Privacy - Short counters to nothing to hide, nothing fear arguments.

[ph0b0s123]

So now the general population have woken up to the amount that their governments are monitoring their communications. Politicians, to defend this practice have been rolling out the old argument that law abiding citizens have noting the fear from this monitoring.

This argument has been been discussed here before, but I have seen no good counter argument to it. Of course there are arguments against this idea, but none have had the same succinctness as the argument it is countering.

So I challenge the community to put forward such arguments. Feel free to quote other arguments you have seen elsewhere on the internet, just say where you saw them first.

 

[Kolby Jack]

It's still immoral. Even people who have nothing to hide may not feel comfortable knowing they are being monitored. I don't have much issue with it, but I'm just one guy; I can't speak for everyone. The fear that otherwise law-abiding people may one day make a mistake that normally they could brush off and move on from but instead are immediately caught and punished for is legitimate, if, at this moment in time, far-fetched. The fear is that actions like this could lead to an abolishment of leniency in the future. Is it likely? I don't think so, but even I'm aware that the line must be drawn at some point.

 

[hazabaza1]

Privacy is still wanted, understandably so, and even though people might search up a lot of legal stuff it's still stuff they won't want to know.
Let's say some 40 year old pencil pusher is living a good family life with 3 kids and a great wife. But he's really into hardcore bondage. Like, the sight of leather gives him a massive boner level into it. He has every right to do what he wants with that fact but if he knows the possibility that people are going to be listening/reading to everything he says or writes, he's basically being restricted from perfectly legal activities.

Not to mention it's just shitty. What right does someone have to know everything I want to know? They don't, and they can fuck right off if they think they do.

Captcha: Robot Shake. With a picture of robots dancing. Nice.

 

[RikuoAmero]

Here's a scenario.

NSA man has the ability to look up phone records. He picks a name at random, say it's his neighbour whom he really hates. Looking up the phone records, he finds metadata. Specifically, that the neighbour calls a doctor who specializes in AIDS related diseases; a suicide prevention hotline; a gay support network. No need to hear the actual recordings: logic tells us that the neighbour is more than likely homosexual and hides this fact from his friends and family (perhaps he lives in the Bible Belt). Now, the NSA man has leverage over his neighbour and can very easily ruin his life. What will the neighbour do? Call the cops? Tell them that the spying that NSA man does has discovered this fact he's trying to hide?

 

[tippy2k2]

Spoiler

Here's a scenario.

NSA man has the ability to look up phone records. He picks a name at random, say it's his neighbour whom he really hates. Looking up the phone records, he finds metadata. Specifically, that the neighbour calls a doctor who specializes in AIDS related diseases; a suicide prevention hotline; a gay support network. No need to hear the actual recordings: logic tells us that the neighbour is more than likely homosexual and hides this fact from his friends and family (perhaps he lives in the Bible Belt). Now, the NSA man has leverage over his neighbour and can very easily ruin his life. What will the neighbour do? Call the cops? Tell them that the spying that NSA man does has discovered this fact he's trying to hide?

Combine this scenario with hackers and you've got every reason you would need to shut down a program like this...

But for fun, here's another one!

NSA/Hacker Guy loves his girlfriend....maybe a little too much. He's become real clingy and is resorting to intimidation because "If I can't have her, no one can!". She leaves him like she should and gets out into hiding. No worries though NSA/Hacker guy; you have the ability to access phone records and can find her easy enough! She'll love you now that you demonstrate your love for her and if not, there's always murder suicide and then you'll be together forever...!

The fact that people are involved make the system exploitable. That's the foundation to the argument against this kind of system.

 

[furai47]

My idea is simple: fourth amendment.

You don't need more than that.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Well it's a simple fact that I do have stuff to hide. Maybe not for legal reasons, but because I'm embarrassed or ashamed of them for other reasons. Plus there's the fact that I don't want to be walking on eggshells for fear that anything I might say might be misinterpreted as some sort of terrorist threat or something.

 

[Angie7F]

I really do have nothing to hide to the government so i dont realy care.
I guess that comes fromt he fact that in Japan we dont really get paranoid over terrorist and wont get criticized for political stuff as much as you would in the US.

 

[Carrion22]

how long will it be before such as system is abused? a day max. and from that point on its all down hill.

i am a communist, in the UK there is an old, and abet unenforced law which makes my political stance a crime. however when i discuss thing with friends about the state of the country and how i personally feel, these words could be used to construct a treason case against me in the UK. and treason still does carry the death penalty in the UK (as does murder of a member of the royal usurpers and arson in the *****'s dockyards).

now the way i phrased my last sentence will ALSO get me into trouble. see how easy it is to fall foul of a bullshit law with overbearing and all pervasive all seeing systems.

i wish my utter failure for a democracy had something akin to the US bill of rights, and constitution which specifically limits the way a government can act.

