"McCarthyism"... Thank's Joseph McCarthy, for giving us a word for it.
"I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
31–40 of 83 posts
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#32I don't think this is a very strong piece.
The essay proceeds in three broad sections. In the first, he unpacks the "I've got nothing to hide" argument into its strongest form, and does a fine job of it. In the second, he talks about privacy as a concept, notes that it's difficult to define, and instead enumerates a list of privacy-related problems. In the final section, he tries to explain why the "I've got nothing to hide" argument is flawed.
Except that I didn't come out of that last section feeling I'd encountered a strong argument. It seemed like the author was waving his hands and saying, "There's a strong argument over this way -- it's Kafkaesque, not Orwellian!" But I never did encounter it.
That's a shame. I was sort of hoping he'd go through his list of potential problems, and talk about how each could become an actual problem.
The best argument I saw was that the accumulation of information represents power over the individual. I might put it like this: The more information the government has about you, the greater the chance you and an ill-considered law or policy will have an unfortunate encounter in the future.
I still think that deserves a bit more unpacking, though.
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "unwittingly do something illegal" is the most common refutation I've heard used. I think it's the most powerful as an example of the fallacy of this argument and an example of how unwieldy our laws have become in the United States. A coworker used the following story, apt since he lives in a state bordering another country: "Let's say I go to Canada for a day trip, Montreal perhaps. I speak enough French to get…
Are you sure about this? Reading wikipedia suggests only 90mg or higher unit dosage falls under Schedule II narcotic. You may not be guilty after all :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codeine#North_America
This is not a helpful comment. The anecdote is not suggesting that everyone who commits an accidental crime is trafficking Tylenol One. It's a story about how a small action can turn out to be a felony. This has been true in other cases that have nothing to do with Codeine.
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#34It's interesting how people struggle with this argument. Just the fact that this guy needs to write a 30 page essay to explain the point tells you something.
However I tend to stop short of this kind of analysis, because it all seems to be trying too hard. My argument, is that in the end it's just biological. We're built this way (not all, but most of us). Perhaps for good reasons, perhaps not, but it doesn't really matter. We can't rationalize or deconstruct it any better than we can needing sex, fearing the dark or the extreme reaction a person has to waterboarding. It just is how it is - we evolved to want privacy, and now we need it and that's that. Trying to deconstruct "why" we want it at a deeper level might be interesting, but it is not useful for producing counter arguments to the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument, in fact it is counterproductive, because it values the most important argument of all with zero weight. Further it just prompts people to come up with "solutions" that address the lower level issues and still leave us with our biological sense of privacy invasion.
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#35My point of view is very simple: I believe in freedom of speech. If I feel like someone is watching and trying to understand every word I write, I cannot write freely for fear of misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Hyperbole like "I feel like killing my boss" is the first to go. The person I am speaking to knows what I mean by my statements and I feel confident that he does. Having someone listen in on my conversations would take away that feeling of freedom. The law even has similar provisions: attorney-client privilege is only applicable if the two people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#36My point of view is very simple: I believe in freedom of speech. If I feel like someone is watching and trying to understand every word I write, I cannot write freely for fear of misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Hyperbole like "I feel like killing my boss" is the first to go. The person I am speaking to knows what I mean by my statements and I feel confident that he does. Having someone listen in on my conversa…
Not worried about a down vote here?
I wrote out a big old reply to this article, and canned it. I was worried about a load of down votes. I didn't want to be judged badly by a decent community. I was worried my opinion would be a downer or some how anti-American / Capitalist / Western. So I self censored. And that's just a hacker's news aggregation site.
Dunno what point Im trying to make, but were we ever really free to make out true opinion's public? Who do we fear more; government or our peers?
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#37Let me try to present the other side of this argument in a way that doesn't sound crazy: When one of your people dies, it really hurts. If you were the one in charge of guaranteeing the safety of that person, its a failure much deeper and more profound than the worst startup company failure. Most people will be willing to do anything to prevent the loss of another life on their watch. The monitoring of communications…
Here's a refutation of the parent's position.
