Can we still recover the right to be left alone?
thenation.com
thenation.com
I was minding my own business, pack in, pack out, with not a soul in sight. And out popped a park ranger, the first person I had seen in days, asking me if I had a permit to exist in the wilderness.
No, no I did not. Sorry for the terrible intrusion of existing. Then he went up to write an order that I had 2 days to get off the public land, with it being a 2 day hike out. Before handing it, he wanted an address I had none. Apparently this somehow broke his brain. The dude would literally not let me go until I came up with an address, even though I legitimately had none.
We have this for some public lands. It doesn't work for all of them. Our National Parks would fail at their conservation mission if everyone were allowed to break trail, for instance. (You'll also see rampant poaching if refusing to provide ID or an address for a citation turns into a get-out-of-jail-free card.)
National Parks are completely over-run with millions of people from all over the world, it would utterly destroy the environment to not limit the number of people that access it and how they access it. They have to keep ratcheting up the restrictions because of extreme levels of demand that cannot be reasonably met.
National Forests and wilderness areas are somewhere in the middle. You can buy a general pass to use them but there are local restrictions on what you can do and some popular areas require additional limited-availability permits for backcountry camping and similar to manage the number of people occupying the land at any one time.
In this case, it seems like the ranger is being a bit of a dick. I’ve never been hassled in the National Forest backcountry of the Cascades in regions that require no special permit, just a cheap general pass that I buy every year that technically permits that usage. I did once get a ticket from a rural sheriff for not parking far enough off the shoulder on a forestry road when I went camping.
So I'm arguing to leave people more alone, which is more anti-authority.
It's really hard for me to put into words the cultural rift, but it's almost like aliens colliding, the only solution I have found is to live in a different world and try to tread carefully away from theirs. By identifying a few topics like "is it wrong to exist in remote undeveloped public forest without a permit" I can immediately identify the sort of people I have irreconcilable differences with.
It was never a serious position, and all the raging about i.e. above poster paranoid about pronghorn movement while apparently being oblivious people were likely legally hunting the damn things in the wilderness areas they're thinking of, since the law apparently allows killing them but not a .00001% chance you spook one inadvertently into moving into a wolfs mouth. I cannot even begin to get on the level of someone like that,they may as well be aliens to me the rift is so severe.
Its helpful to understand the intended purpose of something before calling for its removal.
They also forget this one little story their "savior" (the son of god, the one true king; if you believe all that ancient religious gobbledygook) supposedly told (written in the very same book); "The parable of the trusted steward." "Dominion" does not equal neglect and destruction.
Also, you have a scary view of humans' place within the world.
NPS is stretched on resources. They don't set up permits because it's fun, but because something needs to be conserved.
OP might have been backpacking responsibly, but the permit system exists for good reasons and we bear the heavy burden of protecting the wilds from ourselves.
We are. But we're also the most powerful. That power comes with responsibility, one of which isn't trampling through sensitive areas.
Then you should be happy: it's not the Earth and animals creating the permitting system.
No, it's not. It literally has no meaning.
> not the other way around
Yeah, until an alien species shows up that has more powerful weapons and decides your meat is delicious, and considers you a herdable animal. They might install you in a coup so you can play videogames all day and drink beer as your only source of nutrients, to give your meat that kobebeef marble.
> Whatever happened to liberty
The Americans decided that it wasn't worthwhile anymore.
> and the pursuit of happiness
It became profitable to keep you from being happy.
I’ve backpacked into several parts of the Cascades without a special permit, because none were required, and never been hassled by a ranger. Most of it is National Forest; more restrictions than BLM land but you are generally allowed to camp as long as you follow the local rules.
I mean, yes. You followed the rules. If you wandered somewhere that does require a permit, you'd have been at risk of being stopped.
I live around national parks. A single obnoxious tourist can disrupt the life cycle of dozens of protected species by running feral through their mating and nursery grounds. (It's also not obvious that you're re-routing e.g. a herd of pronghorn from the safe valley whose floor you're on into the territory of a new pack of wolves.)
The person you're replying to mentioned the park ranger was the first person they had seen in days.
I'm not sure I agree with Locke, but I at least feel that the parks are meant to exist as a partial means of living up to that contract and should be less strictly patrolled than this one was on that day.
I'm fairly certain that Locke adapted ideas from some some older source, but Locke's work is considered foundational to the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and some of his phrasings found their way into both documents.
Definitely worth reading more about it if you're into that sort of thing. Especially in the current political climate where everything that doesn't fit the agenda is fast being swept beneath the rug of history.
I'm so glad I live in a country with a legally defined right to roam, Norway [1]. There is a two day limit but that only means you can only camp for two nights in any one place not that you can be told to leave. There are provisions for the kommune (local authority) to forbid access to areas that have been damaged by over-use though.
