In short, at the risk of trivializing the argument:
The ability to gleam private details about people is having some power over them. The entire modern theory of government rests on limiting and dividing up the power of those in power. With mass surveillance, that balance is broken. Not only do we have private details on individuals, that knowledge is held by a small and unaccountable elite, protected by state secrets.
Even if you live completely lawfully and morally and truly have nothing to hide you can either:
1. Unwittingly do something illegal (there are too many laws on the books for anyone to know they are completely innocent); or do something that can be construed as such, since the police and prosecutors can be fallible;
2. Still live in a society where a small group of individuals can exert blackmail and intimidation on a significant proportion of citizens. Even if that power would be rarely used, it creates an environment of fear. People start to be afraid to speak against abuse, those in power stand less for their own scrutiny.
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 around but it's not so good after an evening of drinking and socializing. The next morning, I wake up with a powerful hangover headache. A pharmacy is nearby, but my head is pounding too hard to read the labels so I go to the pharmacist. In broken French, I ask him for some Tylenol. He asks me 'what kind?' 'Just one,' I reply. He sells me a small bottle with a Tylenol label; I pop a couple and put the rest in my bag. After I return home--declaring 'nothing' at the border, of course, since I forgot about the bottle of medicine--I find the bottle and notice the word 'Codeine' on the label. Canada sells 'Tylenol One,' a compound with this addition. I'm technically guilty of felony drug trafficking of a schedule 2 narcotic into the United States as well as felony concealment (drugs). Are you certain you've never done something seemingly innocent that's actually a serious crime?"
I think the problem with laws like the one you mentioned is that they aren't perceived as a threat because of selective enforcement. Assuming your posting reflects the legal situation correctly, many people who consider themselves law abiding citizens have committed a felony, but it is only enforced on, say, the guy who gets into an argument with a cop at a traffic stop and then has his vehicle searched.
While that is much worse than a law that can and will be enforced broadly, people will paradoxically seem to perceive it as less of a threat. The problem is that there are many such laws, which accumulate into a weapon the authorities have against you. You may be accused of something totally absurd (putting up a light installation in public), but instead of having to back down after discovering you aren't a terrorist, the authorities will find a law that will allow them to hold you responsible for their excessive reaction, or at least "punish" you for them embarrassing themselves.
This is why I think society would, to some degree, benefit from radical transparency. If all crimes were punished, people would be much more motivated to actually fight unjust, overly broad or unspecific laws, because everybody knows that they will be affected.
Personally, I have made a conscious decision to go out of my way to preserve my ability to start every unwanted encounter with a cop by asking him for the reason he stopped me and for his badge number (a right I have in my country), even though that may not be what I would actually do. However, that means that I cannot so some things I consider OK but aren't legal. But then, I live in a country with reasonably simple and understandable laws, even for a layperson.
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 :)
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.
Ok, how about another example: you buy a box or two of Cuban cigars in Canada and smuggle them home to the US in your suitcase. This is a crime, but millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens have done stuff like this.
Good point. I'm not all that versed in US drug laws. However, having seen a whole bunch of signs when doing cruises, I imagine that telling the Customs agent that you have a bottle of medicine containing codeine isn't a good idea since Vicodin and the lot are only available by prescription. Either way, his point is still a good one, I think: Even if you're the most open and giving person on the planet, do you really want to court fate like that?
I remember an old black and white film where a bad guy planted an illegal substance on another character (a trival slight of hand) and then sicced the police on him.
With possession laws, someone else can make you into a criminal without any intent or even awareness on your part.
Given the number of sexual and other scandals that have come to light regarding Congressional representatives in the past few decades, one wonders how many have been blackmailed, and how many are currently being blackmailed.
Let 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 seems almost small in comparison to the lengths that many would go to.
There are practical reasons for government monitoring of communications. Bad people have existed long enough that it's safe to assume the trend will continue. [1] Listening to their communications is the best way to stop them, or at least to ensure that they can't act openly. Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.
Privacy could easily considered to be a basic right of all people. But it lives in a continuum like everything else that we value. Some times it's better if the government errs on the side of caution. And most of the time, people have nothing to hide.
> Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.
Except, once you start a regime of easy and ubiquitous surveillance, you cannot guarantee that those risks will remain small.
