As our right to privacy continues to be eroded by the ever increasing technologies and abilities for surveillance, and the need for more surveillance is seen as necessary to guard and protect us from evil-doers, terrorists, vampires and the like, I'd like to take this opportunity to shout out, from the belly of the RI General Discussion Forum, how ridiculous and infuriating it is to hear people say these words as if they were clever, as if they weren't brain-dead zombies mouthing what certain others might deem the proper and acceptable response to their more conspiratorial contemporaries who happen to be concerned over the invasion of our privacy by the corporate government.
The thought police have nothing on them, nosireebob.
All I can say is, they're lucky I am unable write like Barracuda or Starmanskye, or I'd surely tear them a new one. For now I'll be content to search out a few sites of like-minded authors to help me understand why I get so ticked-off when I hear someone regurgitate - "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about."
This first person, from reddit, sounds like I feel, and is followed by 143 comments, a couple of which, I'll bring up here.
Looking for a response for "If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?"
I've been running into this as an argument a lot lately and frankly, it frightens me. It's often thrown out as a conversation stopper. After all, you wouldn't argue the point unless you have something to hide is often one of the implied messages.
In an era of ever increasing invasions into our privacy (body scanners, data mining, online and offline surveillance) mixed with more and more restrictions on watching the watchers - this attitude, at least to me, is dangerous. We're seeing more and more bolder violations of power by police and have fewer and fewer means to legally challenge them. On top of that - when something comes up in conversations with some around me - I get "Well, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about."
I'm looking for some ideas, long and short, for responses to this maddening phrase. Sometimes there's time for a more in depth explanation - but many times there isn't and for some reason this phrase causes brain freeze for me. I've read some fantastic posts here and figured this was probably the best forum I could think of to ask.
(voted the best response from lawstudent2 49 points)
* Supreme Court Justices Warner & Brandeis on the importance of the right to privacy. Fundamentally, privacy is important for the same reason that clothing is: you choose what part of yourself to expose to the public, and saying you don't need privacy is like saying you should just walk around naked all day. It is also important for political reasons: the right to gather anonymously is important, and this was abused many times by racist southern cops to try and break up civil rights rallies, among other things. Further, you should be able to criticize people or institutions among your friends, and then have the reasonable expectation that this criticisms will remain private. Think about it: if you have no right to privacy, then you have no right to think that what the government is doing wrong, and hide it from the government. How is that even remotely beneficial?
* It confuses criminality with ethics. Simply because someone thinks someone is unethical doesn't mean, nor should it mean, it is illegal. You can, and should, have the right to prevent other people from finding out about things about yourself that they may think is unethical, but you do not. I do not mean things like theft, adultery or murder; I mean like voting Republican when you say you are a Democrat, what organizations you donate your money to, etc. Without a right to privacy, privacy 'invasions' will result in people who are in positions of power being able to identify classes of people they merely disagree with, but are not doing anything wrong, in order to harass them, and, then, incrementally, dig so deep into their lives as to bankrupt them.
* To quote (potentially apocryphally) Cardinal Richelieu: 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. See the point above.
Submitting what is here now, so that The Blue Screen of Death doesn't eat my post.
Back in a bit.
%$#*@#---grrrrrr. damn comp. ate the second half of my post.
Here we go again. >.<
edit #6 (I seem to have lost the transition from reddit to metafilter. So it goes. Just dropped in, one more time, to provide the link to metafilter.)
Anyway, Metafilter had this comment:
Misbehaving or not, our behavior is shaped by the knowledge that we are being watched. Read Foucault on the panopticon.
posted by pickypicky at 6:22 PM on February 18
Foucault and His Panopticon
>snip<
One of the techniques/regulatory modes of power/knowledge that Foucault cited was the Panopticon, an architectural design put forth by Jeremy Bentham in the mid-19th Century for prisons, insane asylums, schools, hospitals, and factories. Instead of employing the violent methods and dungeons that were used to control individuals under a monarchial state, the new modern and supposedly democratic state needed a different sort of system to regulate its citizens. The Panopticon offered a powerful and sophisticated internalized coercion through the constant observation of prisoners, each separated from the other and allowed no interaction. The modern structure would allow guards to continually see inside each cell from their vantage point in a high central tower, unseen. The constant observation was seen to act as a control mechanism a consciousness of constant surveillance is internalized.
The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the relationship between systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation, and the power-knowledge concept, since, in his view, power and knowledge comes from observing others. It marked the transition to a disciplinary power, with every movement supervised and all events recorded. The result of this surveillance is acceptance of regulations and docility -- a normalization of sorts -- stemming from the threat of discipline. Suitable behaviour is achieved not through total surveillance, but by panoptic discipline and inducing a population to internalize that surveillance. The actions of the observer are based upon this monitoring and the behaviours he sees exhibited; the more one observes, the more powerful one becomes. The power comes from the knowledge the observer has accumulated from his observations of actions in a circular fashion, with knowledge and power reinforcing each other. Foucault says that "by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase in power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process."
For Foucault, the real danger was not necessarily that individuals are repressed by our social order but that they are "carefully fabricated in it" (Foucault, Panoptican) and because there is a penetration of power into the behaviour of individuals. Power becomes more efficient through the mechanisms of observation, with knowledge following suit, always in search of "new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised." (Foucault, Panoptican)
>snip<
(small bites and 1000 edits.)
Another comment from Metafilter:
Simple answer - The lives of others... WATCH IT.
The level of government intrusion displayed there was based on 1980’s technology, RUSSIAN tech at that! Imagine what we can do today. And don’t think that being a law abiding citizen will save you. You have no idea how you might play into some petty mid-level intelligence officer’s, politician’s or bureaucrat’s agenda… as a pawn, an opponent, or perhaps just collateral damage.
posted by DetonatedManiac at 6:52 PM on February 18
Ok
Lastly, a name that came up several times at both websites, Bruce Schneier.
LINK
The Eternal Value of Privacy
By Bruce Schneier
Wired News
May 18, 2006
The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.
A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty.
For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.
How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered.
This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
DONE
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