[1] https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/publikasjoner/2020/juni-202...
If you want the right to be left alone, you have to concentrate power, so that people who don't leave other people alone can be effectively punished. That concentrated power attracts the kind of people who don't like leaving other people alone. To these power-seekers, people left alone are an opportunity cost, they could be forced to work towards some goal set by the power-seekers.
If you want to be left alone above all else, you can always turn into ted kaczynski.
But reaping the benefits of society comes with costs. one of them is accepting annoying neighbors and other social contracts that might not specifically cater to your desires.
To be recorded is to leave an immutable trail of the self which prejudices how you (and others) view yourself. To be monitored is to be categorised which is to see yourself in an imperfect and distorting mirror.
Look at your distorted historical reflection and tell me that it does not prejudice the choices that you make and so alter the person that you choose to be next.
To be observed is to be put into a taxonomy - a cracked funhouse mirror that never reflects the real you. Typifications aren’t a bug in the system; they’re the mind main feature. If the glare of categorization freaks you out, therapy is cheap and plentiful. And let’s be clear: the Noumenal - the unfiltered Real - is forever barred from our awareness. Everything we think and feel must pass through the sieve of perception. If that bothers you, congratulations. Welcome to being human. The only escape is non-being.
Would you want that done to you? Simple question. Not rethorical.
It's not my premise. Do you accept your own premise? That you can't have that right.
Do you want me to leave you alone? Or can I keep investigating the real you?
I already collected your volunteership for The Seer. It will watch you, not me.
Don't worry. If you abandon technology, people around you still use it, and The Seer will be there, lightly probing you.
We are not in an argument. We are in a social interaction that leads you to slowly lean towards agreeing with me. There is no escape.
There is no answer you can give. If you agree that people should have the right to be left alone, then you were wrong. If you don't agree, then you volunteer. If you agree but don't volunteer, you are tyrannical (you want rights for you but not for others). If you just leave, that signals you want to be left alone.
We are not in an argument.
Why don't you get curious instead? It's one of the site guidelines after all. Community trust and goodwill is the most precious thing we have here. Why throw it away?
That is the most profound expression of community trust someone can hope to achieve.
All you need to do is say that were wrong, or that you volunteer. It's an act, theatrical or not, of empathy.
Instead, you prefer to pretend that you are right. That no one is going to surveil anyway, and there is no point conceding to a random member of the community. It would be a personal shame for your image after all. You would lose what you perceive to be as an argument, on the internet. You can't do that, right? Your ego is more important than defending personal rights.
We all agree the answer is no, I would hope. It follows that you are not affording this topic a proper level of nuance.
PS even something like signal (presuming things are as private as we are told) encourages phone usage, which is very leaky.
I'm struggling to think of benign software - I guess linux etc could be considered as that.
None of the software I’ve authored or contributed to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I barely make users enter an email.
What I do won't scale but I can sleep at night.
Is this the endgame? Any action, anything spoken or viewed is monetized for rent seeking intermediaries? information is power -> information is money.
What does this mean?
In other words, the goal is to remove the financial incentive to collect and store information about individuals that should be private.
The NSA has no profit incentive. Neither do e.g. ICE or the nutters tracking womens' menstrual cycles.
Sure. It's a bit silly to extend the term "demonetize" to encompass more than money.
"Disincentivize" is probably a better term.
I can imagine honest and ethical ways where I would want to provide some of my private information to someone and ask them to process it for me - basically, recommendations as a service is a perfectly valid (and very valuable) business. What I don't want is for them to keep my information and use it for any other purposes that don't benefit me. Which suggests that I always want a way to negotiate the terms.
Given that there were some estimates than individual private data is worth mere pennies, my only explanation why such negotiations and data non-retention agreements are gated behind some enterprise plans (with "call us" pricing) is because it's either worth more than I think it does, or that it's perceived as such.
If it's the perception/bias issue, researches into value of private information may help. A legal requirement to offer an ability to have the same terms to everyone interested (aka upfront pricing and requiring data privacy related features to be individually available outside of any plans/bundles) might be the way to prompt such research (no guarantees about the results and that normal people won't be just priced out, though), but it may also have a lot of unexpected consequences.
Ultimately, I suspect this hill is probably as hard to climb as solving economic inequality (and is probably related to it).
Information is not an object. It's not a countable good. Yet copyright demands we frame it as such.
Why? To structure our society around competition. I would much rather give collaboration a try. Unfortunately, the demand of intellectual property reframes collaboration as "derivative work", and forces us to make explicit contracts with specific people before creating it.
---- edit:
To elaborate this in the context of the article,
The very idea that we need to protect a person's right to monopolize information is ignorant of the underlying right to oblivion. Intellectual property frames the very act of existing as a person as the creation of information. That alone infringes on the right to oblivion.