 

[Lawyer105]

When government / security-type people are prepared to publish all their personal correspondance and call transcripts on the 'net, then I'm prepared to let them monitor me too. Until then, if it ain't good for them, it ain't good for me.

Also, maybe we should require any politician or security-type government person who votes/supports/whatever monitoring laws like this to walk around naked at all times.

 

[IndomitableSam]

It's the slippery slope argument. We're used to a little bit of privacy invasion, and it's getting to be a little bit more all the time. Eventually, all our purchases/phone calls/etc will be made with a chip implanted in our arm and everything we do will be recoreded somewhere, a la Minority Report. The more we're okay with just a little bit of privacy invasion, the more they'll take. Give an inch, take a mile, and so forth.

 

[DoPo]

This argument has been been discussed here before, but I have seen no good counter argument to it.

Oh, it's very simple - why? Why do you need to abandon privacy? What benefit is there? Sure, maybe you have nothing to hide (a big MAYBE, I'll get to that later) but you are not exactly telling everybody you meet everything about yourself, nor is your house transparent. That's partly because you don't need to. So what is the need here? Security? Because that's going to suggest that privacy and security are zero sum. I mean, I challenge you (OK, not you but just in general) to provide evidence for this being the case. Everything I know points at the opposite - privacy and security are not zero sum, therefore you don't need to totally sacrifice one for the other.

That's the short of it. There is more here [https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/]. You should probably head on there, I'll just ramble on here but it's not going to be as interesting or good.

But you have nothing to hide, right? Let's challenge that concept - no you have everything to hide. Every scrap of information is valuable. Information can be used in variety of way and a lot of them either unlawful, or harmful to you or both. Information is power, indeed. Hey, remember how you posted on Facebook you're going on vacation? It's easy to see and people would already know you're out of the house. That's the power of information. What else? Well, if you post photos on Twitter, especially from your phone, I can find where you live. Seriously. It's pretty trivial, there are even tools that automate it. You don't even have to take a photo of your house or street - all JPEG images have EXIF information embedded, by default, most phones and cameras put stuff in there, like time when it was taken, details about the camera (brand, technical details), name of the owner, if you supplied one). And if you used a mobile phone, it usually geotags the location where it was taken. Everybody can know where that picture is from - everybody - its publicly available on Twitter. Just take the information of the pictures taken and you will learn a lot of stuff - where (and possibly when) you usually go and most probably where your house is.

Information is power. And yeah, there are lots of ways to use that information. Robbing the place or kidnapping come to mind. Not sure about the latter but the former definitely happens. OK, maybe the robbers don't stalk people on Twitter/Facebook and take their pick that way, but they do watch out for patterns and times when to strike - they would do a research. Why do you feel the need to make the research as simple as several clicks?

But you don't really need to worry about robbery, right? It's something that happens to other people, not you. Let them worry about it. That's the thing - they do have something to hide, in that case. But here are other things that happen to other people - pissed off people. Let's imagine Alex has a really vengeful ex so Alex moved to get away. But if the ex still sniffs out the new location, that's going to be bad. Nothing to hide? Well, no not really the case. Also, that's sadly a real scenario that has happened a lot of times - exes but also just plain mean people out to hurt you.

So far so good, that's why you need to keep information to yourself. It definitely has benefits, what is the actual drawback of doing it? None? Seems like none. So, we have Privacy positives present, negatives not present.

But whatever, let's not dwell more about you yourself not sharing information with possibly malicious people, we're talking about the government, right? Yeah, about that. Now, there is definitely the possibility of power being abused. I won't dwell on that either, but think about it, would you blindly trust people just because they say they are trustworthy? On an unrelated note, can I have your bank account details? I won't do anything bad - trust me because you can trust me.

Anyway, there are other things that can go wrong - the government (or whoever is getting the info) plain simply mishandling your data out of stupidity. OK, that's not really probably - who is going to just leave some confidential information just lying around? That doesn't happ- [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2131236/More-secret-government-documents-left-on-train.html]...oh it actually does. Yeah, leaving files on public transport, dropping unencrypted flash drives and so on. It happens. Sometimes the information can seep out due to other not accidents, I mean, like the data being sold to third parties. Or people being cheated out of it. And so on. Are you sure your data is safe? Linkedin seems a trustworthy website, and yet last year they had their passwords stolen. 6.5 million to be precise. But OK, if you know anything about security you'd probably go "Well, they can't actually do anything with the encrypted passwords". Except they could. Yeah, the passwords are hashed but they weren't salted. Why not? I dunno - ask Linkedin. The passwords weren't easy to crack but were cracked - it just takes some more time and CPU and a botnet has pretty much infinite amounts of each - there were multiple botnets and password cracking farms working together. To make matters worse - every single password leak before that added to the ease of cracking the new passwords. Password cracking algorithms are improved with data from the leaks, so they focus the cracking techniques, since passwords are predictable and thus minimise the time needed.

