Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

jacquesmattheij.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 321 posts

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

#91

Post by mindslight »

carsongross wrote: post #81
mindslight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

My version of "fending off" includes an end goal where you're no longer under attack and don't have to hide out in caves.

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.

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

#92

Post by joshuak »

dmvaldman wrote: post #3

"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

Also the argument is framed backwards.

The question isn't, 'why do I need my privacy'. The question is, 'why do you need to take it'.

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

#93

Post by joonoro »

jliptzin wrote: post #75
rorykoehler wrote: post #66

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…

>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 purchased firearm in the country.

You'd be surprised at how effective guerrilla warfare is.

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

#94

Post by douche »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #86
jliptzin wrote: post #75

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…

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

That was a big issue for the North in the early years of the Civil War. Southerners were disproportionately represented in the small pre-war standing army and West Point alumnae. So the war starts, and they mostly go home and switch sides; at the same time the northern armies are massively expanding, with a gutted officer pool.

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

#95

Post by freshhawk »

jliptzin wrote: post #75
rorykoehler wrote: post #66

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…

"Today, the government's military is so advanced that they'd quickly squash ..."

Would they? They should try doing that now in all the various wars and police actions they are involved in.

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

#96

Post by nnutter »

rorykoehler wrote: post #66
hammock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Maybe in that future you'll be able to 3D everything but if we lose the right to bare arms don't you think that would limit the supply of arms when that time came?

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

#97

Post by PavlovsCat »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #67
PavlovsCat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if various identities are all elevated to an equal level of acceptance, the term "privilege" will simply be shifted to more nebulous concepts. 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 pri…

Let's cross that bridge when we come to it. 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 terr…

> We have.

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.

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

#98

Post by PavlovsCat »

zxcvcxz wrote: post #26
PavlovsCat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is…

What are his ideas to 'fix' the system?

That's a big question about someone who gives a lot of talks: https://www.youtube.com/results?filters=long&search_query=ja...

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

#99

Post by ChuckMcM »

carsongross wrote: post #81
mindslight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This has been perhaps the most interesting thing, from a military tactics view, of the latest wars. That a moderately armed insurgency can hold against a very sophisticated military. The limits of smart weapons. In many ways it bolsters the argument that the 2nd amendment, as a bulwark against the emergence of a federal police state, is not actually outdated.

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

#100

Post by doomrobo »

caseysoftware wrote: post #6

And it's the same line of reasoning that opposes a central gun registry.

The open question that the article didn't touch upon (probably because it's much more complicated) is where to draw the line between what is and isn't the government's business. There are many who don't buy into the "nothing to hide" argument and would nonetheless advocate for the use of a central gun registry. It's not mutually exclusive, it's just a matter of where a person draws their line of privacy. I'd imagine that libertarians are on the far "nothing is anybody's business" end of the spectrum.
Post reply on HN