Surveillance is useless without absolute secrecy of who is being surveilled and why. The potential harms of such an institution should be obvious. Which is why American jurisprudence allowed such surveillance only with court orders, or the assent (sometimes after the fact) of special courts like the FISA court.
What we are fighting today is surveillance, through technological means, of everybody all the time. It is therefore absolutely guaranteed that a concomitant amount of government operations and agenda, related to this surveillance, will become secret and unaccountable. At this point, persecution and abuse is not just a possibility, it is guaranteed.
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".
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"......
Are you so naive as to think that the real terrorists will be communicating in the open? "Real" terrorists will use Tor, TrueCrypt, PGP, Steganography and any other tool in the toolkit to hide their tracks. I don't see how a gov't surveillance apparatus is going to catch any of them.
IIRC, in 9/11 the problem wasn't that there wasn't enough surveillance, because information regarding the attacks DID reach the White House, but it was apparently ignored.
"Real terrorists" communicated in open using mobile phones, during 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. These conversations were tapped by Indian government and were used in further investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks#cite_note-D...
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.
>There are practical reasons for government monitoring of communications. Bad people have existed long enough that it's safe to assume the trend will continue.
Bad governments has existed even longer.
Especially some of them like, you know, the one at constant warfare with other countries, the nuclear-bomb dropping on civilians one, the McCarthyism and J.E Hoover one, the still having the death penalty in 2012 one, the bible yielding one, the BS marijuana prosecutions one, the Rodney King one, the Kent State shootings one, the world leader in incarcerations one, the BS WMD pretext one, the Watergate one, et al.
>Listening to their communications is the best way to stop them, or at least to ensure that they can't act openly.
The second phrase contradicts the first. They quickly assume they cannot talk openly and they don't, so listening to public, unencrypted communications has no use at all. You might catch some naive idiots that way but never the well organised big fish.
Plus, it's all a pretext. It was never about the terrorists, it's about the government having more control, and especially the secret services and such inventing more responsibilities and work for themselves, to ensure bigger budgets and role.
>Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.
Define innocent. In my eyes, John Lennon was bloody innocent. And he has a ten thousand pages FBI file. Same for Martin Luther King. Same for thousands of activists, politicians, and change-makers.
When those people are trapped (and throughout history government has shown the will to trap them and stop them, by any means necessary, from blackmail to imprisonment), all of society is harmed and trapped, because change is resisted.
You might catch some naive idiots that way but never the well organised big fish.
During the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, Indian government tapped into the mobile conversations of terrorists. These tapped conversations helped in further investigations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks#cite_note-D...
Clearly, these were "well organized big fish" and not "naive idiots".
the still having the death penalty in 2012 one
Whats wrong with death penalty? It is perfectly reasonable response to some kind of crimes. [An example: the terrorist, who was caught live in action, who killed plenty of innocent people. That guy surely deserved a death sentence]
It'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.
I'd be careful not to attribute unexplained aspects of our desires and behavior to biology alone. A lot of it can be a social construction. If you're used to having your privacy regularly invaded from a very young age, it's possible that you won't have any "biological sense" of privacy invasion.
Does our intuitive sense of biology come from our genes, or our cultural value of "personal space"? The fact that we have weird reactions to nudity and social norms that prevent us from sharing the most intimate details of our lives indicates that it may be a cultural thing.
Obviously, this just makes privacy invasion on a systematic level even more ominous.
My 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.
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?
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?
I think there are some studies on the effect of surveillance on human behavior. I've searched on google scholar, there are quite a few articles.
Here's an excerpt from one article, to give you a feel of such research: "in relation to the telephone, one feels ‘a subject’ and thus able to control the situation whereas, in relation to the camera, one is always ‘an object’. The object of a camera is in the situation of being a potential victim, without the opportunity to influence his or her own destiny. The object is forced to trust in someone else. This is why surveillance raises contradictions: to be placed in the position of a victim does not increase the feeling of being ‘in control’, but rather the feeling of being ‘under control’. However, while feelings of being under control may not be pleasant, they might still ensure one’s feelings of safety.", from ‘The gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban space, Hille Koskela, 2000. http://old.geog.psu.edu/courses/geog497b/Readings/Koskela.pd...
I think there might be some empirical research as well.
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.
there's something that frustrates me about arguments like this.
