Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' (2011)

Unfortunately, there is no piece of evidence that can exonerate a person in such a context; one cannot "establish innocence," the best one can hope for is to plead tirelessley in an endless popularity contest.

The right to privacy is nothing less than the right to keep an individual mind... To own a body. If you value your own life, the right to privacy - to be left alone - is your beginning and your end, if not kept.

(Edited an error/reversal.)

Consider how often and how recently in our own history there have been activities which have been illegal and yet not "morally wrong" as considered today. Aiding escaped slaves. Homosexuality. Inter-racial marriage. Abortion. And so forth.

Also note how I said "nothing the government dislikes" rather than "nothing illegal". And that's because when a government has broad sweeping powers, especially of surveillance, government agents can easily punish people and ruin people's lives regardless of whether their activities are illegal.

Our system of governance has been designed at its core to limit the powers of government. This is very much intentional because it is designed to allow government to enforce the laws only with the cooperation with the public at large. A government that can enforce laws independent of the will of the people is a government poised for the transition to tyranny.

There is a reason why the term "police state" is so reviled even though in itself it contains merely mechanical descriptions. And that is because even if a "benign police state" could exist the danger is far too great that the reins of power would be usurped by those seeking their own ends and their own advantages. And the most forceful way to avoid such a catastrophe is again to limit the power of the state.

Do you fully support the party that will be in control of the government in five years? If not, you have something to hide.

You think I'm being silly? Six months ago you might have been able to float that argument, but with an openly partisan IRS, go ahead, tell me why that's wrong.

This person need not be accountable, say, to the voter (it could be a low-level bureaucrat with a petty axe to grind), and although presumably there is 'accountability', what if the harm done to you is significant enough to make your life miserable, but not significant enough to the monolithic agency (which remember is only accountable indirectly, to elected officials who may care about stupid stuff like political wedge issues) to justify the expenditure and effort to root out the malicious actor.

"I have nothing to hide because I don't do anything wrong."

What does "wrong" mean in this context? Against the law.

So - how many torts or crimes are there on the books? How may ways of interpreting them are there - both already writted down and possible in the future? Are they interpreted by flawless machines or emotional humans? Etc. etc.

Yes, because it is crazy to suggest that the US government might be collecting images of people's naked bodies...

(To be clear, I do agree with the article. I just couldn't help but laugh a bit at the idea that the government taking nude photographs of people is depicted as "extreme.")

To take an example, the court system assumes that judge and jury members private life is not known. When one side in a trial knows the judge or juries dreams, aspirations, deep secrets or just plain biases, that party has suddenly gained an huge unfair advantage. Since we can now start to grasp the amount of information gathered by the state, Google or Facebook, can a trail involving either one of them still be claimed to be fair and just if the other party do not has similar inside knowledge of the judges or juries lives?

Yes, I have curtains, but unless I close them, I don't expect privacy. If I'm using mainstream social media sites, I don't expect privacy either. The problem is that most people don't think about the "curtains" being open by default when they're online.

I think we do have a right to privacy and obviously most people have something to hide, but that privacy should require intentional effort to enable (eg closing the curtains, TOR + VPN).

Sure, you may not be ashamed of it. You're probably not be breaking any laws that you're aware of, at least none that really matter. You're pretty sure you live in a country that you're free from persecution. All should be OK, right?

Sadly, whether that's true or not, that only works for today. Tomorrow, well it would seem those with enough bile and hate to judge you, seem to be one of the few sets of people who actually want to seek out power and privledge over you.

You sure you're really that free today? You sure you'll really be that free tomorrow. Your sure it'll be the same for your kids? If there is any hesitation, any hesitation at all, then it's probably not a brilliant idea to sit idly by and accept Government creating profiles on you and the future you's.

Dead god, won't anyone think of the children? :P

That's a lot of ifs. I don't think it really has anything to do about privacy issues. Privacy issues created those "ifs". That's a paranoid state, not a state of law and rights. Those are issues created by society unable to sort its things. I doubt a government can really forbid things based on information, and if so, it already existed before.

Of privacy issues make things worse, but those issues were the mix of a digital age and terrorism. Nobody can escape the fact congress will vote laws and agencies will want to work on things.

And of course a big part of the problem nowadays is that everybody does things that are illegal regularly, there are so many laws that how could we not? "Ignorance of the law is no excuse", just the fact that you're not aware of having committed any felonies doesn't in any way guarantee you haven't committed one.

Unfortunately, I can't help but find it very unconvincing, despite that I'd like to be convinced. There are lots of words but few strong arguments (or any kind of arguments).

I mean, look at our society...just look at it. So much of its energy is devoted to ruling people. Judges, courts, bailiffs, clerks, kings, police, lawyers, etc. It's madness. Most people can't even imagine any other way of living...when they write about alien societies, the aliens have laws as well, and clerks as well, and laws as well.

And that's a lot of work. And they really aren't motivated to understand.

And its a lot of work trying to understand everyone else's situation. I certainly don't want to.

So nature gave us a need for privacy and the means to respect the privacy of others. And even the sense to often pretend that we don't see many things.

http://pastebin.com/7SRmFpFH

--garbled by my mobile

Investigating the nothing-to-hide argument a little more deeply, we find that it looks for a singular and visceral kind of injury. Ironically, this underlying conception of injury is sometimes shared by those advocating for greater privacy protections. For example, the University of South Carolina law professor Ann Bartow argues that in order to have a real resonance, privacy problems must "negatively impact the lives of living, breathing human beings beyond simply provoking feelings of unease." She says that privacy needs more "dead bodies," and that privacy's "lack of blood and death, or at least of broken bones and buckets of money, distances privacy harms from other [types of harm]."

Bartow's objection is actually consistent with the nothing-to-hide argument. Those advancing the nothing-to-hide argument have in mind a particular kind of appalling privacy harm, one in which privacy is violated only when something deeply embarrassing or discrediting is revealed. Like Bartow, proponents of the nothing-to-hide argument demand a dead-bodies type of harm.

Bartow is certainly right that people respond much more strongly to blood and death than to more-abstract concerns. But if this is the standard to recognize a problem, then few privacy problems will be recognized. Privacy is not a horror movie, most privacy problems don't result in dead bodies, and demanding evidence of palpable harms will be difficult in many cases.

The author dismisses the "need for blood" as too extreme, but that is not convincing. For example, consider the most compelling argument in the article, which is that government data collection creates a Kafkaesque world in which the opacity of the procedures renders the individuals powerless:

Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system's use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.

This is a powerful argument, but it is not going to convince a majority of people unless you can show real harm. Not blood or broken bones, but actual cases where good guys (as perceived by the majority) were harmed by government surveillance, e.g. harassed or put to jail. Why would people feel a "suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability" if the Kafkaesque bureaucracy does not eventually bring actual harm? (The case of Aaron Swartz is not an example: the problem lied with the CFAA rather than government surveillance).

I'm still optimistic: the process will work as usual. Government powers will be abused. There will be scandals. In the long term, laws will be improved and transparency will increase. What reasons do I have to think otherwise?

The more they know about me the more they can steal off me and the more liable I am to be attacked for disobeying one of their edicts. If I want to do something that the government arbitrarily decides it "wrong", then I've got something to hide.

So yeah, I have everything to hide from a criminal gang.