Yeah, you did nothing wrong, the company...well, it did, but what it's not really responsible of is all malicious crackers now have new tools to use against you - even if you don't use Linkedin or any other compromised website, you are still vulnerable because the crackers are more armed and dangerous than before. Thanks to data that should have been kept private.

What else is there to say? Keeping things private is sort of an advantage, isn't it? What are good reasons to not do it?

But one final thought - what if you don't have anything to hide, but what if others do? Companies, businesses, acquaintances - they may have legitimate good reasons to not disclose all information. You are harming them. Yes, you read that correctly - if you think you have nothing to hide, you can harm others. The whole "nothing to hide" mentality assumes that not only you have nothing to hide but so doesn't anybody else. Which is not true. Also, the mentality assumes everybody receiving information is benign. Which is not true, either. There are lots of information one can learn about you just because others don't think it's valuable. And you can be that person if you don't realise that value. It's a lot of what social engineering hinges on - conning people out of valuable info, or otherwise stealing it, in order to attack somebody else. Usually a company, but maybe individuals, too. Fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage, theft - these are all crimes you can contribute to, if you don't see the power of information.

 

[Esotera]

Information is power, and it can be abused either by the person who originally collected it (the government) to suppress their enemies, or by people who inadvertantly get access to it, like hackers or whistleblowers who haven't checked whether they're leaking something that could cause harm to informants.

There's also the emotional argument that no-one should be able to watch you without you knowing about it, because it's just creepy. I don't want to be spied on, if I am being spied on I want an option to opt-out, and find out what data the authorities have collected on me.

edit: to clarify, if my government can spy on me, I want to be able to spy on them & see whatever information they have on me, and anything in the public interest. I guess we have the freedom of information act in the UK but that's not too popular with politicians at the moment...

 

[JoJo]

how long will it be before such as system is abused? a day max. and from that point on its all down hill.

i am a communist, in the UK there is an old, and abet unenforced law which makes my political stance a crime. however when i discuss thing with friends about the state of the country and how i personally feel, these words could be used to construct a treason case against me in the UK. and treason still does carry the death penalty in the UK (as does murder of a member of the royal usurpers and arson in the *****'s dockyards).

now the way i phrased my last sentence will ALSO get me into trouble. see how easy it is to fall foul of a bullshit law with overbearing and all pervasive all seeing systems.

i wish my utter failure for a democracy had something akin to the US bill of rights, and constitution which specifically limits the way a government can act.

A small correction, treason and those other crimes haven't carried a potential death penalty since 1997 when there was a big push towards human rights laws. Also, would you mind posting a link towards the law that makes your political stances a crime, I've never heard of any current UK law like that before.

 

[hermes]

The simple counter argument I have is this:

To the legislates that want this policy: put web cameras in your house so the public can follow you everywhere, all the time. Because we all know, if YOU have nothing to hide, YOU have nothing to fear...

 

[manic_depressive13]

The government can use this information to find political dissidents and arrest them using selectively enforced laws. Simple as that.

 

[CriticalMiss]

If it's okay to watch everything innocent citizens do then it should be okay for people to watch everything 'innocent' government departments and politicians do 24/7, so lets see the powers that be leading by example and allowing us to see all of their personal information. It's not a problem if they have nothing to hide. Right?

I think it's only a matter of time before something like Enemy of the State happens. An innocent person gets confused with someone else or set up to take the fall by corrupt government cronies. It's probably already happened.

 

[DugMachine]

It does bother me a bit that the government is spying on me without a warrant but it comes to a point where what the fuck can I or anyone else do about it?

Spreading awareness has always annoyed me because nothing seems to be done about it. I know lots about what's going on over seas in Turkey for example but what can I do to help? I'm not going to send money because I don't trust where it would end up and I'm definitely not headed over there to take up arms.

So with this knowledge of the government spying on us what can we do? It's my understanding that people have known this for quite awhile since Bush era but still nothing has been done to stop it. Talking never seems to get anything done but I sure as hell am not going to be the one to take charge.