I think that technology is inescapably taking us towards a future where anyone and everyone can record everything that any individual does, perpetually, and at arbitrary scale. In many ways we are already there, especially in certain domains (gmail, facebook, cell phones, creep shots, etc). It sounds pessimistic to say "this is inevitable" and I'm sure many people (myself included!) want that to be wrong, but given the technology we produce and the limited degree of control we have over its use, I don't see any alternative.
So the present and future allow for democratized mass surveillance, never mind what your government can do. What is our societal response? Make this illegal? I doubt the effectiveness of that, both against the common man / criminal and also against the government. If you are already terrified that the government will break any of its own laws to watch you (and perhaps this terror is justified), then how would the government passing laws limiting its own abilities allay any of your fears? I don't see how it would.
I'm then annoyed because we seem to be standing on the deck of the Titanic wishing virulently that water wasn't wet. This is the future, and it's coming, and the government will have these records, and private companies will have these records, and countless individuals will have these records. What are we meaningfully going to do? Pass laws? Are we simply going to will back the clock to when this wasn't possible? Or should we instead start to talk about what this future, recorded, society will look like?
I welcome an effective "call to action" response to turn back the tide of mass surveillance...
> If the answer is no, then it is simple. It should be illegal to spend tax money on such mass surveillance systems.
Yes, but will this stop the government from creating such systems? Will it stop private companies from making such systems? Will it stop private citizens from making such systems? Won't these have the same chilling and deleterious effects that this document outlines as bad, if not worse?
Yes it can, as it has been done before with the police system. You have a group of people watching society and reporting any criminal activity. It just so happens that the response system is already built in. Police don't go into private homes or search belongings without due process.
It should be quite easy to design a system in that way. Cameras and other surveillance tools can only be placed in public places; this will protect civil liberties while still enabling the government to better distribute justice. In effect, they will place a policeman on every street corner.
I'm not so sure. To play a devil's advocate, even cameras in public places, if combined with some data mining can invade privacy pretty badly. Say, resulting in continuous tracking.
I've argued that this is an outcome of a democratic "everyone watches everyone" society.
however, some problems. someone has to have some monopoly on force? So the government has to have some information that is secret, for example, information about suspects in a criminal investigation. although it's possible that in a fully recorded society that need would go away! a police investigation would simply consist of reviewing the evidence recorded and acting, and a suspect couldn't run because everything is monitored and recorded.
this sounds pretty terrible! and I think it would be, unless, the institutions of a democratic and just society were preserved. given that any crime would come attached with "the whole truth" recorded, trials might be easier? cardinal richelieu is purported to have said "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.", but I'm not sure if 15th-century French monarchy is the same government as a modern-day democracy (say what you will about Manning et al) ...
Monitoring at this scale would require tremendous resources that the Federal government has plenty of but individuals are unable (or unwilling) to invest. The article makes the argument for accumulation of information as a means to obtain power; in the case of individuals collectively accumulating information on the government, who holds the power? If the derived power is fragmented then no one would be motivated to take action.
I hope you can reveal more details of how you are going to accomplish what you've set out to do in the site.
In general, technically minded people who care about privacy like to see these kinds of solutions in open source form or there will be heavy resistance to trust it.
Yup, more information will be up soon and all of our code will eventually be open sourced. There are no secrets to what we're doing at all, it's just a question of putting it all together in digestible form (and in the meantime--or any time at all--my email is in my profile and I'd be happy to hear from you).
The really sticky parts of Parley (ie. crypto) are already open source, made and reviewed by far greater minds than ours. We're mostly trying to solve the network problem that has impeded adoption of end-to-end email/IM encryption in the past by building a system that is ridiculously simple for anyone to use.
I think the most powerful argument here is that just because one may think that they have nothing to hide, and they don't mind "having their picture taken naked and distributed to their neighbors" doesn't mean that they should enforce their beliefs on others.
That goes both ways. Just because one wants to keep secrets doesn't mean you should stop someone else who wants to know everything.
To make the case for who is wrongly imposing their will, we need need a framework for measuring goodness. The author goes in that direction, talking about measuring the societal benefits of privacy and the systemic harms that privacy protects against.
However, the "secondary use" harm wasn't very compelling. Contract law seems to be the proper way to handle that, rather than privacy.
