This is an interesting post on the topic from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_beli...
The thread under that comment just serves to reinforce the OP's point.
Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
231–240 of 329 posts
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me ask you one question: What would be circumstances that would change your mind? As in: What would need to happen to make you think that surveillance is going to far? So far, it seems pretty much like your belief that surveillance is not a problem for you is unfalsifiable, that you will believe that it is a problem for you only when the secret police is actually coming for you or maybe your family.
Something bad would have to happen to random citizens as the result of government surveillance. Something like "Private Citizen X criticized the government and embarrassing information about his life was revealed as a consequence." There are lots of bad things that the government could do. But it just hasn't happened. They've had mass surveillance technology in place for over a decade now. The world hasn't fallen apa…
> Something bad would have to happen to random citizens as the result of government surveillance.
Define 'random'...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-van-buren/parallel-const...
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130...
> Something like "Private Citizen X criticized the government and embarrassing information about his life was revealed as a consequence."
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-cove...
You mean like that?
> There are lots of bad things that the government could do.
Does, not could do.
> But it just hasn't happened.
It happens, but it just does not manage to cross your threshold for worry because you personally are not inconvenienced.
> They've had mass surveillance technology in place for over a decade now.
For longer than that, and it has been abused for longer than that too.
> The world hasn't fallen apart
It will not 'fall apart' because of this. But it will change because of this, and not for the better.
> Hitler hasn't risen from the dead and everything is pretty much the same as it was before.
Yes, we still have willfully blind people that would require things to get so bad that they would no longer be able to avert their eyes before they would consider maybe things have gone too far. But by then they would have indeed gone too far.
> I guess we can check back in another ten years to see if your apocalyptic visions have come to pass yet.
It will never be a moment in time, we will just simply keep on creeping up to it, just like the frog in the pot of water.
What fascinates me is that there are people that are obviously reasonably intelligent that manage to actually see the pot, the stove and all that it implies and they still tell other frogs to jump in, the water is fine.
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#233meh, I want to have my cake and eat it too. (I'm not making fun of someone, this is actually how I feel, and there is some tension between requirements.) I don't want any surveillance whatsoever, I want to just be able to do whatever I want, jeez. To live freely. I shouldn't even think about being watched. At the same time, take something like the Dell database that was just stolen, and criminals starting to do their…
> Then I want courts to be able to flip a switch
But you also don't want anyone else to flip the switch, or it being flipped for any other purpose. That might just be impossible. So you might be better of without the switch.
> You're not just going to stay anonymous behind a skype number while you're defrauding people halfway across the world.
Also, for this problem, as for many others, there are many possible solutions that don't involve surveillance.
> Also I don't want some bitcoin asshole to pay off an old soviet general and get a nuclear bomb, just because they think it would be a fun troll to blow up a major city, trololo.
So, you would prefer them to use USD cash instead, then?
> These aren't theoretical concerns - ransomware, kidnapping, all these yucky things that civilized societies don't have, all happen absent rule of law.
Except they very much do happen in "civilized societies". And sometimes with the help of the powers of authorities.
> It's not an easy line to find.
No. But it's quite easy to see that the direction we are heading is completely at the wrong end of the spectrum.
> a good kernel isn't reading my memory contents and slowing me down, but if I start performing illegal operations I might very well get shut down :)
Which is very much the opposite of mass surveillance.
> Frankly I don't see why humans even need to be involved,
Humans who see the potential of the collected data will get involved. People who want to abuse power don't usually wait until someone gives them permission to.
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#234The reasons given are largely consequentialist. There are deeper philosophical reasons why privacy is important in this context. The essential reason it is important concerns the proper relationship between the individual and the state. Surveillance and intrusion violate the proper relationship and establish an improper relationship between the two. In other words, to justify the relation and thus intrusion, one hold concepts of state and individual that are anti-individualistic and place the state above the individual. The undesirable effects follow. To borrow Koneczny's terminology, a surveillance state is move away from Latin civilization perhaps towards Byzantine civilization.
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
The right to bear arms is partly about the people having the same powers or greater, collectively, than the government. In the modern era it is information asymmetry that we should worry about. How to prevent such a thing pragmatically is tricky.
> The right to bear arms is partly about the people having the same powers or greater, collectively, than the government. This only works in the US and even there I have no illusions at all about the ability of a present day militia being able to fight off a trained army, it's a pacifier for overgrown toddlers. The only people that have to fear from citizens with guns are other citizens (with or without guns), the mi…
> the military would have absolutely no problem whatsoever dispatching those
I'm less pessimistic about that. I'm a big fan of gun control laws but I also think that the one positive thing that has come from the ongoing middle-east conflicts is that a determined militia can be genuinely problematic.
