If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
- Edward Snowden
> We can't have a post-privacy world until we're post-privilege. So when we cave in our autonomy, then we can sort of say, "well, okay, we don't need privacy anymore, in fact we don't have privacy anymore, and I'm okay with that." Realistically though people are not comfortable with that. Because, if you only look at it from a position of privilege, like, say, white man on a stage, then yeah, maybe post-privacy works out okay for those people. But if you have ever not been, or if you are currently not, a white man with a passport from one of the five good nations in the world, it might not really work out well for you, and in fact it might be designed specifically such that it will continue to not work out well for you, because the structures themselves produce these inequalities.
> So when you hear someone talk about post-privacy, I think it's really important to engage them about their own privilege in the system and what it is they are actually arguing for.
-- Jacob Appelbaum ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s )
Finally, the conclusion that reaching post-privilege will result in a feasible post-privacy does not follow at all. What, is the implication here that white men "on stages" have nothing to hide? I don't get it.
Leave it to some people to turn a human rights issue into an identity politics issue.
Let's cross that bridge when we come to it.
> Finally, the conclusion that reaching post-privilege will result in a feasible post-privacy does not follow at all.
From the claim that a post-privacy society would have to be post-privilege does not follow that all post privilege societes have to be post-privacy.
Right now, when people say "no privacy", that in practice means zero privacy for some or most people, and total opaqueness for others (e.g. the NSA, or people who can make things go away with bribes, etc.). It doesn't actually mean "no privacy for anyone". For that to be the case, society would have to be actually egalitarian, e.g. post-privilege.
> What, is the implication here that white men "on stages" have nothing to hide?
They don't get killed by drones for starters. Appelbaum lives in Berlin because he feels safer there than in the US IIRC, it's not like he doesn't have spook pressure in his life; but he still considers himself privileged, imagine that.
If someone says homeless alcoholics should be rounded up and put into camps, then the fact that they aren't that, and don't have a friend in that situation, is their "privilege" they may not be aware of. That has nothing to do with "identitiy politics" to me. And I don't see how that is nebulous either? "Privilege" is not a complicated word, it means what it means in context and is perfectly fine to use.
We have. The question of how to eliminate "class privilege" has remained open for quite a while and will for as long as the optimal distribution of scarce resources is still an active field of study.
It doesn't actually mean "no privacy for anyone". For that to be the case, society would have to be actually egalitarian, e.g. post-privilege.
You're delving into Foucault territory here, which is fine but also somewhat tangential. Of course the people doing the spying and the people who fund it will be less affected (but maybe not with the bad state of infosec), that's a given where any power structure is involved.
How would egalitarianism fix this? I think you're operating under a wholly different definition of egalitarianism than is commonly accepted. The only way to solve your dilemma is through a stateless society with a totally flat hierarchy with a method of economic exchange that doesn't involve a market system, or any mechanism that awards having more information.
They don't get killed by drones for starters.
Not yet.
If someone says homeless alcoholics should be rounded up and put into camps, then the fact that they aren't that, and don't have a friend in that situation, is their "privilege" they may not be aware of.
That's just asymmetry. You can just as easily have it be an oppressed group calling for the internment of a dominant group, which by definition they will not be a part of, and may not even be in contact with if there are factors like apartheid put into play. Calling it "privilege" makes no sense.
"Privilege" is not a complicated word, it means what it means in context and is perfectly fine to use.
The sociological concept of privilege is in fact an inversion of what we generally call a privilege. Sociological privilege often refers to constant and immutable characteristics that cannot be taken away, and moreover makes the value judgment that the group with privilege is bad, and that said privilege must be abolished. This is totally ass-backwards: it should be that the disadvantaged group is elevated to the same level of privilege, because more often than not (excluding class) "privilege" simply refers to the baseline that preferably all groups should be held to.
No; you said "Even if various identities are all elevated to an equal level of acceptance", I say, let's do that first, even though it may never be perfect. Unless you're saying "acceptance" itself is some kind of scarce resource? Of course, it's not a great consolation to say "everybody should have access to clean drinking water", but it's a start, kind of the pre-requisite to do anything about it.
> Of course the people doing the spying and the people who fund it will be less affected (but maybe not with the bad state of infosec), that's a given where any power structure is involved.
Call it privilege or structure of power, does it really make a crucial difference?
> How would egalitarianism fix this? I think you're operating under a wholly different definition of egalitarianism than is commonly accepted.
Yeah, mine is the one a Kindergarten child might have: people striving to be fair to one another. Doesn't make everyone the same, doesn't change genetics, but it's still a neat concept.
> Not yet.
Doesn't change the point.
> That's just asymmetry. You can just as easily have it be an oppressed group calling for the internment of a dominant group, which by definition they will not be a part of, and may not even be in contact with if there are factors like apartheid put into play. Calling it "privilege" makes no sense.
Look, whatever. It's still just a word. Call it asymmetry or inequality or structures of power or privilege. It means what it means in the context of people arguing for mass surveillance because they themselves either aren't or think they aren't affected negatively. If you want to talk about some abstract unrelated stuff I'm not interested.
> This is totally ass-backwards: it should be that the disadvantaged group is elevated to the same level of privilege, because more often than not (excluding class) "privilege" simply refers to the baseline that preferably all groups should be held to.
... and because everybody has it ass-backwards, feminists are clamouring for men to be groped all the time? I'm of a mind to just delete my comments to get out of this, this is leading nowhere and adding nothing.
Privilege is no more or less than a source of cognitive bias in political opinions.
"I support drone assassinations because they make the world a safer place" is an understandable thing to say as a white guy in Iowa, but comes from a place of privilege: said white guy in Iowa probably does not understand or even consider the realities of living in constant fear of summary execution from the sky with no warning, has never seen a friend lose his children because they were within the blast radius of someone on the kill list.
No one is suggesting that we sic the drones on white guys in Iowa too out of some ridiculous idea of fairness. What we are suggesting is that his opinion is wrong, and should be excluded from American foreign policy, because when you remove the lens of privilege, drone assassinations stop looking like a good thing.
"I oppose welfare because if those poor people weren't lazy, they would have jobs" is a reasonable thing to say when the only world you know is one where your parents' friends offer you jobs and internships at dinner parties. This comes from a position of privilege: unemployment predominantly affects people of color in poor inner-city communities where people do not have such social networks, have in been deliberately excluded from those social networks, in a world where having a Black-sounding name on your resume makes you many times less likely to get the interview. (It is entirely possible to rationally oppose welfare on other grounds: poor incentive structures, support for alternatives like public works projects instead, ideological commitment to the free market, etc. But specifically the claim that poverty is a personal failure of character, unambiguously comes from privilege and is therefore not correct.)
When someone makes this argument and we call them privileged, we aren't asking for them to get laid off, we're arguing that their idea of social policy is immoral and people who believe it ought not to be voted into positions of control over government budgets.
tl;dr: privilege isn't why you're evil, but it is why your opinion is wrong
How does one take a golden argument like "privacy is an inalienable right," turn it into a tired "you should be ashamed for being white, check your privilege shitlord" flamebait, and still get taken seriously?
You had to work pretty damn hard to get this out of that quote. His point was that a lot of people who say they (and by extension society, this part is important) don't need privacy probably don't need privacy because their privilege protects them. So then the goal has to be to convince them that their privileged position makes them a special case, and that they should care about the unprivileged. It isn't just white people who have privilege, that's just an example.
This general idea really isn't controversial, but the terminology elicits very strong negative reactions in people for some reason (I honestly don't understand it). If I pointed out that the TSA screens darker-skinned people with extra vigor, often inconveniencing those people, most people would agree with me. If I then said that I don't care about this issue because I'm white, so I breeze through TSA checkpoints without any problems, many people would tell me I should be a little more considerate of others.
But if I call myself "privileged" in this instance then all of a sudden people would be whining about social justice warriors or something like that. Very strange.
No one has ever managed successfully to divorce the concept of privilege from the implication of blame, so saying that someone has privilege (or, worse in this context, is privileged), is tantamount to saying that they're a bad person and they should feel bad. Is it any wonder there's pushback?
Whether privilege and blame should be so inextricably linked is a separate discussion, and one I've seen from time to time in progressive circles. But, to people who aren't deeply enough immersed in such circles to be familiar with all the theory around the concept, that's how it comes across.
For example, the way I see it, I can't help that I'm white, it isn't my fault, I didn't do anything to "earn" my white privilege. However, if I refuse to at least acknowledge that I have privilege, then that is my fault, for that I would deserve blame.
