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If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

jacquesmattheij.com

81–90 of 321 posts

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or I don't care about freedom to bear arms because I don't have a gun 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 en…

Okay then: "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 camp…

I agree that fending off a modern army with rifles is a pipe dream

Tell that to the mujahideen...

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#82
That still leaves open the question about what qualifies as worth hiding and what doesn't - who gets to decide that and is that going to be a thing everyone lives by forever or will that be a function of time and other circumstances? (Spectacles - not worth hiding but think of the Pol Pot era and you had to hide them if you wanted to survive.)

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you because I frankly think implying that gun owners, men, Christians and gamers are persecuted in the United States (which was the implication) makes you just as laughable as the same radical feminists you claim to oppose.

Why does persecution have to reach epic proportions before it becomes safe to acknowledge it?

Your question is unanswerable. By most definitions (see "Defining Persecution" at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1941006 as one example):

> 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.

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#84

Something important to note in the OPM data breach: 1.1 million fingerprints were stolen [1], and it would've been a lot more if say this happened 10 years later, and the US, just like Estonia, India and I think a few other countries, started asking their citizens for their fingerprints and stored them in their own databases. When the governments start telling people "Hey, you already love using your fingerprint on t…

Biometrics are fundamentally flawed as they can't be revoked.

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.

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#85

"When you say I don't care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide, that is no different than saying I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write." - Edward Snowden

It's also crucial to civilization that everyone _else_ has these rights, not just you. You can't take internet, roads, and telephones away just because bad guys sometimes use them.

I want my neighbor to have all rights, even if he is doing wrong with them.

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand about the want to have freedom to bare arms (aside from moral arguments about what high levels of gun ownership does to society, but let's not go there) is that the only time I can imagine needing a gun in life is during a time of civil war or some similar sort of uprising. It would not make any difference to me what the law was in this regard if lawlessness had already broken out and I feared…

What I don't understand about it is that the right to bear arms was rooted in the desire to allow citizens to arm themselves against an oppressive government so they could organize an effective overthrow if the need ever arose again (after the revolutionary war). Today, the government's military is so advanced that they'd quickly squash any kind of uprising even if you somehow managed to obtain every legally purchase…

The political cost would be too high for the oppressing side. The military will not be homogeneously obedient to repress its own people that much

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#87

Something that people in silicon valley just don't get is that that the above argument also applies to tech corporations like Google who collect personal data for living and then say "trust us, we'll do no evil". The industry is upset about Snowden because it cost them sales in China, but for the most part while it talks the talk it doesn't walk the walk. * If we're going to talk about WWII a good example would be IB…

"...tech corporations like Google who collect personal data for living" 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, Gend…

The real reason they ask for mobile number is to stop spammers creating a ton of accounts.

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#88
post #21

I'm not sure about cause and effect with logging data and genocides. Ok it made the Nazis job easier in Holland but they killed a lot of people elsewhere. Since those times the amount of data stored on everyone had rocketed and the amount of genocide going on has plummeted - see the graph from Pinker's book - http://i.imgur.com/rFWzUOd.png

Are you kidding me? Of course, they found jews people in all the invaded countries and Germany, but they had a harder time finding jewish people. In the Netherlands, they basically knew who were jewish, and if the data had not been destroyed, 100% of the jewish people have had died because of it. Without the data, some people had the chance to escape or hide their true identify (there are plenty of jewish who could c…

My point was that the data was not the cause of the genocide. If you look at modern genocides eg. Rwanda a few years ago or Southern Sudan as we speak they are mostly characterised by a lack of internet connectivity or data about people. The places where everyone is on Facebook and G+ are not where they happen. Indeed in the Sudan case if there was a lack of privacy about who exactly had slaughtered who's family I suspect it would make the perpetrators much less likely to do it.

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#89
Regarding his statement: "It doesn’t require much of an imagination to see how this information could be abused." Rogozov answers: Yes it does! In fact, that is the whole point of the blog entry, and it's completely skipped over. Their was a lot of writing, but the whole point of the article was left as an exercise for the reader. Why be so lazy? There needs to be a set of concrete examples of how these information breeches actually hurt real people. Saying, "their privacy has been violated in a pretty drastic manner leading to death, identity theft or embarrassment" isn't specific enough, and as a reader, I don't buy that the Nazis are going to take over in America someday so they can eradicate all the Jews in the employment of the United States government.

Rogozov believes in his main point -- but we need specific examples that people (who actually vote) can relate to this.

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

#90
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand about it is that the right to bear arms was rooted in the desire to allow citizens to arm themselves against an oppressive government so they could organize an effective overthrow if the need ever arose again (after the revolutionary war). Today, the government's military is so advanced that they'd quickly squash any kind of uprising even if you somehow managed to obtain every legally purchase…

That argument always presumes it is the entire military against civilians. One would think if things got that bad, there would be some manner of defections from the military into the rebelling side.

The other check and balance was also that each state were to have militias. So it wouldn't be just citizens against 1 federally controlled military.
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