Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting seriously irritated at the "I have nothing to hide" crowd. For starters, here are a few ways this can go horribly wrong:

* Industrial espionage -- it's big business, and I'm sure it pays better than being an NSA analyst.

* Foreign espionage -- since this gives unlimited querying power to every agent, a single "turned" agent could inflict massive damage on U.S. government and industry interests on behalf of a foreign power. The potential for double agents is huge.

* False positives and guilt by association -- being flagged as a "person of interest" and then essentially persecuted because you have fringe ideological interests, are looking up a lot of info on terrorism for a book project, have a friend who knows radical Muslims, etc.

* Corrupt use in political campaigns by incumbent politicians with access -- obvious.

* Blackmail and other corruption.

* Use by government agencies with access to spy on other agencies.

... I'm sure creative people can think of more.

"Industrial espionage--"

According to a New Zealand whistleblower back in the 90s, this was one of the main purposes of the Echelon network. Imagine what happens when your larger competitor gets in bed with the NSA. According to whistleblower Russ Tice, the Bush NSA was able to request intercepts on Senator Obama, so there certainly could be enough corruption for back room deals to occur for your startup's private information.

This is yet another reason to encrypt your git traffic.

I completely agree. I got very frustrated talking to two intelligent people (one a lawyer) about this the other day. I think everyone should be educated to make sure they know about these points so that they can intelligently explain them to the "I've got nothing to hide" crowd. The 4th Amendment and the right to privacy just doesn't seem to carry much weight with the average person any longer (if it ever did).

I think that the 'nothing to hide' crowd don't understand that the concept of things to hide could grow and grow unless the surveillance power are kept in check. Today, only terrorists have 'something to hide' tomorrow it could be activists, then journalists and so on, until they 'nothing to hide' people become the victims. http://rt.com/usa/justice-department-admits-spying-228/

People need to look at this long term and realise that abuses of power will continue to intrude larger and larger sets of the population unless they are stopped now.

Your points are excellent. And even if we all do have nothing to hide, an agency of the government that decides on its own to break the 4th and 1st amendments, and reinterpret the law practically out of existence, in secret, and lies about it to Congress in its oversight capacity, is A Bad Thing(tm).

It seems to be oft-overlooked that Manning and Snowden have managed enourmous breaches of what is supposed to be secured information (yours and mine, and probably everyone elses!). Staggering breaches. Any they're boh essentially nobodies - Snowden was an army washout who became a securtiy guard who has penetrated the US security apparatus in a way that would have been considered the greatest KGB coup ever if it had been a cold war operation.

There's a staggering lack of basic competance around protecting this stuff. The CIA director who lost his job over Aimes must be wondering what the modern mob have to do to get fired.

Thank you for making that post. I've been repeating these points on broken-record for the last few months.

I would also like to add /family/ as a huge pressure point, akin to your guilt by association.

IOW, one may have nothing to hide, but their family member does and one can be controlled by threats to that family member. It's disgusting and insidious, but that's how bad, scared and dangerous people operate. We are not using our intelligence if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable in this way.

Api, please make a post expanding on these ideas. Then post it here and send some copies to international news sites, like the guardian.

We need to wake up, your post would help a lot.

Anytime an adversary (opponent in a lawsuit, police investigator, promotion candidate, political candidate, etc) is owed a favor by a member of the intelligence community, you are going to lose.

The whole of your life may be innocent, but a single interaction (searched for porn? vented about someone in a private conversation?) taken out of context can almost certainly destroy you.

This. I can't seem to make people around me understand this point.

Do you list these negatives when having that conversation? Do they not see the possibility of something like this being used against them or family members when you lay out the possibilities specifically (blackmail and industrial espionage could hit anybody)?

The "nothing to hide" trope seems to me to be entirely based on a false dichotomy that contrasts "nothing to hide" with "unpatriotic/criminal". I think this is primarily because people lack the imagination to consider the other seedier and more lucrative uses of surveillance.

If they were confronted with these other possibilities, would your acquaintances change their thinking? Or do these other risks--for example, the risk of having an employer targeted by competitors unfairly (potentially leading to layoffs), or the risk of having a representative vote against the interests of his or her district because of blackmail (potentially leading to a loss of government services and investment)--simply not resonate?

When I make this argument the most common response is that they have faith in the goodness of people and dont consider these risks to be very significant.

I'm having the same problem as some other commenters here in that people don't seem to care about these hypothetical situations. They mostly trust the gov't to only track the "bad guys". Are there any good cases of the above-mentioned actually happening? Any other suggestions for responding to the nothing-to-hide argument?

My best counterargument for "nothing to hide": What do you think Nixon would have done with access to a limitless database of (effectively) every human on earth?

Privacy is important. But vastly more important is unaccountable power.

Playing devil's advocate here.

But that has never happened and probably never will. Nixon was caught quickly. Besides, that wouldn't even affect me, only people who do bad things or are in positions of political power.

Also, how about: just because I have nothing to hide doesn't mean that I don't mind being watched.

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