What makes you (hypothetically) a bad person is having privilege and supporting policy which benefits the privileged at the expense of the unprivileged. The blame is assigned not for being a member of a privileged class, but for forming and acting on political opinions (including acceptance of the status quo) based on that privilege.
People who use privilege as an argument aren't asking you to be ashamed of being white, they're asking you to be ashamed of being conservative.
Well that's a big problem too.
It's essentially erasing the experience and stories of an entire swath of the political spectrum, and shaming people for their political orientation.
The Open Rights Group regularly do briefings on things like this and one of the "Responses you might get and how to counter them" arguments is:
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear
That isn’t true. Surveillance has been used against journalists, whistleblowers and human rights activists. Most of us want to keep parts of our lives private." [0]
I've had people use the naïve "nothing to fear" argument before. Tell them that even if they wrongly believe that they don't require privacy, people working in their interest do.
[0] https://www.openrightsgroup.org/assets/files/campaign_resour...
It's a shame that we love to boil incredibly complex issues down into simple platitudes. You find it on facebook, on the news, on twitter (although short and sweet does work well there), and every where else you look and people you talk to.
It's a shallow way to talk about things.
Those generally have a grain of truth, but there is no simple one-line solution here, it's invariably quite complex. The field of economics is an entire field rather than a one-paragraph summary, after all.
Here's my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. How are we going to do it? Give me ten after that, I'll drop out of the race right now. Every once in a while... every once in a while, there's a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that, there aren't many unnuanced moments in leading a country that's way too big for ten words."
--President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet, The West Wing Season 4, Episode 5 (2002)
No thanks. Come take my clothes off, bring a camera. I'll charge my normal hourly rate and we'll both be upset about time wasted.
First of all, there is no express right to privacy in the Constitution. There is however, the Bill of Rights which everybody is familiar with. It does outline protecting specific aspects of privacy which include such things as the First Amendment (freedom of religion) or the 4th Amendment, (privacy of your possessions against unlawful search and seizure).
The supreme court refuses to protect privacy beyond those issues which are directly related to the Bill of Rights even though the public believes it is their right to have a blanket type of protection against congressional overreach.
To hear Snowden confuse these things by lumping rights protected under the Constitution with a broad reaching idea of the public's right of privacy (which is does not have), and then equating them is puzzling.
His analogy does not fundamentally confuse anything; he's equating privacy rights to speech rights through a weak notion that having no interest for one equates to no need for the right. Privacy in and of itself might not be a right explicitly granted by the Constitution, but the analogy is clear and an accurate description of how ludicrous it is to give up a right because you see no need for it.
He was only pointing out that there might be other reasons to defend a right (or defend that idea that something should in the future become a right) other than me wanting to exercise that right directly.
I do care about freedom of speech even though, really, I have not much to say. Freedom of speech affects me in other ways (and arguably more important ways) than me personally being allowed to say certain things. Likewise, I do care about (an hypothetical) "right to privacy" even though I have nothing to hide.
Particular implementation details are interesting in their own right, but they are not the conversation.
>The supreme court refuses to protect privacy beyond those issues which are directly related to the Bill of Rights
This is simply wrong.
I think the argument that an email would be a "paper" under the fourth amendment is going to be the first test. I know that sort of thing has been challenged (users should've have an expectation of privacy, etc.) but it's my belief that the argument "users have no expectation of privacy when it comes to emails" is a misdirection. Our citizens have rights whether or not they expect those rights to be respected by those in power.
I agree with the larger point that information on digital devices should properly be considered "papers" or "effects" even if stored in something nebulous such as "the cloud." As long as there's no deliberate or implicit sharing of these things, "the cloud" should be considered as private as a desk drawer.
While that may be surprising to some Americans there are indeed other people and countries on this planet, that have their own constitutions that define human rights that the US constitution does not, privacy among them.
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as unenforceabl as it unfortunately is, also defines privacy as a human right.
— Jacob Appelbaum
-- Jacob Appelbaum
You're doing it wrong. If you want to paraphrase one of the two affirmations in that quote, you need to write something like: "Or I don't care about freedom to bear arms because I don't have anything to shoot at".
The second part of that structure is showing a use case for that freedom (speaking, publishing, shooting). Simple possession is not enough.
So concentrate more the next time you feel like entertaining this fantasy that civilians need to be able to freely shoot at stuff, just like they need to freely speak and publish.
"I don't care about the freedom to bear arms because I have nothing to protect"
I agree that fending off a modern army with rifles is a pipe dream which causes political blindness (although this disparity just illustrates how thoroughly the second amendment has already been trampled). But there are plenty of smaller scale immediate situations where one might really wish they had a gun - eg bears while camping.
Also the whole premise around these sayings is ultimately flawed. When we are forced into coming up with justifications for natural rights (thought, communication, using tools, being left alone, etc), we're fighting a losing war.
Tell that to the mujahideen...
Guerrilla campaigns work because they're driving less-committed foreign invaders out through attrition. Our domestic military has nowhere else to withdraw to, and would necessarily have broken free of public opinion (otherwise democracy would put a stop to anything long before sustained conflict).
Don't get me wrong, if any such thing occurs I would much rather have distributed gun ownership than not. Furthermore, the right to bear arms quite obviously covers conventional explosives, armored vehicles, and missiles. To the extent that this might not be good policy, then the second amendment should have been rewritten rather than simply trampled.
On the political front, it frustrates me to see the amount of energy shoehorned into "they're gonna take our guns", which imho causes people to be myopic to the other rights that are being oppressed. I'm not talking about commenters in this thread (who obviously have more than one issue in their head at once), but your less-connected punter who turns on talk radio and has their specific desire for freedom transmuted into support for a different flavor of tyranny.
Vietnam.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War#1980... :
> In the border region with Pakistan, the mujahideen would often launch 800 rockets per day. Between April 1985 and January 1987, they carried out over 23,500 shelling attacks on government targets.
Another way of putting it is that the longevity of the insurgents probably says more about the mission that was handed to the military than it does about the ability of the military to deal with the tactics.
> very sophisticated armies showing an awful lot of
> self restraint.
You'd be surprised at how effective guerrilla warfare is.
One counter-example: the Taliban
Would they? They should try doing that now in all the various wars and police actions they are involved in.
2. More importantly: they don't want to. long drawn out wars are profitable, numbing, and demoralizing. Most people don't care about them anymore. They just happen in the background. No thumbs up, no thumbs down. Go on about your business. That's the best type of reaction a government could ask for when pushing the agenda of lobbyists and the corporations they represent.
Yep, and an attempted takeover in the USA would also be asymmetrical and ideological.
So the question, I suppose, is what could trigger the actual occupation? My guess is that it will be austerity measures that will come through widespread municipal bankruptcies. Pensions and disability checks will stop coming. Services will stop being provided.
There is a whole section of the population that subsists on government provided benefits. Multiple generations, below the poverty line, directed acyclical graphs of income where the last person to have worked is a generation or two ago. When that lifeline goes away, then we will see unrest. Then the government will come in and occupy, providing basics. Give us your guns and we will protect you. Take this rice and this water and go home and watch TV.
Nor need there be! That's not how guerrilla or "asymmetrical" warfare works; the chief advantage for the guerrillas is that they disappear into the populace between attacks, so there's no one for the more ordinary sort of army to have a battle with.
The way you win a war like this, as the occupier, is to counter this advantage in a way that makes guerrilla warfare proportionately costly for the guerrillas, which ordinarily it is not. For example, you might respond to guerrilla attacks by taking hostages from among the populace, and if the attackers fail to surrender, proceeding to execute the hostages taken. While hardly nice, this method is very effective, and can eventually produce the total and complete pacification of the territory under occupation. (Of course, so can mass relocation or genocide, but those are absurdly expensive and time-consuming by comparison, not to mention far more costly in terms of political will, and are thus best reserved for cases where hostage-taking doesn't work, such as the North American aborigines in the early 19th century, or the Armenians in the early 20th.)
You can achieve victory in an ordinary war by blowing things up, more or less. In a guerrilla war, more subtle means are required. And nastier means, no doubt! -- I don't think anyone has ever tried to claim that military occupation and the forcible curtailment of guerrilla warfare were nice, and I'm certainly not making any such claim right now. I'm just pointing out that, on the one hand, this is what you have to do to win, and on the other hand, it is possible to win a military occupation, if the political will exists for it to be competently carried out.
In recent American history, of course, such will never does exist, because for all the generic American ignorance of history, foreign affairs, and military matters, we do at least have the basic good sense to recognize that engaging in military occupation, of a country which never did us harm and isn't about to start, is both wrong and expensively pointless. That's why it takes stupid, venal, dishonest leaders to fool us into supporting such adventures.