A better argument was that privacy protects free thought. Unfortunately, he mentioned it too briefly and didn't discuss the conflict of free speech and privacy in enough detail. Perhaps there wasn't enough space, but I think more explanation of how privacy expands "the range of viewpoints being expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity." After all, those viewpoints are of little value to society before they are shared widely. One could argue that it's not privacy that is important, but protection against retaliation.
The reverse of keeping secrets (asserting your right to privacy) isn't allowing others full snoop powers (denying your right to privacy), but allowing another to practice full disclosure (asserting their right to freely reveal all).
Playing Devil's Advocate here (I actually agree with you), the main argument against privacy is that it hampers effective and just running of the government. Simply put, the government must gather such information to work in the way that it is told to (we elected almost all of these people, remember). An example of this working properly is search warrants: the government can and will search your private property without your permission, a clear invasion of privacy, but acceptable as it leads to a better justice system. Yes, the government is limited in what it can search, but that power is still held by the government even if the person in question doesn't agree with it.
The question shouldn't be about protecting privacy; it should be about being fair with how the government invades it. For example, the body scanners could be considered not fair as they invade more people's privacy than necessary (or they could be fair if they didn't).
That is a pretty good write up. I really like the point that 'privacy is only a desire to hide wrong things' when in fact it is a basic personal security issue.
A simple concern on this topic:
When my day to day life is public online:
a)strangers know when I am on vacation and my house is empty
b) given the standard misunderstandings amongst people - what they can check about what I am doing via online tools and it differs from what they expect - and they never have to let me know they know (a seed for massive misunderstandings)
Both a and b open my life to problems out of my control. Irrelevant of the life I am living. Thus the need for privacy.
I see no reason to come up with examples apart from the US Gov's response to the massive Wikileaks cable publication. Ignore for a moment that some of the 'secrets' were about illegalities, and recognize that the US Gov has things it NEEDS to hide.
We all do, and anyone who says "if you have nothing..." is clearly naive about life. Back when the first teletype BBS's appeared, I pimped for having no passwords and a wide-open system. My plea was met with complete silence, and subsequently life schooled me in the whys and wherefores and wisdom of that silence. The first thing to know is: not everybody is your friend.
I haven't quite figured out how the hyperbolic "I've got nothing to hide" gets past the issue of account passwords.
Even if we assume a new "real name only" global system of online identities, that would still require that false testimony or simple errors never get attached to such identities.
You do not receive the Google Docs login prompt if your browser is not logged into Google at all.
You do, however, receive the login prompt if your browser is logged in through another Google service (like search). Check to make sure nobody has you logged into Google search or something.
This sort of half logged in status is very annoying.
I like to remind people in that camp that I have the right to hide nothing. I may very well have "nothing to hide" but I also have the right to hide that.
I hope the posting of a mobile link is not a new trend. Here is the Amazon link of the book for people who prefer to view the Internet on screens larger then 4"...
I'm also in that camp and certainly hope no-one gives me that (or any other political propaganda) for Christmas. Why can't you just accept your father's opinion instead?
The bad thing about the "nothing to hide" camp usually isn't their opinion that
they themselves have nothing to hide, but the fact that the majority of these
people seem to want to force this opinion on the rest of society. Fine, live
your rose-colored post-privacy life. But leave me the fuck out of it. I have
things to hide. Everyone has. You included.
Mostly because I know his opinion is based only on the "other sides" "political propaganda". And he probably wouldn't appreciate it, but it is always a good thing to read and educate yourself on the opposing view. If anything, to increase your resolve and have better points to argue your position.
Personally his opinion worries me. He claimed there was no reason for encryption in communication unless you are doing something "bad".
The ability to gleam private details about people is having some power over them. The entire modern theory of government rests on limiting and dividing up the power of those in power. With mass surveillance, that balance is broken. Not only do we have private details on individuals, that knowledge is held by a small and unaccountable elite, protected by state secrets.
Even if you live completely lawfully and morally and truly have nothing to hide you can either:
1. Unwittingly do something illegal (there are too many laws on the books for anyone to know they are completely innocent); or do something that can be construed as such, since the police and prosecutors can be fallible;
2. Still live in a society where a small group of individuals can exert blackmail and intimidation on a significant proportion of citizens. Even if that power would be rarely used, it creates an environment of fear. People start to be afraid to speak against abuse, those in power stand less for their own scrutiny.