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I'm actually surprised that the 4th Amendment isn't referenced more frequently in refutation to the asinine "nothing to hide" position.

"Nothing to hide" is thematically similar to the groan-inducing "Do you want the terrorists to win?" arguments against civil liberties, in favor of increased security measures, proferred and popularly supported in the mid-2000s. (Sadly, many of the legacies and artifacts of that position still persist).

The answer to any of these half-baked arguments should always begin with something along the lines of "Because we're better than that." Because we have a constitution that assumes we're good people, and that protects our civil liberties from invasion. Because these things are so fundamental to our nation's purpose that giving them up is much worse than being attacked. Giving them up threatens the very purpose of the country's founding.

Even to entertain these arguments, i.e., by trying to cite examples of areas of privacy or liberty that are negotiable, areas that aren't, and so forth, is to stoop low. It is to lose before the argument has actually begun. It is to accept the faulty premise that privacy is about hiding something -- that it is an active attempt to conceal information from the world. No, privacy isn't the action being taken. Invasion of privacy is the action. Privacy is simply a state of being, and one to which we have an inalienable right.

Privacy isn't something we opt into; it is something we don't even really consider until we are made, or compelled, or asked to opt out. "Nothing to hide" begs the question. It assumes, as a foregone premise, that privacy is an opt-in decision that we consciously undertake in defense of something (and that something is implied to be onerous or illegal). This is just fallacious logic, plain and simple.

It's unfortunate that a right to privacy wasn't inumerated directly in the constitution, but was instead defined indirectly. This is one of those areas where the founders really couldn't have known how far technology would go, and how important something like privacy -- which may have been taken for granted back then -- would become 200+ years later.

The "nothing to fear/nothing to hide" also goes against the Presumption of innocence[1], present in many countries' civil law.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence

The bulk of your logic makes sense, besides depending on taking "privacy is an inalienable right" as a premise. However, on a practical level...

  "Because we're better than that"

In order to fight a war[0] from a "better than that" position, you have to have vastly greater power, enough to compensate for the hobbles you put on yourself to remain "better". Otherwise, whoever fights dirtiest wins. When people are trying to kill us, how do we make up for not listening to them, without letting people die?

[0] In a loose sense. Terrorists try to kill us, and the only way to stop them is with force. A lot of the same principles apply.

The only way to stop existing terrorists may be to kill them. The things that go into stopping prospective terrorists from becoming actual terrorists are more complicated.

"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."

-- Noam Chomsky

Somebody tell Al Qaeda. I'm sure they'll listen to a reasoned debate.

But we do have vastly greater power. Terrorist groups definitely don't have a budget of 680 billion USD[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S...

While I agree with the point, raw budget comparisons are not a valid way to make it; terrorists also aren't defending such a big piece of land (and sea), and are more narrowly focused in scope as well.

The raw budget comparison is not the end of the United States' military superiority; the US has access to cruise missiles and aircraft targeting systems that allow them to put a precisely-measured dose of explosive through practically any window in the world at a few moments' notice. Meanwhile, the "terrorists" are strapping some fertilizer to a Nokia brick phone and laying it on the side of the road in the hopes that a truck will drive by so they can detonate it. The US so vastly out-matches the people it's fighting right now that they're having to write new strategic doctrine to be able to handle it. Are you really trying to make the argument that we don't have enough leeway to keep some principles in the process of defending ourselves?

Of course the raw budget comparison is not the end of the US's military superiority; I said I agreed with the parent's general point: that while additional constraints may make it harder to achieve tactical objectives, we don't have any trouble achieving tactical objectives.

My point was just that the metric being used was irrelevant to the comparison being made.

In the intelligence battle, though, how much can we afford to cut ourselves off? A large budget is of little use, unless we can spend it on surveillance equipment...

Liberty creates risk. Yes, the terr'ists may get a few of us from time to time. It's not, IMHO, worth giving up our civil liberties to prevent that.

A group of terrorists lucked into taking down two big buildings and so we have to debate whether we can afford civil liberties? The premise should be self-evidently absurd.

If we'll kill thousands of Arabs to protect freedom, we shouldn't be so eager to walk away from it for the death of a few thousand Americans.

I would also suggest that abandoning principle for expediency can be hobbling in itself. Wars aren't entirely fought by robots just yet. "Power" isn't a column in an Excel spreadsheet.

You're close here, but you're missing the big picture. It's not that the constitution assumes we're good people. It's that many of the founders were suspicious of large central governments. The anti-federalists insisted upon a bill of rights as a condition to ratification. I would assert that most of the bill of rights is about protecting the ability to of the people revolt against the government:

First Amendment - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. Ensuring that me and my buddies can get together and talk about overthrowing the government.

Second Amendment - right to bear arms. Ensuring I have the ability to inflict harm on/protect myself from government actors.

Third Amendment - right against quartering troops. Ensuring the government can't put soldiers in my house to listen to me or intimidate me.