(Of course, it helped a lot that after Vietnam such leaders stopped conscripting the children of the mostly progressive elite, which did a great deal to mute progressive opposition when the Bush II claque came along; instead of finding some way to suppress people whose political opinions actually mattered, the Iraq adventurists could count on a volunteer military in which the elite had no significant personal stake, thus no significant reason to try to prevent being squandered. But that's a different discussion altogether.)
In fact, Sherman not only engaged in total war, but originated the idea that it should be used in that conflict; he had to sell it to Lincoln before he could get permission to employ it. I really don't think it's that much of a stretch to imagine such a thing happening again in the United States; all it'd need would be, on the one hand, another sufficiently bloodthirsty general, and on the other, another sufficiently widespread perception that those on the dirty end of the total-war stick had it coming.
You implied it.
The studies cited in http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/having-a... certainly point the other direction.
Here is an article, for example, that suggests violent resistance (ideally with a gun) is the best way to avoid property loss and injury when attacked. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2004....
Are you seriously asserting that a small female under attack by a large male is better off unarmed?
Also, upon rereading, your article doesn't even really support your claim that a gun makes women less safe. Note the comparisons made: "More than twice as many women are killed with a gun used by their husbands or intimate acquaintances than are murdered by strangers..." "A very small percentage of these women (7%) had used a gun successfully in self-defense..."
Note the comparisons NOT made: the percentage of women in households without a gun who successfully defended themselves, or P(murder|abusive husband && gun) vs P(murder|abusive husband && !gun).
> the percentage of women in households without a gun who successfully defended themselves
Irrelevant, since the whole point is that lethal home invasions are very rare. In other words, even if having a gun provided 100% protection against a murderous home invader, and even if lacking a gun made it 100% certain that he would kill you, owning the gun would still have a negligible effect on you overall safety.
> P(murder|abusive husband && gun) vs P(murder|abusive husband && !gun)
You can't have it both ways. Either guns make it easier to kill people or they don't. If they don't, then they're no good for self defense. If they do, then you're more likely to be killed by your partner if he has access to a gun than if he doesn't.
If women defend themselves successfully 7% of the time when a gun is in the home but 3% when it's not (the relevant comparison), then guns are effective in preventing domestic violence. The article doesn't even discuss this statistic, which is the only important one.
Either guns make it easier to kill people or they don't.
They do - no one disputes this. No one disputes that an armed man vs an unarmed woman has a better shot than an unarmed man vs an unarmed woman. So what?
I'm not sure why you keep harping on statistics, since neither of us has any direct statistical information regarding whether a woman owning a gun makes her less likely to be killed by her partner. There are no statistics supporting your position either.
Your stories don't really support your position because everyone involved is still alive. If you'd had a gun, then at least one person could very well be dead as a result of committing a not particularly serious crime.
I bought a firearm because I like shooting little paper targets. I can legally carry a loaded firearm in my car, but I don't, so what does that tell you? I have a single handgun, so I must be a homicidal maniac, right?
>I lust for the thought of besting other young men, I want to win, I want to be the one standing when the dust settles. Maybe it will sate that appetite, maybe it will give me some appreciation for the world that I lack. Who is to say? I don't feel the desire to go out and slay my fellow man, except in that one specific context.
You'll forgive me if I don't find the last sentence very reassuring!
Look, I know I'm not going to persuade you to stop loving guns. But do you realize how you come across? You come across as quite a literally a gun nut: a crazy, angry dude with a gun who can't wait for an opportunity to point it at someone. You are making the case for more gun regulation better than I ever could.
here's an idea. Get property insurance instead of a gun. That way if your shit gets stolen you'll get a shiny, brand new replacement from the insurance company!
And nobody dies!
There are many people who live in areas where police response is nonexistent for many types of crime or response times are awful. Guns are a great equalizer for the weak.
The overblown prohibition push over the years has empowered the more extreme gun advocates and created the potential for more problems.
I offered him a cup of tea, and told him it would probably be safer for him to leave via my front door and down the stairs rather than back down the scaffolding. He declined the tea, but I went and made one for myself and called the police. He went back out the way he'd come in. The police caught him in the garden, where he brandished a bottle at them. They did not shoot and kill him[1], they de-escalated then caught and cuffed him. He served a short sentence, got some drug and alcohol rehab, and is now only engaged in minor crime.
At no point did I think "this would be better if any of us (me, him, the police) could have a gun".
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/armed-police-...
Armed Police in England and Wales only fired their weapons twice out of 14684 operations in 2013/2014.
And let's not forget that the UK has terrorist and paramilitary groups operating here.
I never fear knife crime in my small town (pop approx 100,000).
No, statistically speaking (and via simple logical deduction) it will dramatically increase the chance that a life (yours and/or your attackers) will end.
If you informed on the mob then, yes, you should be worried about getting murdered on the street, and you should probably carry.
Otherwise, that punk that pulls a knife on you just wants your wallet. Just hand it over and nobody dies that day (I'm assuming you don't value the contents of your wallet over a human beings life).
The statistics unequivocally point to guns reducing safety. I'm not usually a big fan of Jim Jeffries' comedy, but he does a great bit about gun control (NSFW link)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl--YVnni0I
I'm in total agreement with Jeffries here. It's ok to like guns. Just drop the "it makes me safer to carry one, one day I'll stop a robbery, etc" nonsense. Be honest and say "fuck the statistics. I like guns. You can't stop me from owning one. Now piss off". It's much more intellectually honest.
At the end of the day we still need to look at the stats (how often do intruders hurt/kill homeowners when unprovoked?), but it still doesn't make too much sense to raise stakes for the sake of survival.
Adding a gun into the mix runs counter to simple common sense. The rational response is to have property insurance and stay out of a burglar's way.
This approach is a double win. 1. Nobody dies (yay!) 2. You get brand new stuff paid for by the insurance company!
The fact that there are so many of these situations points towards a different and bigger problem in society and I would much rather energy was spent on fixing them than treating symptoms with firearms.
I do agree that the cat is out of the bag but I still don't want anything to do with guns. They are bad news and only good for killing which is an experience I would rather avoid in life.
Of course there's a bigger problem. But I would much rather own a gun and actually be able to protect myself and my family, than refuse to have a gun on principle and just pray that one day I get to effect all of society. The latter is like refusing to wear a seat belt, because people should really be driving safely.
It's not that I don't understand the perspective you put forward, especially in the US where there is already a high prevalence of gun ownership. I do however think the importance of the right to bear arms is way overstated. It's really easy (and dare I day, liberating) to live without a gun.
'Cause I'd say, grab a shotgun and shoot in their general direction.
Good for you that as a brave man called Rory it's easy to get rid of invaders with a kitchen knife. You'll probably have the same results with a fake knife.
This comes to mind (particularly the part about "If he is in superior strength"):
"If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected." - Sun Tzu
What if the invader is carrying a baseball bat?
What if he wants to rape the woman? What if he takes a cut from the knife, then knocks out the woman, rapes her, and murders her?
"Preferable"? Is the invader killing the woman preferable to the woman killing the invader?
It's amazing how shortsighted you are! "Just do this" or "just do that."
Talk to any kind of instructor in self defense or martial arts, and they will tell you to not get into a knife fight, or you will get cut. All of your ideas rely on the invader being rational and more interested in his own well-being than anything else. Yet the fact that he's a home invader shows that is not the case.
Firearms are equalizers. They make the 5'2" woman just as dangerous as the 6'+ 200+ lb. man. They allow her to defend herself from beyond the invader's reach. They make noise to draw attention to the fact that something bad is happening.
Rational people realize that they have nothing to fear from law-abiding gun owners who only want to be prepared to protect their loved ones from evil people. And rational people realize that evil people are not going away anytime soon. Rational people realize that there are plenty of irrational people who may do them harm, and that the only effective method of self-defense is to have a firearm and know how to use it.
Get out of the house and let the authorities deal with it. Your stuff isn't worth your life or your family's continued safety.
Remember that most burglars aren't as shocked or scared as you are during a burglary. It's a routine for them. Their attention is focused on what to do if someone in the house notices.
If you brandish a weapon you're dealing with someone who is more alert and aware of the situation than you are and has no intention of dying.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/having-a...
This quasi-statistic (which I will take at face value), while interesting from a sociological perspective, does not actually inform individual decisionmaking. It's a thinly veiled way of saying to someone "you can't be trusted to handle a gun/knife/whatever properly" - which, even if true for the majority of humans, is an incredibly offensive and patronizing thing to say to someone. And may just get you punched in the face, which (if it so happens) suggests that you were probably wrong about the individual in question.
