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People with nothing to hide

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Re: People with nothing to hide

#61

Post by mtgx »

asperous wrote: post #48
ck2 wrote: post #39

Think about how the NSA helped stop all the killings and maimings at the boston bombing. Oh wait, they didn't - from two super stupid criminals not even trying to hide what they were planning. So WTF good are they doing for all the damage they've done to our society. NSA has become just like the TSA, completely useless theater that hassles everyone and accomplishes nothing. Just wait until they can park hundreds of d…

Apparently they stopped some other bombing (though it's pretty hard to convict a criminal guilty purely on intent). I think it just comes down to the trade off of freedom vs. loss of life. I mean that's what it's really about, isn't it? We are giving up the freedom of privacy for the potential of more security? Yet, This is not the American Way At one point we realized that in order to protect the freedoms of our peo…

Or maybe they didn't:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/public-documents-contradict...

Re: People with nothing to hide

#62

Post by mtgx »

rmc wrote: post #60
ck2 wrote: post #39

Think about how the NSA helped stop all the killings and maimings at the boston bombing. Oh wait, they didn't - from two super stupid criminals not even trying to hide what they were planning. So WTF good are they doing for all the damage they've done to our society. NSA has become just like the TSA, completely useless theater that hassles everyone and accomplishes nothing. Just wait until they can park hundreds of d…

Select bias. You don't know what they did stop.

I'm sure they have plenty of proof ready to share with the public, to prove that the system is worth it, even though it's unconstitutional, but apparently no one cares about that and about American values anymore:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etm4dHdaApo

Re: People with nothing to hide

#63

Post by noerps »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #12
AndyKelley wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Can you repeat that, but explain it more clearly?

Privacy has no intrinsic value whatsoever. All it does is slow down those who can use information against people. To win, we must fight the threat (government). Privacy only gives us time, which itself won't solve anything.

The concept of privacy is inherent for dubio pro reo. If you take away or reduce privacy everybody is guilty by association - qed.

Re: People with nothing to hide

#64

Post by downandout »

These tweets are just a sliver of the overwhelming evidence that most of the US population is incredibly naive. The issue with that, of course, is that they won't vote out of office the officials responsible for allowing these programs. Every elected official involved in the oversight of these programs, those that announce support for them, and those that do not publicly denounce them, must be voted out in the next election. That won't happen because of people like this. As a democratic society, ambivalence may be the most dangerous enemy we face.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the NSA offered free, nationwide, unlimited mobile voice/LTE data/SMS with a warning that all of it would be monitored and recorded. My bet is the adoption rate would be above 90%.

Re: People with nothing to hide

#65

Post by EliRivers »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #38
mantas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why sad?

It is sad that you (and most people here) prefer to live in a society where it's socially acceptable to hide who you truly are based on irrational fear of judgement, rather than be open and benefit from the improved communication which publicity offers. We learned to accept and tolerate most directly noticeable features of people. Maybe you don't want to communicate your skin color, your height, your gender or your l…

There's nothing irrational about fear of judgement. I do things that are completely legal that, if many other people knew I did them, would cause them to treat me differently, to my detriment.

You seem to be saying that I shouldn't hide them. My choice is to stop doing something I like doing, or accept that people will judge me and I will be treated a little worse. Why? Why should I have to do that? Why can't I keep going as I am? It makes me happier, it makes everyone else happier. What's so fucking wonderful about me being less happy?

People without secrets are perpetually putting on a show; removing privacy won't cause everyone to suddenly accept everyone's differences. You have some kind of utopian fantasy in which if everyone knows everything about everyone else, the world magically becomes a better place. It's not true. Tolerance has no limits? Have you met humans? How about that tribe where a boy becomes a man by being anally raped by other men? Or the neighbouring tribe where he becomes a man by orally servicing other men? There are cultures and societies in the world where anally raping children is simply not tolerated. How about gender selection? Killing a healthy child a few hours old because you wanted the other sex? The society I live in has a very low tolerance for drowning children in a bucket. Extreme examples, yes, but making it public won't suddenly make everyone tolerate it, and won't make everyone agree "oh, well they're different, it's okay for them to be like that".