Fourth Amendment - right against unreasonable search and seizure. The government can't come in and take my stuff unless and until I do something "wrong."

I could go on, but to my view, is all about revolution. There may be those who think we've moved to a place in society where governments like ours are benevolent and that the majority will is always right. I don't.

Maybe people think that hanging onto such rights is futile given F-16s and M1 Abrams. I think our difficulty in Afghanistan and Iraq is a pretty good refutation of that position.

Privacy is important because, without it, bad guys can make us slaves.

The second amendment talks about a well-regulated militia. That doesn't sound like it's intended to be protection against one's own government, but against invading armies.

I'd like to point out, for the benefit of others, that the term well-regulated simply meant 'effective' or 'in proper working order'. It did not necessarily mean that it should be controlled by the government.

Source:http://constitution.org/cons/wellregu.htm

What about the 'militia' part? Or the 'being necessary for the security of a free state' part?

The second amendment is saying 'we're not going to restrict arms, because we need a body of men to call on who know how to use arms, in order to maintain our independence', not 'fear your government, be prepared to shoot its representitives'.

I am not arguing that the second amendment is a provision for overthrowing the government. I really did just want to make sure everyone knew how 'well-regulated' should be interpreted since it's easy to read it naively.

Fair enough, thanks for the clarification. I was reading it still in context to the parent comment.

It's both. The second amendment is necessary to maintain the security of a free state against foreign invaders and against a government seeking to take the 'free' from the 'free state'.

Two points:

1. Notwithstanding that language, it's an individual right. See Heller.

2. Militias were, almost exclusively, the province Of the individual states. There was not until relatively recently a standing federal army. The point was to keep arms in the hands of individuals.

The Bill of Rights is a check on large centralized government. It's the whole point. Don't forget that these guys had just been through precisely such a revolution. There are some pretty striking quotes from Thomas Jefferson directly on point.

The second amendment is explicitly written to secure a right of the people against infringement by their government: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Protection against foreign armies is already provided for in Article 1 (Congress has the power to fund the military) and Article 2 (the President is the Commander-in-chief of the military.)

> Do you want the terrorists to win?

The terrorists have won if we give up our freedoms in fear of them. That is their whole tactic.

Trivial example: a traditional suit-and-tie, senior manager walks by a junior programmer's cube and sees youtube on the monitor and immediately assumes junior is slacking off, abusing company resources. He subsequently spreads negative commentary about junior to his peers.

The problem is both senior's prejudices, AND the fact that he's missing context. Junior might be watching an instructional video. It might be a break after 10 hours straight work. He might be creating videos for the company and uploading them.

In other words, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean someone who looks is going to see the whole true picture.

And that only considers accidentally taking them out of context. As the quote from Richelieu goes, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

THAT is the line that should lead off any discussion of this topic.

Anyone who's sat on either side of the table as a lawyer questions a witness will know how a selective editing of the truth can shade decisions. Reality TV shows and 60 Minutes have along, long history (and they're hardly the only ones) of shooting a great deal of footage, then splicing and editing it together in a way as to tell the story they want to tell.

This is part of a larger topic I'm starting to formulate about power. The key in power isn't to have more total resources than the other side, but to identify the key points from which you can control the outcome. William Gibson noted that the future isn't evenly distributed. Neither are are power and control points.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAe3FpLGvBY

I'd be interested in a reality show where the episodes were all drawn from the same footage, but each one has a different `slant'.

Plus, if politicians have nothing to hide, why do they fight Wikileaks? Why don't they publish all administrative documents, accountancy books, meeting reports, etc? Those who push surveillance policies refuse to eat their own dog food. They're hypocrites.

The bigger problem with "nothing to hide" is that it implies that what currently qualifies as right or wrong will hold in the future.

And while people in the US like to take for granted that democracy inevitably marches towards freedom, that simply isn't always so.

There's no guarantee that what was once illegal or suitable grounds for harassment by the community and authorities won't become so again.

"Harmless" records of yourself enjoying alcohol, common recreational drugs, listening to certain brands of music, interacting with currently-legitimate political parties or activist groups -- all could one day be held against you and be found as grounds to have authorities and/or the wider community harass, arrest or otherwise sanction you.

That argumet is seldom present in these discussions and it's the one I value the most.

A coup is never off the table.

1. Privacy and secrets are necessary because our society demands it. My identity is crucial for me to be able to borrow money, obtain a bank account, sign papers. I am therefore entitled to privacy to my own date of birth, mother's maiden name and a host of other so called "secrets".

2. Privacy also reduces the chance I will be discriminated against. If you've lived in a country where the law decides whether you are allowed to purchase land based on your religious beliefs, then you'd appreciate that the less people know about you, the less they can prejudge you.

3. Private conversations allow ideas to be discussed and discarded if they turn out to be wrong or worse still turn out to have ethical issues attached. If every thought are treated as a matter of public discourse that can be held against you in the future, then people will be keeping their mouth shut.