Doesn't sound like they're capable of controlling themselves around a deadly weapon, or is that a bad assumption to make as well?
People make mistakes, people are fallible, the /r/talesfromtechsupport subreddit goes to show that quite well. Despite this, you obviously don't want these people to die, and if not having a gun reduces the chance of a gun being turned on them, they may well be better without it.
Having a gun in the scenario inherently raises the stakes to lethal, after all.
Or are you someone who was personally offended by the generalization that they might be in the group of people, considered Normal Humans, who don't handle life-threatening situations like a person in the special forces?
Fact is, as an American, particularly one who lives in a southern state where a gun can (legally) be purchased for cash in a grocery store parking lot with no record, if someone were to break into my house, there is a non-trivial chance that were someone to break into my home they would be armed. Given that I'm single and live by myself, were someone to break in all I would have to do is take a defensive position in some room, phone the police, and announce to the intruder that police are on their way and that I am armed. Now what if I had a wife and kids? That changes the dynamic. What do you plan on doing in that case? Running through a house with a potentially armed intruder while you are not armed? Truth be told, there aren't a lot of wide open spaces in a house and as a 6'3", 230lb male could probably overpower a single intruder. What if you have more than one? I'm a boy scout at heart. Be Prepared.
How likely is all of this? Dunno, my brother has suffered an armed home invasion. My neighbor was luckily not home when his was broken into. A coworker almost got carjacked last month, and him being armed saved his ass. Hell, I once narrowly missed getting into a car accident and when I pulled over to make sure the other car that ran off the road was fine, I nearly got jumped by a couple guys that had a couple inches and quite a few pounds of muscle on me. I'd rather not get the shit beat out of me because someone got some mud on their Mercedes. Draw a line in the sand, if they cross it they fucked up. Hell, just last week my buddy got robbed by 3 punk teenagers when he got out of his car at his girlfriend's apartment complex.
I don't think owning a firearm makes me "deal with things like I'm in the special forces", but maybe I'm just an outlier. Truth be told, I know folks that are wholesome, responsible individuals who want protection, and I know folks who illegally own firearms and don't know the first thing about how to properly handle a firearm. It's a mixed bag of nuts and only reinforces the notion that damn near anyone who wants a gun will have one. I certainly wish I lived in a Western European country (for more reasons than a little more sanity about firearms... if only my mother had attained US-German dual citizenship as she very well could have, oh well) and this wasn't as much of a thing, but I don't and I doubt I'll have much luck getting over there in the near future, so I've got to play the hand I've been dealt. Now as for assuming us firearms owners are a bunch of knuckle dragging, Dirty Harry wannabes, please reconsider your stereotype. The large majority of folks I know down here are responsible folk.
This is terrible advice.
The chance that you are the victim of a serial killer is so vanishingly small as to be not worth considering. Therefore if you have an intruder in your home, they are almost certainly after your property.
I would hope that any moral human being would not value property over a human being's life.
Therefore the best outcome which preserves human life is to simply let the intruder take your property and leave. They're almost certainly in a hurry to do so.
Involving a firearm escalates the situation unnecessarily and raises your own chances of death from very very unlikely to probably 50/50 (stat pulled from my butt).
If, on the other hand, you do believe that lethal force is justified to protect property then you have a miss aligned moral compass.
The irony of course is that (statistically speaking) you would be vastly lowering you and your family's chances of surviving the event.
The chance that the intruder is there to murder you is ridiculously minuscule. It's so small that the people that do indiscriminately enter homes to murder get special nicknames like "Zodiac Killer" and Hollywood makes films about them.
Worrying about this type of intruder is irrational. Pulling a gun turns what is almost certainly a routine burglary into a life and death situation.
As I just said, a statistic is still a risk. A risk I will not take when it comes to family. You play it your way; I'll play it mine.
Of course. I just find the idea of guns making you safe so laughably absurd (and provably false). I'm sure they make you feel safer though. Maybe that's worth something.
Here's a good comedy skit about gun ownership (NSFW)
The error in your logic is that you're imagining yourself with a weapon, which indeed, is laughable and provably unsafe.
Edit: not going to bother replying and further make this thread a gun debate. Just want to state that YouTube videos of comedic skits and accidents doesn't nullify any argument. Humans will make mistakes; that's a fact of life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUonA66btgI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK_1yDAqsnM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvfbikv0gBc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WChMcDCMgGw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjCczTWqKx8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycTwaROa1I0
2mins of youtubing. These examples never end! But you, your wife, your kids. You'd never make these kinds of stupid mistakes.
edit: there must be thousands of these self proclaimed gun pros out there here's another beauty
https://youtu.be/v-i8dtulUYU?t=165
love the facial reaction.
edit 2: these videos literally never end on YouTube. Here are another 2
I agree. This is a fact of life. This combined with the utterly vanishingly tiny chance that you will be the victim of a serial killer make gun ownership for the purpose of safety absurd.
Own a gun all you want. But at least realize that you and your family are actually less safe because of it!
Not everyone who owns a gun has the proper discipline to learn how to use their weapon. I call those people statistics, and they set a bad example for the rest of us who respect our tools.
I'm not passing judgement at all. I'm saying that having a device that is designed to suddenly and explosively discharge a projectile is inherently unsafe. To back up my claim I posted numerous videos, many of highly trained people, who have experienced accidental/negligent discharge.
Accidents happen. Even to the most highly trained and careful. The issue with gun accidents is that they have an incredibly high risk of being fatal. Enjoy guns all you like. Just stop pretending that you are safer around them or that you are immune to mistakes. No human is.
Guns have hosts of failure modes, and require specialized knowledge on their operation to ensure safety. Guns can even fire accidentally, with an accidental discharge on dropping the firearm being a possibility on any gun without a firing pin block (which is practically any long gun, the kind you can buy at Walmart in some states, with no waiting period in some states). A poorly handled gun may shoot in a totally unpredictable trajectory, and a first time user would be unlikely to consider collateral damage. (Nursery behind the attacker?)
A knife mishandled usually leads to non-life-threatening self-injury. A knife can be dropped, but will only damage those around it that are wearing inappropriate footwear. A knife has very few mechanisms, and only has as many mechanical failure modes as there are gimmicks on the knife; with some having zero mechanical failure modes possible besides faults that are metallurgical in nature. A knife can be wielded poorly with zero training; a first time gun user may never find the safety without assistance, let alone loading and reloading. A knife results in very low collateral damage.
Basically : I'd rather put a limiter on a novice in combat than give him or her weapons in which they put themselves and their family in even greater danger by their own naivety. With proper training, a gun will be the best choice; my personal problem with that decision is that I've met very few properly trained gun enthusiasts that treat firearms with the respect they need to be handled with, and that's not to say I know very few of them.
> Guns can even fire accidentally, with an accidental discharge on dropping the firearm being a possibility on any gun without a firing pin block (which is practically any long gun, the kind you can buy at Walmart in some states, with no waiting period in some states).
Poppy cock. Modern firearms don't just go off [0]. It is true that many long rifles and shotguns don't have a firing pin block. They have hammer blocks instead (the difference being a firing pin block is activated when the shooter grasps the grip, while a hammer block prevents the hammer of pin from making contact with the cartridge until the trigger is actually pulled). Most firearms incorporate multiple safety systems.
Furthermore, every firearm made in America in the last century has been certified as drop safe. The test is that the gun is dropped from a certain height (I think it's 39 inches) onto a concrete floor, with the hammer back and a round in the chamber - ie the worst case 'I was about to shoot something but butterfingered and now my live firearm is falling to the ground." That was instituted by firearms manufacturers after a spate of bad press when a factory defect meant a batch of Colt 1911's could fire if dropped with a round in the chamber (for those interested, the problem was with the strength of the firing pin spring; after several thousand rounds were fired through the weapon, the tension on the spring would be low enough that it could be over come by inertia). The 1968 Gun Control Act made drop testing mandatory.
> A poorly handled gun may shoot in a totally unpredictable trajectory, and a first time user would be unlikely to consider collateral damage. (Nursery behind the attacker?)
Yes, and an orphanage across the street in case you miss popping your own kid.
Here's the thing - everything you're saying is based on some pretty big assumptions that just aren't true. A study conducted back in 2007 by the Force Science Center where people who had never fired a hand gun before were put through simulated gun fights found that "naive shooters ... are amazingly accurate in making head shots at close range." [1] Point and shoot is something we humans tend to do really really well.