Let's take the following premise as given: Most Americans will say "I support our troops, because they're willing to lay their life on the line -- and sometimes lay it down -- to protect our freedoms."
Or, as Patrick Henry put it when this country was fighting for independence from Great Britain: "Give me liberty or give me death!" [1]
These examples imply that most of us think of our freedoms as something that we won't automatically give up when the alternative is putting our lives on the line.
NB, I'm not saying we won't give up our freedoms when faced with an alternative of certain death. I'm saying most of us are willing to fight for our freedoms even if it means accepting a significant risk of death.
I speak only for the USA; the viewpoints of other countries and cultures may be quite different.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_Liberty,_or_give_me_Dea...!
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#38Let me try to present the other side of this argument in a way that doesn't sound crazy: When one of your people dies, it really hurts. If you were the one in charge of guaranteeing the safety of that person, its a failure much deeper and more profound than the worst startup company failure. Most people will be willing to do anything to prevent the loss of another life on their watch. The monitoring of communications…
To anyone who favours a free society, your argument may not sound crazy, but it sounds dangerous. Most apologetics written on behalf of a surveillance state seem to ignore the unsavoury elements of the government itself.
Instead of becoming more transparent, governments are wanting to keep more secrets, while demanding that more of yours be exposed. Governments usually do have something to hide, ranging from corruption to murderous adventures abroad (sometimes not even abroad). This is not an institution that I trust to monitor me for "my own good".
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#39My point of view is very simple: I believe in freedom of speech. If I feel like someone is watching and trying to understand every word I write, I cannot write freely for fear of misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Hyperbole like "I feel like killing my boss" is the first to go. The person I am speaking to knows what I mean by my statements and I feel confident that he does. Having someone listen in on my conversa…
Not worried about a down vote here? I wrote out a big old reply to this article, and canned it. I was worried about a load of down votes. I didn't want to be judged badly by a decent community. I was worried my opinion would be a downer or some how anti-American / Capitalist / Western. So I self censored. And that's just a hacker's news aggregation site. Dunno what point Im trying to make, but were we ever really fre…
This is exactly the point that I was trying to make: when we write here, its in public. We have the expectation to be judged for what we say. Could you imagine if you had that feeling writing to your friends in private?
Re: "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
#40Let me try to present the other side of this argument in a way that doesn't sound crazy: When one of your people dies, it really hurts. If you were the one in charge of guaranteeing the safety of that person, its a failure much deeper and more profound than the worst startup company failure. Most people will be willing to do anything to prevent the loss of another life on their watch. The monitoring of communications…
Shame you are down voted for this because you have an important point, our human contradiction.
If government lets something bad happen because of privacy issues, we the people complain, and can vote them out. If the government pull out all the stops, including trampling all over privacy, then we don't like that either, and can vote them out. So what is a government supposed to do?
The next problem is that we the people say its fine for our governments to abuse the rights of "them". We don't mean "us". But government has to get that distinction right, and to do so, as best as they can, they have to cut through privacy and decency. That's fine for "them", but not "us". If its some Arab in gitmo, meh, whatever. If its some western god fearing christian, hmmm, that can produce a different response. If its me or my friend, we can get very upset about it.
In the end, people have to make a real grown up choice. We need to decide how far this goes, and accept the risk that goes with that. That risk works two ways. Risk of say a terror attack and risk of our own governments increasingly ruining our lives. And this is a cold numbers game. Think about it, are you or me more likely to be killed in something like 9/11 against perhaps daily government interference.
In many ways this is our fault. We expect too much and are not prepared to accept the risk or responsibility. Personally, I'd rather have my privacy and freedom, with a higher risk of being killed in a terror attack. I'd rather those who oppose those freedoms didn't win by making our society more like their ideal. If an attack happened and my government proved that it did everything possible, but privacy protection for us all got in the way, I personally would accept that. Its the price of freedom.
Mind you, them and us again. Of course Im calculating that the chances are I personally wont be involved in a terror attack, and the victims will just be another "them"......
Contradictions............