We say “dejame en paz”.
And is not a young thing, is how it is said around here.
There will never be a perfect balance between these competing needs, and the line will be pushed back and forth as long as there are humans to debate the issue.
It can in several variants. Freedom of expression probably can't without private speech.
The United States, for example, wouldn't exist if Thomas Payne hadn't been able to publish his pamphlets anonymously.
Yes. Freedom of speech doesn't require privacy in most constructions as it typically concerns, first and foremost, publicly-made political speech. This finds its way into U.S. law through the expansion of the First Amendment's protections by its press and religion clauses [1].
[1] https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-01/06-diffe...
From my perspective, you simply can't speak freely if the government (or your neighbors) might murder you for saying things they disagree with.
Suppose you're Thomas Paine and you want to advocate for the independence of America from Britain, and that Britain doesn't allow the government to punish anyone for what they say, but does prohibit anyone from publishing their writings anonymously.
Then everyone knows exactly who Thomas Paine is, and even if there is no law against writing those things, there is now a constable poking into his business looking for some other pretext to arrest him, several legislators drafting bills that would negatively impact his livelihood and which will quietly be withdrawn if he would simply stop publishing such things, and a variety of private enterprises who now refuse to have anything to do with him in any capacity because they have business before the crown and fear any public association with their critic.
How is it free speech if you're still getting punished for it?
Is there a "right to knowledge"?
I'm aware of rights to speech, thought, movement, conscious, religion, expression, assembly, association, etc. But I've never heard anyone claim, or read any charter/constitution/etc. that has a "right to knowledge" clause.
Is there a country which has enshrined a "right to knowledge"? Does it have any limits (alluding to what you mentioned, how does the right to knowledge interact with other rights)?
it's the right to observe somebody else without their consent: it's quiet scientific observation that tries not to disturb the observed which is impossible in the quantum level but very realistic in the day to day classic (non-quantum) level
tl;dr: the right to create knowledge i.e. do science
The point, restated, is this: When we pass laws that say "There are factually true things that you are not allowed to know under penalty of law" we had better be damn sure the tradeoff is worth it. Sometimes it will be, sometimes it won't. The exact line will always be ill-defined.
It's so fundamental a right that most places only enshrine more complicated versions of it as law. Most societies now even extend that right to offer control over the knowledge you store electronically or write down and the way other people get to use "your" knowledge.
When we seek to impose privacy limitations on the data that others can gather we're curtailing those rights to some extent. We're telling them there are specific things they can't know and that does limit their freedom in a very fundamental way.
And yeah, about the voting booth: many of those who now demand a right to be left alone just a couple of years ago vehemently defended the practice of proprietary voting machines.
What an excellent way to frame the discussion!
Transparency is vital for regulation and control (see e.g. Seeing like a State) and the more opaque humans are, the harder is to control them, plan their actions, reason about their future behavior. How can you make a five-year plan for the whole country if you don't even know anything about anybody? Opacity is not going to work here. You would need a ton of very, very detailed information.
That's why China is introducing more and more measures to defy privacy - this is the only way their model can hope to work, it it impossible in the opaque-person world where no information about the person can be created. The article argues that privacy is not property, but the concept of privacy can not but lead to the concept of property - if you can have private thoughts, can you have private expressions? If you can have private expressions, can you have their material embodiment? If you can have the material embodiment, can you exercise control over it and limit the control of others over it? Oops, you just created private property.
Which is what? Pretty much all leftist state models require strong state, which leaves very little space to privacy. Somebody who holds both leftist or collectivist political beliefs and hopes for privacy is contradicting oneself. If they were anarchists or libertarians, that'd be a different business, but it's surprising to find libertarians in The Nation.
I believe that's the core obviously wrong idea we're not going to agree about.
We don't know what the world would look like if the US hadn't destroyed communism, and hadn't actively supported tyrannical leaders.
But in an ironic twist, the US will now be destroyed by the same dark forces they created.
That all socialist projects that were successful for some time were authoritarian is, well, those were the ones who could survive in that world (in this current world). I think there’s a word for that. :)
[1] Capitalist nations violently interfering in other nations is not called authoritarian.
None of these things necessarily imply any of the others.
It is significantly better than privatized tourism, because private tourism is frequently taken over by organized crime who destroy the nature to build hotels. Public service tourism usually doesn't care about profit, but rather about reducing public spending, so it is generally more efficient, has a smaller foot print, is shared, educative, and respectful.
I'm not an expert so I can't give you references, but ask your neighborly LLM:
> The USSR promoted the idea of "democratic tourism" — affordable and accessible to everyone. Unlike Western commercial tourism, Soviet tourism aimed to educate and unite people. The Tourist Union (Туристско-спортивный союз) and other state organizations built networks of tourist bases, campgrounds, hiking routes, and equipment rental centers.