The biggest issue you aren't considering is that the biggest advantage of a gun is that you just have to have it. Power isn't shooting someone accurately - it's bringing a gun to a knife fight. Having a knife means you have to close to the target to engage - having a gun means I can stand back and project power.
[0]There are cases where guns will fire accidentally. These are extraordinarily rare, and are generally due to trying to use an unmaintained firearm in a way it isn't supposed to be.
[1] http://www.forcescience.org/fsnews/66.html
EDIT: formatting edit
I'm so glad I live in the UK where both criminals and self-defence is mostly knife based.
I think the American style of "bringing a gun to a knife fight" just escalates everything.
You think you need a gun in order to kill a would-be assailant. The OP says he used a knife to scare them off. I know which I prefer.
> You think you need a gun in order to kill a would-be assailant. The OP says he used a knife to scare them off. I know which I prefer.
I guess the point I'm trying to make and I should have phrased this more clearly, is that the primary purpose of having a weapon in this situation (either as a criminal or in the case of home defence) isn't to kill someone - it's to project force. Guns and knives are both force multipliers, it's just that a gun is much more efficient and therefore a much better force multiplier. The point isn't to kill someone, it's to coerce them with the threat of force to do what you want them to.
OP was making that threat when he scared off his home intruder(s) by holding out a knife and 'leaving them an exit' - in essence he was saying "leave my home or I will use potentially lethal force on you." The situation doesn't fundamentally change if OP is armed with a knife or a firearm; it's just the strength of that threat is greatly increased.
Another way to look at this - if OP and his assailant are rough equals in terms of ability to do harm to each other, it doesn't matter if OP has a knife or a gun, as long as he has one or the other. Anything that amplifies his ability to enforce his threat of force should be enough to tip the balance of power is his favour (assuming a rational adversary). Guns only become necessary or useful when there's a disparity between the assailant and the now hypothetical OP. There's a moderately well known case in America where a Texas woman's home was being attacked by two men (it turned out they wanted to steal her husband's prescription painkillers). Her ability to coerce these men without a weapon was extremely limited. However, she had a firearm, and was able to stop the attack through the threat, and use, of force.
> I think the American style of "bringing a gun to a knife fight" just escalates everything.
I mean, you're right. The problem is that a) things have escalated, and b) de-escalating it would mean deep systemic changes to the American Constitution and the perceived balance of power between the State and the Citizen. The reasoning behind the 2nd Amendment is two fold - first it's to provide for common defense in the form of a State militia, which is largely a moot point in this country. The second, and this is a bit controversial, is to provide citizens with a means of resisting the Federal government in the event of tyranny. One would think this would be a moot point as well, in a country that spends an obscene amount of money on its armed forces, but it has moral significance - saying that at the last, the citizen is responsible for the protection of their own liberty, and preserving the means of that protection. </rant>
No. A gun also scares them off - and much better than a knife. A gun is an equalizer. Is an 85 year old lady with a knife going to be threatening to some young thug? Not likely. Will an 85 year old lady holding him at gunpoint be scary? Very.
"Smith made the burglar call 911 as she kept her firearm pointed at him."
We're always hearing stories about "responsible gun owners". Well, how responsible is that? It's basically guns 101 that you don't point unless you intend to shoot. Luckily she didn't end up killing the kid, but it could quite easily have happened.
Brandishing isn't something a gun is for, i'm sorry. It's an extraordinarily bad idea to use a gun as a tool for threatening a would-be attacker for both your health, and your legal well-being.[0][1]
> Furthermore, every firearm made in America in the last century has been certified as drop safe.
Single action revolvers have absolutely no safety other than the geometry of their design to prevent accidental discharge and (sometimes) an external safety. Here is the first list of them I found for sale readily on google.[2]
Here's a list of de-certified firearms [3], I'd like you to notice the amount of modern guns de-certified just last year for sale for being deemed unsafe (for these varied reasons[4]). I apologize for the CA-centric data, it was just easiest to find.
Competition shooting pistols often have absolutely no safety devices at all, and plenty are manufactured within the United States.
Many pistols are heirloomed or sold privately, those pistols are not required by law to conform to any safety standards, and can be sold indefinitely. Their high value nature aids the used gun economy, another incentive to have a gun sans modern safeties.[4 :relics and curios/heirloom footnote]
> Poppy cock. Modern firearms don't just go off [0].
Well, here's a blog post with enthusiasts arguing over that.[5] I have a few guns that were left to me by the deceased, but I am by no means an enthusiast.
Here's a blog-post that used wording similar to yours regarding the last century, but he describes drop-safe guns as 'a vast majority' rather than 'every', further explaining about which (modern) guns are never drop-safe.[6]
Now, let me say that I sincerely hope that someone who is going to take the effort to arm their house with a gun will do the homework to figure out a safe firearm to do so with, and with the proper training; but we don't live in that world. People will grab something convenient, just like anything else in life. That means cheap, old, or a knock-off.
[0]: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/self-defense-news/why-brand...
[1]: http://volokh.com/2010/02/12/if-you-brandish-a-gun-in-self-d...
[2]: http://www.gandermountain.com/Guns/New-Guns/New-Handguns/Sin...
[3]: http://oag.ca.gov/sites/oag.ca.gov/files/pdfs/firearms/remov...
[4]: http://smartgunlaws.org/design-safety-standards-for-handguns...
[5]: http://www.commongunsense.com/2010/09/can-guns-go-off-withou...
[6]: http://monderno.com/training/accidental-discharge-question/
If circumstances had been that I was cornered and I would have had to use the knife if they didn't leave I don't think I would have taken it (or a gun for that matter). To be quite honest I don't know what I would have done in that situation (probably rushed them unarmed and tried to run away). Thankfully in both properties there were multiple escape routes.
Carrying a gun increases your risk to get shot: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-gun-i... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/
Saying that the cat is out of the bag so you need a gun is cold war logic were you need to be able to kill the other more times. So you rather want to escalate the situation further instead of trying e.g., what Australia did by implementing gun control?
So Charles Branas's team at the University of Pennsylvania analysed 677 shootings over two-and-a-half years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time, and compared them to other Philly residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity.
This study only looked at one side of the equation of people who carry guns, the ones who got shot. What about all the people who carry guns and never use them? Wouldn't they be excluded from this study?
"We enrolled 677 case participants that had been shot in an assault and 684 population-based control participants within Philadelphia, PA, from 2003 to 2006. We adjusted odds ratios for confounding variables."
How does this only look at people carrying a gun?
"Their study assessed risk for being assaulted and then shot, a compound outcome event whose second element (being shot) is not inevitable given the first (being assaulted). Persons who were assaulted but not shot are not studied. We do not know whether any association between firearm possession and their outcome measure applies to assault, to being shot given an assault, or both."[1]
[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866589/ [2]http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/05/why-skydivers-would-be-bet... [3]http://volokh.com/2009/10/05/guns-did-not-protect-those-who-...
Take Switzerland. http://world.time.com/2012/12/20/the-swiss-difference-a-gun-...
The right to bear arms is ideally one you never need, but it's essential as a contingency plan. We've yet to see a government that didn't exercise horrible abuses of power and the right to bear arms hopefully keeps some of that in check.
Also, entertainment purposes.
I want my neighbor to have all rights, even if he is doing wrong with them.
The question isn't, 'why do I need my privacy'. The question is, 'why do you need to take it'.
I fail to see how reframing the argument is going to change anything. What we need is WAY more transparency. If there's transparency, then the abuses will be obvious, and once people see the abuses they will say "enough is enough."
That ultimately is why they want to keep this hidden. It's not because the "terrorists" will find out, it's because WE will find out and we won't like what we see.
Tit for Tat. If you want to take away our privacy, then we MUST have complete transparency in return.
I would argue that joshuak's formulation above is not a reframing, but the original and correct definition of the right to privacy. Just as with property and liberty, the default presumption should be that there is an intrinsic right of title, and that any challenge to that entitlement should face a heavy burden of justification.
>Tit for Tat. If you want to take away our privacy, then we MUST have complete transparency in return.
Such a trade off could really only be made to work in the light the formulation above.
- Snowden
The more important question is, "what gives you the right to try to take it, no matter what concern you're professing?".
Better explained here by Schneier https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/05/the_eternal...
* If we're going to talk about WWII a good example would be IBM and their role in the holocaust:
[1] - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3924
[2] - https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-10/Cross_Tom/Bl...
There are other, much more loved, tech companies that do similar things, too. They know who they are. I just hope history won't be kind to them.
Yes Google is intentionally using its technology to serve ads, but it's not intentionally using its technology to give information to the NSA, and is in fact trying to get everything encrypted to specifically stop the NSA.
