps there are solutions other than "let people lie about how they vote"?

Not all anonymous behavior is antisocial. Take, for example, people who sheltered Jews during WWII. I suppose by some definition this is antisocial if you define "antisocial" as bucking local society. But by that definition democracy always leads to antisocial outcomes.

This quote from George Bernard Shaw highlights the value of some "antisocial" behavior and seems like a rather democratic ideal:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Some people can be publicly unreasonable. We have unpleasant names and consequences for such people, as you demonstrate. Other people can be privately unreasonable.

If all progress depends on the unreasonable man, isn't there value in facilitating cowards to be unreasonable? Obviously a great deal of damage is also done by unreasonable people. But I suspect that the balance of a few heros outweighs the many villains and it is better to err on the side of individual privacy.

I just wonder why I promote individual privacy while discouraging government privacy. What arguments can be made for or against that seeming contradiction?

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