Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

> You're saying, "We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn't agree with in the past". This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to. I would be unhappy if people said "I think that karmacondon has made mistakes in the past, so he shouldn't be trusted to do his job ever again."

Yes, you would be unhappy. But this is not about whether you are unhappy, but whether you should have control over military, police, our tax money, and thus everyone's lives.

It simply is a very well established fact that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous, and that they are extremely hard to break up once you recognize they are heading in the wrong direction. Just look at what the problem is in countries where people are doing badly, both historically and right now, and why things are so extremely hard to improve once they have gone bad. Which is why we have built structures that try to prevent such concentrations of power from forming. That is essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers: To build distrust into the system. Dictatorships are the opposite of that (only one power, and no mechanism to remove the person in office). Yes, democratically elected officials certainly are unhappy when they are voted out - but that is the price we pay to prevent concentrations of power from forming.

And surveillance is undermining democratic decisionmaking. Having a democracy now does not guarantee you a democracy tomorrow if you aren't careful in who and what you vote for.

> If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.

Yes, "we" will. If history can teach us something, we can expect that it will take about a decade at least, with many unhappy lives, maybe millions of deaths, until foreign military gets into it to "deal with it".

Sure, maybe that won't happen. But given the prospects, wouldn't it be wise to use our experience from history, to try and make predictions where things will lead, and to then try and prevent things from happening in the first place?

You are aware, for example, that Hitler was democratically elected into office, and all his powers were given to him democratically? And you are aware what it took to remove him from office afterwards?

My goal is more modest, to fix the problems with posting using real names if possible (and not by using real name policies).

> We need to regulate any institution that collects data in the same way.

I feel like this is too wide. Everyone collects data. I don't mean all tech companies collect data, I mean, for example, your friends have copies of the emails you've sent them. They have photos with you in them of places you've been with timestamps and GPS coordinates. Your coworkers have access to your calendar. Your mechanic has the service history on your car. Your librarian knows which books you have checked out.

These aren't problematic situations because they each only have a little piece of your data, and you trust each those people with that little piece, and if you don't then you don't have to give it to them.

The problem is when you don't have that choice. Which is what happens when you're dealing with a government or a monopoly (or some other concentrated market where you can't trust any of the players). You can't reasonably choose to not have your location collected by your mobile carrier, or the traffic cameras in front of your home. If all your friends use Facebook, then Facebook Facebook Facebook.

But we don't really want to regulate Facebook. I mean holy cow, what is that even supposed to look like?

I think we can separate the problem into two pieces. The first is collection by, let's call it, unavoidable monopolies. Telecommunications carriers and other utility companies. This is where we know exactly what to do, because these entities should not be collecting any information about people at all. There is no reason Verizon needs to know anything about you other than whether you've paid your bill. So regulation here can be useful, e.g. make it unlawful for carriers to triangulate a cellphone's location without a warrant, or collect anything whatsoever about the contents of IP packets. But we also have a strong technical solution here. Encrypt all the things. Fully deprecate HTTP in favor of HTTPS. We need to build, for example, DNS query privacy. Things like that.

The other part of the problem is what you might call avoidable monopolies. There is no fundamental reason why Facebook has to be as centralized as it is. You have a phone which has all your photos on it and is connected to the internet 24/7. Why is there a copy of your photos on Facebook's servers? If one of your friends wants to see one of your photos, why are they not getting it directly from you? Then you don't have to trust Facebook with a copy of it. So the solution for this half of the problem is, disintermediate the avoidable monopolies.

The argument between the two of you is baffling. It is incontrovertible that the U.S. is using electronic data gathered right now by itself and by private technology companies to screw with people. Literally billions of dollars will be spent on that purpose this year alone. There are several government agencies devoted to doing it. There are also the government agencies of a dozen or two other countries which the U.S. government agencies work with and share data with to a greater or lesser extent. Literally thousands of newspaper articles have been written about this.

The U.S. government has several orders of magnitude more information about the private lives and communications and beliefs and activities of its citizens than East Germany ever had. This is also incontrovertible and undeniable.

How can either of you talk about abuses that happened in the past as if those were the only abuses? Why would you need to?

> It is incontrovertible that the U.S. is using electronic data gathered right now by itself and by private technology companies to screw with people.

Yes, it is. But these are not the people that the argument is about and that's precisely the problem here. They don't feel that it concerns them at all, it is always others who need to worry about what is done with that data, they have nothing to hide and absolutely nothing to fear.

> Literally billions of dollars will be spent on that purpose this year alone.

10's to 100's of billions of dollars.

> There are also the government agencies of a dozen or two other countries which the U.S. government agencies work with and share data with to a greater or lesser extent.

Yes.

> Literally thousands of newspaper articles have been written about this.

Indeed. But since this has not yet resulted in mass arrests on US soil this evidence amounts to nothing in the eyes of those that see it as a 'good thing', these people are keeping us all safe and are merely doing their jobs. Incredible to you, to me and lots of others but still that's a position that quite a few people hold and not much that you will say or do will persuade them from that point of view.

So, I don't need to use the past as a reference. But it is strange to see a person that would refuse to learn from history to be able to apply the lessons to todays environment. I'm working on a second part of that blog post about 'if you've got nothing to hide' that concentrates on the present (I think the past has been dealt with), but I still feel that those are such enormously important reminders that they serve as a good backgrounder for why all this stuff matters.

So this is a simple choice grounded in the 'those that refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it' line.

> The U.S. government has several orders of magnitude more information about the private lives and communications and beliefs and activities of its citizens than East Germany ever had.

This is true. But the mere possession is not enough to sway a die-hard denier of danger and supporter of the surveillance state. All that data by their reckoning is in good hands it is there merely to protect them from unseen dangers.

Obviously I disagree strongly with that position but that's probably because (1) I've lived for a bit in a country that was a police state by most definitions and (2) I've seen how the various layers of that society would deal with this (the majority were just like karmacondon here, only a very small minority dared to take a stance, the rest saw the whole thing as essentially beneficial, which retrospectively may seem very hard to understand. In fact even today there are still those that yearn for the communist days when life was orderly, everybody had a job and everybody had a pension waiting for them at the end of the line).