Of course, we are taking about business people, so they'll always be some who will sell it for the right price.
I agree. The largest and potentially most-revealing information about you is captured by technology companies like Google and Facebook.
The Amsterdam registry recorded "Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death"
Create a Google account and you are asked to provide: Name, Gender, Date of birth, Location, Mobile phone number.
This is some of your most private and personal information and it's tied to your actual behaviour on the web. Google's ability to track you across the web and across devices is simply unprecedented.
Google omits basic facts in their privacy policy about the data they collect about you. Things like: how long they keep your data (presumably forever), whether the data is anonymised, whether your searches or activity are disassociated from your identity, and who sees your data inside the company.
Does Google use your mobile number solely for two-factor authentication and absolutely nothing else? Google doesn't tell you. Do they really need your date-of-birth? And is it only used for age verification? Could they simply ask if you're 16 or over? Sure they could, but date of birth tied to your online activity is so much more valuable when it comes to crunching all that big data on user behaviour.
The amount of information that Google captures about you is gargantuan. They know more about your online (and possibly offline) behaviour than you know about yourself. Just to be clear, I don't believe Google does anything nefarious with your data. But even if you trust them, why is it considered perfectly acceptable for them to track you to such a relentless degree?
View a YouTube link on a fresh Android phone it puts you on the sign-in screen, hit back the video plays, they make it look like you have to sign in to watch the video hence make it easier to follow what you watch.
Run Chrome for the first on an android phone, the sign-in button is bigger and clearer, the skip button is small and greyed out.
Chrome history can only be suspended, accidentally enable it and it's on forever again, no warning.
Login from one google account and then accidentally login in from another and it tries to join them (this is so bad I new hit incognito mode before signing into anything google makes).
All of these things in isolation seem relatively minor but the goal is clearly an all encompassing pervasive monitoring of everything you do (so much so that my next phone will not be Android, I'm seriously considering a dumb phone and using my tablet).
I don't trust Google and tbh as a company I don't like them very much.
It's not a popular topic here on HN, but I strongly recommend Aral Balkan's talk about the actual business of Google, Facebook, and far too much of silicon valley.
Throwing around "tracking" as a dirty word made sense when the Internet was a brochure. Paper doesn't normally remember that you looked at it, and HTTP pretended to be a way of looking at a piece of paper, instead of what it is, an interaction.
Tracking is integral to all interactions. Taking sensory data from two different points in time, and deciding that both are representations of this thing called a person that's standing over there, and that said person comes with all these characteristics that are fixed, and all these characteristics that are mutable over time, and that I have all these previous experiences with that person, and a mental model of how they might react to certain things, and a mental model of their hidden internal state like mood or sleepiness, that is the essence of tracking. Friendship is sort of its ultimate form, so it makes sense that an electronic medium for friendship is the heaviest "tracker" on the internet. We humans can absolutely consent to and facilitate tracking that we want, or else we wouldn't associate with each other.
Google's suite of services and the tracking it performs make it more useful to me. When I search for an English word that has a special meaning in programming, it knows I mean it in the software engineering sense. When I open Google Maps I can tap two keys instead of 20 to get directions home. I have the agency to accept that.
The privacy issues of the modern world, to me, have little to do with tracking: rather, they are a violation of expectations, of confidence. You might think, when you send a "private" message on Facebook, that it will only be read by the named recipient. But it may just as well be read by an anonymous NSA analyst. That's where the evil lies. Or, you may think, when you're on a site other than Facebook, that Facebook has no idea you're there. But the "Like" button is watching you, associating that visit with your Facebook profile. That's what's fucked up.
you know many many people risk their lives under extreme conditions to do exactly that. See Latin Americans trying to get to US or Africans into Europe.
Hell I am in the process of emigrating from one Western country to another, and its an incredibly stressful process with no guarantee of success for me.
Rogozov believes in his main point -- but we need specific examples that people (who actually vote) can relate to this.
A plausibly deniable system is the only real answer and so far that is word of mouth.
A single electrical grid certainly is. I'd prefer to see local co-operatives buying utilities from competing networks. The co-ops would own the last mile and could pick the combination of technology, price and robustness that suits them. And when one fails, they hook up to a competitor.
If Japan had had that arrangement, instead of having to bail out the utility monopoly that failed to prevent the Fukushima disaster, they could have just let it go bankrupt and spent only what it took to clean up the mess. And that distinct possibility might have helped prevent the disaster to begin with. They might have figured out how to move the pumps high enough above, for example. Or made provisions to bring in new pumps by helicopter.
A disciplined standing army is more vulnerable too, in some situations, than highly decentralized forces. If you can get the leaders to surrender, that's it. But those pesky insurgents never give up.
And then there's the French Navy, whose leaders refused to send them out to sea when the Nazis were invading. Churchill ending up destroying it so it wouldn't fall into enemy hands. Those ships could have been used to help the evacuation and then fight the Nazis at sea.
Centralization is becoming a problem in disaster relief now too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/us/nationalspecial/after-f...
When the governments start telling people "Hey, you already love using your fingerprint on that iPhone of yours - so why not give us your fingerprint, too? We'll make your life so much easier!", forgetting to mention that there's a drastic difference between the iPhone keeping a local "template" of the fingerprint, while the governments are likely keeping the fingerprint data directly and on their own servers - fight it as much as possible.
Remember you only have so many fingerprints, and even fewer of them you'll probably consider "practical" for authentication to devices and whatnot. Don't let companies or governments lure you into asking for your fingerprint and storing it for you on their servers "for your convenience".
I've never understood why people feel they are a good solution, my bank gave me a little card gizmo, I put my code in it generates a cryptographically secure response.
If it's stolen or lost I just ring them up and they invalidate it.
This is hard. Any entry to the USA for example requires every alien to have their fingerprints taken, and if more and more countries require this there isn't anywhere to go. Another way is needed to stop this practice.
"are you willing to publish your pin code, a high resolution scan of your signature, your passport... Are you ok with your entire family being murdered for their religious affiliation?". If you’re willing to do all of that then congratulations, you really have nothing to hide and the word ‘privacy’ means nothing to you.
Privacy is not just privacy from reasonable people, but unreasonable people as well.
Serious question: Who's making this argument? I don't hear it articulated by anyone, frankly. I'm sure there are people who hold this position and have argued for it, but are any of them in a position to make policy? Have any of our dozen+ presidential candidates made this claim?
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
Senator Trent Lott:
"What are people worried about? What is the problem?" asked Lott, a former majority leader. "Are you doing something you're not supposed to?"
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/15/bellsouth.nsa/
Senator Lindsay Graham
"I don’t think you're talking to the terrorists. I know you're not. I know I'm not, so we don't have anything to worry about..."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/lindsey-graham-nsa_...
And responded with your quote, and a bit more. The context is harder to ridicule:
I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities.
Knowing that reality helps people act accordingly.
I don't normally ridicule people for being forthright about reality.
I'm too lazy at the moment to grab the data for what support was for the Patriot Act when it was first created, but in 2005, support to extend it was at 59%.
Leaving aside that hiring a female engineer from google would not add more women into the ecosystem, it is poor form to take a bunch of personal data and use it to compile a list without consent. From memory, the list had full names, position and links to public profiles. This was essentially a massive doxx dump of female engineers.
I assume most of the listed individuals weren't "hiding" their employment position, but this list could be used to target them, spam recruit them, make it appear as if they were shopping employment offers etc.
Just because you have something to hide doesn't mean you've done something wrong and deserve to have it exposed.
The system works per state, hence if I move from one state to another than my data has to be moved from one state to the next.
I have a friend that works on this system that moves this data over web services.
A more interesting essay might analyze the beliefs and attitudes that lead to people agreeing with the statement, and (perhaps) why they are problematic.
(It's actually quite difficult to figure out why people are comfortable saying they have nothing to hide, it's masked by the sea of text explaining they are wrong)
It sucks and I am not sure what a good man should do.
I agreed. Which is why I propose that for the safety of everyone, we station a cop inside everyone's home. After all, you never know when a burglary is gonna happen. With a cop inside everyone's home, you are guarantee safe when a burglary does happen.
Also, just to make sure you don't do anything illegal in the bathroom (like doing drugs), I propose that the cop must also be present with in the bathroom anytime anyone need to use the bathroom. After all, if you got nothing to hide, and you're not doing anything illegal in the bathroom, then you should not fear the cop being in the bathroom with you.
Ergo, it is not that I shouldn't have anything to hide because I shouldn't fear the government, it is rather that I fear that the government can misinterpret whatever it is that I'am hiding. (I strongly suggest watching movie "Brasil").
