[LINK] If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear

Sun Jul 22 10:17:13 AEST 2012

>From one of the world's more sensible politicians:
http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/19/debunking-the-dangerous-nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear/
>  Every so often, you hear the argument "If you have nothing to hide, 
>you have nothing to fear", in order to justify increased and 
>invasive surveillance. This argument is not only dangerous, but 
>dishonest and cowardly, too.
>  There are at least four good reasons to reject this argument 
>solidly and uncompromisingly:
>1. The rules may change
>2. it's not you who determine if you're guilty
>3. laws must be broken for society to progress
>4. privacy is a basic human need.

Nice one.

Here's an FAQ from the Access Card era c. 2007:
http://www.privacy.org.au/Campaigns/ID_cards/HSAC-FAQ10.html
incl.
*   'Everybody has something to hide'
*   Levels of Need
*   A Single Controlled Identity is a Weapon of Political Power
*   Hiding from the Word 'Hide'
*   Other Articles on the Theme
*   Glib Responses

That needs updating with Falkvinge's article, and generalising.

_______________________________________________________________________

>  Every so often, you hear the argument "If you have nothing to hide, 
>you have nothing to fear", in order to justify increased and 
>invasive surveillance. This argument is not only dangerous, but 
>dishonest and cowardly, too.
>
>  In the comments to yesterday's post about Sweden's DNA register, 
>some expressed the "nothing to hide" argument - that efficiency of 
>law enforcement should always be an overriding factor in any 
>society-building, usually expressed as "if you have nothing to hide, 
>you have nothing to fear". This is a very dangerous mindset. The 
>argument is frequently raised in debates by pro-big brother hawks, 
>and doing so is dangerous, cowardly, and dishonest.
>
>  There are at least four good reasons to reject this argument 
>solidly and uncompromisingly: The rules may change, it's not you who 
>determine if you're guilty, laws must be broken for society to 
>progress, and privacy is a basic human need.
>
>  Let's look at these in detail. They go from the less important and 
>more obvious, to the less obvious and more important.
>
>  One - The rules may change: Once the invasive surveillance is in 
>place to enforce rules that you agree with, the ruleset that is 
>being enforced could change in ways that you don't agree with at all 
>- but then, it is too late to protest the surveillance. For example, 
>you may agree to cameras in every home to prevent domestic violence 
>("and domestic violence only") - but the next day, a new  political 
>force in power could decide that homosexuality will again be 
>illegal, and they will use the existing home cameras to enforce 
>their new rules. Any surveillance must be regarded in terms of how 
>it can be abused by a worse power than today's.
>
>  Two - It's not you who determine if you have something to fear: You 
>may consider yourself law-abidingly white as snow, and it won't 
>matter a bit. What does matter is whether you set off the red flags 
>in the mostly-automated surveillance, where bureaucrats look at your 
>life in microscopic detail through a long paper tube to search for 
>patterns. When you stop your car at the main prostitution street for 
>two hours every Friday night, the Social Services Authority will 
>draw certain conclusions from that data point, and won't care about 
>the fact that you help your elderly grandmother - who lives there - 
>with her weekly groceries. When you frequently stop at a certain bar 
>on your way driving home from work, the Department of Driving 
>Licenses will draw certain conclusions as to your eligibility for 
>future driving licenses - regardless of the fact that you think they 
>serve the world's best reindeer meatballs in that bar, and never had 
>had a single beer there. People will stop thinking in terms of what 
>is legal, and start acting in self-censorship to avoid being 
>red-flagged, out of pure self-preservation. (It doesn't matter that 
>somebody in the right might possibly and eventually be cleared - 
>after having been investigated for six months, you will have lost 
>both custody of your children, your job, and possibly your home.)
>
>  Two and a half - Point two assumes that the surveillance even has 
>correct data, which it has been proven time and again to frequently 
>not have.
>
>  Three - Laws must be broken for society to progress: A society 
>which can enforce all of its laws will stop dead in its tracks. The 
>mindset of "rounding up criminals is good for society" is a very 
>dangerous one, for in hindsight, it may turn out that the criminals 
>were the ones in the moral right. Less than a human lifetime ago, if 
>you were born a homosexual, you were criminal from birth. If today's 
>surveillance level had existed in the 1950s and 60s, the lobby 
>groups for sexual equality could never have formed; it would have 
>been just a matter of rounding up the organized criminals ("and who 
>could possibly object to fighting organized crime?"). If today's 
>surveillance level had existed in the 1950s and 60s, homosexuality 
>would still be illegal and homosexual people would be criminals by 
>birth. It is an absolute necessity to be able to break unjust laws 
>for society to progress and question its own values, in order to 
>learn from mistakes and move on as a society.
>
>  Four - Privacy is a basic human need: Implying that only the 
>dishonest people have need of any privacy ignores a basic property 
>of the human psyche, and sends a creepy message of strong 
>discomfort. We have a fundamental need for privacy. I lock the door 
>when I go to the men's room, despite the fact that nothing secret 
>happens in there: I just want to keep that activity to myself, I 
>have a fundamental need to do so, and any society must respect that 
>fundamental need for privacy. In every society that doesn't, 
>citizens have responded with subterfuge and created their own 
>private areas out of reach of the governmental surveillance, not 
>because they are  criminal, but because doing so is a fundamental 
>human need.
>
>  Finally, it could be noted that this argument is also commonly used 
>by the authorities themselves to promote surveillance and 
>censorship, while rejecting transparency and free speech. Those who 
>want to have a little fun can play the reverse card as illustrated 
>by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
>
>  The next time you hear anybody say "if you have nothing to fear, 
>you have nothing to hide", tell them that's an absolutely false and 
>dangerous argument, and point them at this article.

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