> Note that there are always provisions in the law to protect the lawmakers from having the laws applied to them.
To my original point about asymmetry, this is what we should be devoting our energy fighting.
> simply outlaw it wholesale
Outlaw what wholesale? I'm personally of the opinion that the long term end state will fall more on the side of honesty (combined with increased acceptance) than secrecy.
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that you believe that privacy is hiding the truth. It appears that you believe that the only reason someone would hide any information is because it only allows one to lie. Thus you conclude that since lying is bad, privacy is also bad because it promotes lying. If the above chain of reasoning is accurate, then let's do a thought experiment. What if you personally hold a belief that is contrary to public…
The underlying assumption to your hypothetical is that thought crimes exist. I would say that someone in that situation doesn't have a privacy problem, they have a governance problem. Either a dictator has seized power or their fellow citizens have voted to make it illegal to express certain ideas. And in either case, encryption isn't going to be much of a solution. It'll only delay the inevitable. Someone who talks…
Fair.
I was just trying to take the problem to the hypothetical edge of having no privacy at all; to a case where you do not even enough privacy to share a thought without fear of retribution. I was also trying to align the idea with their understanding of freedom of speech, they do agree freedom of speech is ok, so if you can tie speech into thought and then also into privacy, maybe there would be a logical connection that allows them to understand the need for privacy as a type of freedom.
The situation is very complex because privacy has been implicit in our daily lives for so long, it's really difficult to map out the ways it would reduce our personal freedom. If we want to remove privacy, then we need to make it impossible for anyone to keep anything private from anyone else.
If privacy isn't important; then we should all live in proverbial glass houses where everyone can see everyone else's lives. Why should we trust the government with that power, why not everyone?
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#237In a recent study I read, millenials overwhelminly didn't think that the fredom of speech should be upheld, so why would privacy?
Many people have already gotten in trouble or fired all based on private conversations. Most people didn't care about the privacy implacatons, because of personal feelings.
I feel like our civilization has gone backwards: online mobs determine guilt and the ends justify the means.
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doctors have classes that teach them ethics early on in school/training because the vast majority of professional doctors agree on what is ethical. On the other hand, you can't even get many university professors to agree that something like collecting metadata is unethical. The idea that we could get the majority of the industry to agree on ethics is pretty far-fetched when a large portion think surveillance is maki…
I have found that as an individual software worker, with no union or professional association with the muscle to back me up, any ethical objections I may have are meaningless, as the only thing I can do to object is lose all my household income and be replaced by someone more pliant. For instance, I find a user control that prevents the user from changing focus whenever the input is invalid to be unethical, or at lea…
> […] any ethical objections I may have are meaningless, as the only thing I can do to object is lose all my household income and be replaced by someone more pliant.
“How do you know the chosen ones? ‘No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother.’ Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame. For one person. In the dark, where no one will ever know, or see.”
— Babylon 5, Season 2, episode 21, Comes the Inquisitor, 1995
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me ask you one question: What would be circumstances that would change your mind? As in: What would need to happen to make you think that surveillance is going to far? So far, it seems pretty much like your belief that surveillance is not a problem for you is unfalsifiable, that you will believe that it is a problem for you only when the secret police is actually coming for you or maybe your family.
Something bad would have to happen to random citizens as the result of government surveillance. Something like "Private Citizen X criticized the government and embarrassing information about his life was revealed as a consequence." There are lots of bad things that the government could do. But it just hasn't happened. They've had mass surveillance technology in place for over a decade now. The world hasn't fallen apa…
What is your definition of a "private citizen"? Does it, say, exclude anyone who the government (or parts of it) would consider worthy of retaliation by definition? If one has enough of an audience to embarrass the government, it might just so happen that one doesn't fall under your definition of "private citizen" anymore?
(Also: "random citizen" or "private citizen"? A citizen who criticizes the government is barely a "random citizen".)
Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The right to bear arms is partly about the people having the same powers or greater, collectively, than the government. This only works in the US and even there I have no illusions at all about the ability of a present day militia being able to fight off a trained army, it's a pacifier for overgrown toddlers. The only people that have to fear from citizens with guns are other citizens (with or without guns), the mi…
> the military would have absolutely no problem whatsoever dispatching those I'm less pessimistic about that. I'm a big fan of gun control laws but I also think that the one positive thing that has come from the ongoing middle-east conflicts is that a determined militia can be genuinely problematic. > Note that there are always provisions in the law to protect the lawmakers from having the laws applied to them. To my…
> what
Any kind of abuse of power. The penalties for that should be severe. It's one of the few cases where I think that the penal system should be used as a means of discouragement rather than as one of education and rehabilitation.