Government, after all, is about masses and implementing rules "for all", not "for individuals". A simple example is me being a long term photographer. I enjoy indoor photos. How the light is formed, aperture used, shots being taken, angles, etc. I browse Anne Geddes photos of almost naked children on secure Tor from a local starbucks on a Wifi dongle that I don't use for anything else (public wifis collect and store MAC data) not because I'm a pedophile (something Gov can assume), but rather because I have no idea how Gov could stretch this information, and I am unsure if I could be financially able to pick up my lawyers tab to get a chance to prove to the judge few months into the lawsuit that I am actually a long-term photographer hobbyist, no some twisted kiddie pron lover.
My second answer to this is a "gimme your password" test. Just few weeks ago I was pulled over in a shady neighborhood because my friend is broke and cannot afford anything better. The cop immediately wanted to search my car. I responded I have nothing to hide here. He replied "well, in this case if you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn't have anything against my search, Sir". To what I reached out for a pen and my notepad, opened it on an empty page and handed it to the police officer. He asked me "what is this?". I said: "kindly please give me your email address and password to it". He didn't laugh but clearly didn't want to get suck in. I quickly added: "I mean after all, if you have nothing to hide in your mailbox, then you shouldn't be concerned of me having access it, do you?". He responded "have a good day" and let me on my way.
Could I set up a Private Investigation firm and charge $10/file for access? Would an American pay to see their ex-husband/ex-wife's polygraph results? I could even take payment in Bitcoin.
I think the television news emphasizes the possibility of identity theft & espionage but discounts the likelihood of this data making its way back to the US.
I an utopia, a forbidden-fruit doctrine would develop and be enforced. Data from an illegal leak would be illegal to touch. In practice, who knows.
> Of course you have something to hide. It's not bad to hide things from others. For instance, do you mind if we talk about your sex life? Heck, can I watch you and your wife next time? Sex is natural, we all do it, there is nothing to hide!"
Freedom of speech (the human right, not the legal right) should allow you to have as many harebrained ideas as you'd like, and be as vocal as you'd like. You should be able to talk about your sex life, and you should be allowed to let other people watch you have sex (which you are, on both counts -- your friends examples kind of suck).
"Whatever, in the course of my practice, I may see or hear (even when not invited), whatever I may happen to obtain knowledge of, if it be not proper to repeat it, I will keep sacred and secret within my own breast."
The point is that this isn't being challenged in the latest privacy wars, even though it flies straight in the face of the completely nonsense mantra of "if you've nothing to hide...."
As the OPM "hack" has demonstrated, the government has no interest and little culpability in protecting the vital and dangerous information it has collected. If it shows this much disregard for the important information, how much less protection will they apply to the unimportant things?
* I hate calling it a "hack" since it's been determined that OPM gave them access to everything. I covered that over three weeks ago too: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/opm-background-check-hack-a-di...
Whats so damned wrong with having things to hide? Discretion used to be a virtue. What happened?
====
In the time after WWI, Germany was a relatively liberal country in some respects. The salon society was popular in Berlin and Gays and Lesbians were able to live their lives in relative freedom- not the freedom we have now in the USA, but not the level of persecution they would experience elsewhere. There were magazines that catered specifically to this population as well as private clubs for them to congregate.
Of course these organizations were then easily used by the Nazis to find all of the gays and lesbians in germany...
One thing that makes me really angry about most popular accounts of that regime is the convenient forgetting that Gays and Lesbians were part of the holocaust and were very likely to be straight up slaughtered rather than sent to camps. And while there were fewer gays killed than jews (smaller part of the population) there are other groups as well that are often forgotten... in fact I can only think of the Roma. Shouldn't we all know all the groups the Nazis systematically murdered?
GUNS
====
The important operational part of this is that the data was collected at a time when it seemed innocent and then the regime changed and the data was used to kill people. The nazis are, of course, a very extreme example, but regimes change all the time. For instance, a persecuted group in the USA right now are gun owners. (Yes, I know that guns are used wrongly, over 30 years nearly 600 people have been killed in mass shootings-- of course that doesn't compare to the 10,000 people killed each year by drunk drivers.)
Increasingly, one of the tactics used to go after gun owners is "registration". After all, if you're law abiding, why should you fear registering your guns? There is a massive program right now that causes "FBI Background Checks" for every gun purchase--and by this nature this is registration of firearms and firearms owners.
GERMS
=====
So maybe you hate guns and gun owners so you see nothing wrong with keeping track of them. The thing is, when you live long enough (Say into your 40s) you start to see how attitudes change. Some for the better-- gays are less persecuted now, and I'm grateful for that (being not exactly heterosexual myself). But you also see other groups being persecuted. This starts out seemingly innocently enough. Lets take Muslims. They have been linked to real crimes and that has been used to smear a whole group. (There are other groups getting the same treatment right now- gamers, men, christians, etc.)
The germ, which becomes an infection and spreads, is thinking that because a person of type X committed a crime (A jew in germany charged too much? a boy at college committed rape? a muslim killed people in a terrorist act?) ... that the whole group can be painted with the brush of prejudice.
That prejudice becomes systematic and eventually it can become oppression. Often it becomes the situation where those who think they are oppressed justify oppressing others because they claim their victims are oppressing them. (You see this now with the more extreme elements of feminism. No, not all men are rapists! Really. Some of them are gay!)
This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany where the county had been victimized by the treaty that ended WWII and humiliated and felt widespread victimhood.
So, beware of victimhood being used to justify prejudice!
That's one lesson people don't seem to learn from this era-- its the mechanism by which a peaceful, tolerant society (as germany had) becomes fascist.
After all, germans are not genetically predisposed to fascism, any more than americans are.
Oh, and this whole idea of "thought crime" is a mechanism by which prejudice is fostered and spread-- you saw it in Germany, Orwell wrote about it. We have it in action here in the USA... and on this site.
Surely you know where this will lead. In fact, anecdotally it already looks like this site has lost %80 of its participation... it used to be you needed hundreds of uproots to get to the front page, now only 10 will do it.
Besides, we're currently in the middle of several moral panics. Most of them come and go, but it feels like things are really bad when you're in the midst of them.
Seems like a distinction stemming from perspective. Are women persecuted or do the face disadvantages in the workplace?
As for your question, that strongly depends on which jurisdiction we're talking about. Where the United States is concerned, I would say the latter is true, but not the former.
Just because legislation that you do not agree with is implemented (Checks on individuals before they can buy a gun, or rights of homosexuals to get married for example) this is not persecuting a group.
To imply so is disingenuous.
Secondly, I am no Christian. Indeed, I personally feel that religious beliefs of any flavor are a mental illness.
Thirdly, I am agun owner. I advocate the ownership of guns as a check/balance on the central government. I accept the gun deaths that accompany ownership (accidents, suicide, murders) as I believe the benefit far out ways the cost. I believe this because of what I have seen in countries where there are severe limitations on personal gun ownership. For me it comes down to this: when weapons enter the equation, you are either a Player or you are Furniture. I choose to be a Player.
Fourth and finally, I believe in complete free speech, no exceptions, and as such I in no way wish to limit you, or any person's expression. Still, any time people choose to scoff instead of respond, I can't help but feel they need to return to their seat and pay better attention in class before raising their hands.
I did below.
However, I'm not sure the bureaucracy surrounding either really comes close to "persecution".
Who should be more concerned about the behind-the-scenes stuff, gun enthusiasts, newlyweds, new parents, homeowners, registered voters, or drivers? And why?
I suppose it depends on what threats you consider realistic.
Is it because they don't know just how much data mining governments and companies do to us, and prefer to limit themselves to issues that might reduce their enthusiasm?
In which case it's not really a meaningful objection, since it's true of nearly every hobby. I'm sure that back in the early 1900s some ham radio operators objected to licensing requirements and power limits placed on them. That doesn't mean those were unreasonable restrictions.
> Demonstrating that harm has occurred is not, in and of itself, sufficient to establish that the conduct in question amounts to persecution. Rather, the harm experienced must meet the requisite level of severity.
Things already need to be serious before it can be labeled persecution, which means that any persecution is "safe to acknowledge".
The problem is, "persecution" has a many lay meanings, including "any negative social consequence". Felons, for example, face social negative social consequences even after their sentence is over. Free speech and free association require that some free speech leads to negative social consequences. Someone who stands on the street corner and advocates the return of miscegenation laws will likely get a cold shoulder from others, and may describe themselves as being persecuted for their beliefs. That doesn't mean it fits the sort of persecution described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution . Or at http://z9.io/2005/04/14/debian-sarge-php4-and-apache2-why-do... we see someone saying "Debian Sarge, PHP4 and Apache2.. why do you persecute me?", where "persecute" is not meant in the same way that the Jehovah's Witnesses have been persecuted for not following participating in flag pledges.