4. One only have to look at how "suspected symphatizers" were killed when South Vietnam fell, to understand that privacy allows people to keep their heads low, and should the environment turn nasty, to stay out of trouble.

"In this much-discussed subject, I'm surprised that two huge points never arise"

Actually those points come up in pretty much every book about privacy. Your first point is heavily discussed in Jeffrey Rosen's book The Unwanted Gaze, and your second point is sort of the point of Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear. See also any of Daniel Solove's books.

To point 1, that's how all laws work. The person breaking the law rarely gets to decide the legality of their action. Even with a warrant, the suspect isn't the one determining right and wrong.

To point 2, I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. I'm somewhere near the nothing to hide camp, but it's just a matter of picking battles and honestly not expecting everything I do to be private. I do not benefit in any way from wiretapping.

I draw the line as anything some guy with a fake mustache following me around could observe is fair game. I expect my "letters" to be private, my goings about in public spaces are not.

The article does a good job of bringing up processing power and collation of info, which is a concern. Overall though, I'm more worried about actions taken based on intel than on intel gathering itself. You are always going to be broadcasting some "signal", so let's focus on the active use of such data, rather than the passive gathering.

I would contest that even in a public space you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy to accept anything less is to concede defeat the in entire argument. For example if I trip over my shoelaces while walking along a street then my feelings of embarrassment are confined to the passers-by that witnessed the event. If someone happens to video the event and posts it on YouTube to everyones amusement then I would say that was a gross violation of my privacy.

hmmm, so nobody should be allowed to record video in public? I mean, what if I'm recording my friend's party in the park and you trip in the background. Am I allowed to upload the video? Do I have to edit you out first? What if I upload the video figuring you're anonymous in it, but then a friend of a friend recognizes you and edits out just the highlights? This argument can be carried to extremes; I just prefer to draw the line at public spaces are public, which even if it's not the best demarcation, is at least fairly black and white.

Regardless of that, I was talking about monitoring, not broadcasting. If the police cameras record what happens on every street corner and the video is archived for potential review, I think that's quite different than live streaming to the internet. Almost all of these arguments hinge on the police watching something, and then doing something unpleasant. Maybe the doing is inevitable, but I don't think that's a foregone conclusion, so therefore I also don't think such what if scenarios are slam dunk indictments of monitoring itself.

A "reasonable expectation" can only ever be a standard for conduct rather than a law. The important part of this perspective is that members of the general public are allowed to conduct their affairs without monitoring or intrusion by default, a baseline if you like. From there it become much easier to determine whether people in positions of authority have a credible need for surveillance. In the free-for-all, unless explicitly banned, world that we have today this is impossible to control.

It seems to me that this point of view is becoming less and less common - now that most people have cameras in their pocket, we're starting to lose the intellectual distinction between "seeing" and "recording", and without that it's hard to have any nuance about what you are and aren't allowed to do with video you captured in public. Eventually, there will be new social norms about it, but for now, you must expect that "in public" means "potentially seen by any person on Earth"

The problem is one of erosion. Your privacy is slowly eroded while the government's privacy remains strong. There's always a reason to collect more data on people, citing the usual tired arguments (kiddie porn, terrorism, drugs) to further those goals. This is very much a power game, and if you're not willing to fight to maintain your power, you will lose it.

Then comes the problem of how this information is being used against you. Since you're now more of an open book, and the government is opaque-as-usual, you can't know how they're using your information in many cases, or even how it's affecting your life. Sure, you can send FOIA requests, but then you need to know WHAT to ask for, and even that kind of information is a jealously kept secret, and such requests can be vetoed on "security" grounds. You simply cannot know EVERYTHING that they're doing, but they sure as hell want to know everything that YOU'RE doing.

It's like poker, except you have to show all your cards and you're not allowed to see theirs.

Exactly. The "public surveillance cameras" in the UK mentioned in the article (although the number is probably a slight exaggeration) have now been turned against us further. So instead of being used to protect the public, they are now being used to raise money for the government by issuing tickets for traffic violations such as illegally parking. I such a ticket for stopping in a bus pick up area for less than 30 seconds whilst a passenger got out. It may all start off with good intention but it's exactly how their long term agenda is snuck in.

Here is someone who has nothing to hide: a naked man, without a family, with no money, and no possessions.

With but a few extreme outliers, everyone in a civilized society has something to hide.

Even that person could have a backstory that causes people to give him good will where something hidden could affect him from getting a place to sleep, smiles/encouragement from strangers, etc (ie could be a war vet who unknowingly did something that should have caused him to be dishonorably discharged.)

The second point did arise in the article (sort of):

"They [privacy problems] affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives."

Point 1 is brought up all the time, and it's not the viewer who has the final say, it's a (theoretically objective) court.

As a practical matter, getting to court and fighting a case is often so expensive that the viewer's determination may be effectively final. However, your comment assumes the worst and then works backward in search of a logical antecedent.