We are different. Differences lead to disagreement and conflict. Privacy, amongst other things, gives everyone a means to shield their differences; be it something legal that society disapproves of, or something illegal that everyone does anyway, or something that's illegal in other cultures, or just odd. It's a necessary part of living in this world without either spending our time killing each other, or ending up a bland monoculture in which nobody ever steps outside the lines of society's accepted behaviour.

Re: People with nothing to hide

#67

Post by gbog »

davisr wrote: post #8

I'd love to see digital privacy taught as part of the curriculum in public school computer classes. If every student learned their rights when they learned how to type, these fools with 'nothing to hide' would think a bit deeper about all the information (including the info that may be used against them in a court of law) they've posted online over the past 10-15 years.

Yes.

This should be a part of education. Maybe it is already in some parts of Europe that are more sensitive with privay breaches than US (France? Germany?).

Anyway, I live very far from my youngest brother, and have only few occasion to chat with him. Last time I felt the need to check his awareness of the matter (he is on Facebook and has the right age to share pics of drunk friends), and was happy to hear that he was under a pseudo and was using carefully the privacy features.

Re: People with nothing to hide

#68

Post by rrrrtttt »

ck2 wrote: post #39

Think about how the NSA helped stop all the killings and maimings at the boston bombing. Oh wait, they didn't - from two super stupid criminals not even trying to hide what they were planning. So WTF good are they doing for all the damage they've done to our society. NSA has become just like the TSA, completely useless theater that hassles everyone and accomplishes nothing. Just wait until they can park hundreds of d…

The Financial Times has called this the data intelligence complex, by analogy with the military-industrial complex. It's a government--private sector alliance that's spending $80bn yearly on spying on citizens with questionable returns. Can you imagine "how many jobs would be destroyed" if this were to stop?

Re: People with nothing to hide

#69

Post by Sambdala »

asperous wrote: post #48
ck2 wrote: post #39

Think about how the NSA helped stop all the killings and maimings at the boston bombing. Oh wait, they didn't - from two super stupid criminals not even trying to hide what they were planning. So WTF good are they doing for all the damage they've done to our society. NSA has become just like the TSA, completely useless theater that hassles everyone and accomplishes nothing. Just wait until they can park hundreds of d…

Apparently they stopped some other bombing (though it's pretty hard to convict a criminal guilty purely on intent). I think it just comes down to the trade off of freedom vs. loss of life. I mean that's what it's really about, isn't it? We are giving up the freedom of privacy for the potential of more security? Yet, This is not the American Way At one point we realized that in order to protect the freedoms of our peo…

It's more complicated than "freedom vs. loss of life" because any "protections" necessarily have costs and unexpected consequences. So what ends up happening is even more terrifying than a direct freedom vs. lives trade off would be in theory.

For example, if TSA being onerous convinces a significant number of people to drive for their medium distance trips instead of fly, more people will die because driving is more dangerous than flying.

Also, it's not exactly a 1-to-1 comparison, but for every 700,000 hours(ish) you force people to wait or delay their day in some fashion, you're causing an entire lifetime of inconvenience. It's better than taking an infant from its mother and shooting it, but it's still taking an entire lifetime of potential and destroying it through boredom and frustration.

I know I'm leaning pretty heavy on TSA examples here, but we've also seen they can't even reliably stop weapons from coming through security in predictable and repeatable ways. So, "we" decided that a trade off between security and freedom was prudent, we implemented that trade off, and then we found out we only received the downsides and none of the upsides.

Re: People with nothing to hide

#70

Post by heyitsnick »

The sad irony out of all this is that if you are served with an NSL, you now are legally obligated to have something to hide.

As Nicholas Merrill, writing anonymously in 2007 for the Washington Post [1] puts it:

"Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie."

So its not only that some law-abiding citizens have something to hide; the NSA is legally obligated tens of thousands every year [2] to have do it.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03... [2] http://epic.org/privacy/nsl/

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