If we go with that lay definition of persecution then clearly some forms of persecution are not only acceptable but encouraged. However, that definition is mostly meaningless and unactionable. Just because the local golf club members feel persecuted because they the city law prevents them from getting enough water to keep the grass green doesn't mean they are a persecuted social group, even if others in the town chastise them for wasting water during a drought. Using that very broad definition we can see that extremely few types of persecution end up with death camps. Or for that matter, rarely grow at all.
Of course you downvote me, you're a bigot and I'm your target victim. You advocated my persecution, and in this case, despite providing a substantive comment you downvoted me-- an act that works to silence me-- because not only are you a bigot you are anti-intellectual.
Thanks at least for admitting it.
I love this sort of "If I lose, I called it, so I'm actually right!" hedging.
The implication is, of course, that rather than you perhaps being wrong, that your unpopular opinion is actually 'critical thinking' and your opponents are all incapable of it.
However, consistently, on Hacker News, and among leftists, instead of making arguments that refute my arguments with logic, facts or reason, they choose to do like you do-- and attack me personally.
Since you can't argue to the point and you did argue to the person, and you downvoted to try and silence my opinion-- yes, I think it's a slam dunk that it's an inability to engage in critical thinking.
Also, I have been on this site since around 2007, and so I have many years of experience to draw from... the left teaches anti-intellectualism as much, or more, than the religious right, and it is pervasive on this site.
That you smugly said what you did above is proof positive of it. But you'll never see it, because you've been trained to be unable to see it.
You are being a hypocrite. By saying "downvoters aren't critically thinking", you are attacking people who haven't even responded yet. You're setting up a pre-response trigger. It's an immature, adolescent way to debate. If you were a good at critical thinking as you say you are, you'd see that and understand why.
> you downvoted to try and silence my opinion
Are you psychic? HN doesn't provide a mechanism to see the modders, up or down, and I usually don't downmod and respond, myself. I do one or the other. So much for your 'slam dunk'.
> That you smugly said what you did
You really aren't above this 'personal attack' thing, you know. I actually attacked what you were saying, not you personally, pointing out your hedging. Even if you took it as 'personal attack', that you chide me for doing so, then do it yourself? Hypocrisy.
Your 'critical thinking' is rife with errors, so your pre-response strike against people who disagree with you is entirely unwarranted, and a very non-critical-thinking way to conduct your argument.
Thanks for proving my point.
Pardon?
That stretched the meaning of 'persecution' past the breaking point and into the realm of meaninglessness. Every driver needs a license, and the car needs to be registered and with a license plate. Car licenses are used for taxation purposes and to help the authorities identify the owner of a vehicles.
Watch out! Come the next revolution, when the cyclists, skateboards, and horseback riders take over, all you murder machine operators will be the first against the wall, and they'll use your driver's license to track you down! Slowly!
(Hint: in general, persecuted groups don't tend to have majority of the government, with full legislative control, a president who goes skeet shooting and a vice president that says 'if you want to protect yourself, get a double barrel shotgun'.)
In NJ, for example, it's not even safe to move your guns when changing residences, let alone taking them out of the house at any other time for any other purpose (taking a handgun off your property is equal to committing robbery with it in the eyes of the law for example). There are some protections under the law, but those only apply after you've been arrested, charged, and had your life ruined--if you're lucky to have a judge who lets you bring them up, that is. With hollow point bullets, you can't even legally move them when you change residences, and have to leave them at your old residence (which might also be illegal). To even own a gun, you have to be a legal expert. NY, MA, CA, have similar, though perhaps slightly less draconian laws. You won't be able to get a carry permit (concealed or otherwise) even if you prove you have multiple stalkers who intend to do you harm or kill you.
NJ especially, I assume, is a model the anti-gun lobby wants for the whole country. There are no guns (especially handguns) legal outside one's home or place of business. We have such a peaceful state with no gun violence at all. I guess it's a small price to pay for persecuting all those gun owners.
Many Americans have no legal way to practice the traditional craft of moonshine. There are penalties for getting caught with even a part of a still. In Florida it's a http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2014-08-05/news/fl-wilton-m...
I mean, I'm from Florida. Moonshine is illegal in Florida. Even owning part of a still is illegal. Here's a report of someone charged with "among other counts, possession of more than a gallon of illegal liquor and possession of a still", which are "third-degree felonies, which carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison" http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2014-08-05/news/fl-wilton-m... .
Owning an unauthorized still in NJ is also illegal. Here's an arrest from a couple years back - http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/01/police_medford_man_... .
If you think that gun owners, and moonshiners, are both persecuted due to complex or draconian laws, then your definition of persecuted is rather meaningless.
The question is still, what does "persecution" mean?
As another civil justice issue, free speech is protected under the first amendment. But we also accept that there are time, place, and manner restrictions on the right to free speech. Someone who violates those restrictions may be jailed.
Do you consider these people to be persecuted? If so, then I again suggest that your definition of 'persecuted' is so broad as to be unusable.
If you do not consider them to be persecuted, then why is it okay to sometimes stifle free expression, but never okay to stifle gun ownership? Both are equally constitutionally protected, no? Why does one have limits and the other not?
The Jehova's Witnesses come to mind, too. This is probably not complete, but it does give an indicator at least: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Kennzeichen_f%C3%BCr_Sch...
Top row, from left to right:
"Political", "Professional Criminal", "Emigrant", "Jehovas' Witness", "Homosexual", and "Antisocial"
Left column, top to bottom:
"basic color", "badge for repeat offenders", "prisoners of the punitive regiment", "Jews".
Then there are some more badges listed, for special cases if you will :/
> That's one lesson people don't seem to learn from this era-- its the mechanism by which a peaceful, tolerant society (as germany had) becomes fascist.
Having read Sebastian Haffner's autobiographical book about the time from 1914 to 1933, I have a somewhat different picture, in which both WW1 and the inflation played a huge role in fertilizing the soil for craving adventure and outside stimuli (that craving for example expressed in the sports craze in the 20s). The Nazis didn't have to transform all of society -- they just needed enough people willing to be brutal enough on their behalf, that's what they had and that's how they took over. I would say the Nazis chiseled more than they transformed, and then the others either rationalized and became willing Nazis, or were unwillingly in their power. But by the time resistance seemed like a good idea, it was pretty much too late, people could only save their souls by standing up, or save their lives by fleeing, but not really change the course of things. When that was still possible, people just looked on and hoped for the best. Seems familiar, huh?
Maybe my impression is totally wrong, but that's my impression. Here are some quotes form said book (the English title is "Defying Hitler")
> A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.
[..]
> To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. they began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.
and:
> Indeed, behind these questions are some very peculiar, very revealing, mental processes and experiences, whose historical significance cannot yet be fully gauged These are what I want to write about. You cannot get to grips with them if you do not track them down to the place where they happen: the private lives, emotions, and thoughts of individual Germans…There, in private, the fight is taking place in Germany. You will search for it in vain in the political landscape, even with the most powerful telescope. Today the political struggle is expressed by the choice of what a person eats and drinks, whom he loves, what he does in his spare time, whose company he seeks, whether he smiles or frowns, what pictures he hangs on his walls. It is here that the battles of the next world war are being decided in advance. That may sound grotesque, but it is the truth.
Ive seen this mentioned twice now.
When did `a piece of paper says X` become a leading argument?
The processes of resource extraction in which Class Men and Class White have been and are engaged in is obvious from the historical record. But the incentive is to just work around the possibility of asserting this as a premise to any degree, so you don't get screamed at or worse. The form and content of much of the thinkpieces you've read has been modified by these kind of incentives. Yet many seem to sincerely believe that everything they read is an honest translation of the author's deepest thoughts, feelings, and beliefs into human language, when in reality most writers on topics like this are, to some degree, scared or cowardly.
Rough translation:
Only people in privileged groups can comfortably claim to have nothing to hide, because they don't get persecuted for who they are. It's not just Jews who got persecuted, it's minorities everywhere, but only in that case is the persecution widely acknowledged. Otherwise we disavow individual acts (of bigotry/racism/sexism/etc) but we don't look for the root causes.
It's obvious that (the class of people labeled) white men have disproportionately benefited from exploitation all throughout history, and continue to benefit to this day. However, people who bring this up in thinkpieces or the media get screamed at or worse. Most writers understand this, and water down their critique so it's easier to swallow and the backlash will be minimal. This is cowardly.