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Privacy and the "Nothing To Hide" Argument
privacyprof writes "One of the most common responses of those unconcerned about government surveillance or privacy invasions is 'I've got nothing to hide.' According to the 'nothing to hide' argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The 'nothing to hide' argument is quite prevalent. Is there a way to respond to this argument that would really register with people in the general public? In a short essay, 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, Professor Daniel Solove takes on the 'nothing to hide' argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings." At the base of the fallacy, as Bruce Schneier has noted, is the "faulty premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong."
Pull down your pants.
IF you enjoy your privacy with "nothing to hide" but generally just like being a hermit of sorts, or just living your life without a bunch of statistics attached to you, that should be reason enough. As an American isn't it a right not to be forced into situations that would divulge information about ourselves? Not because "there's something to hide" just that a person man want to live a peaceful life without numbers, statistics, and data mining attacking your personal peace.
I have always taken the stance of: "If I have done nothing wrong why do I not deserve the right of privacy?"
the jews. They had nothing to hide at all.
Off-hand, the main problem with that argument is that it assumes that legal behavior and ethical/moral behavior are exactly the same.
If the government is watching, they are obviously looking for anything they don't like. This could be generally illegal behavior, or behavior that is threatening to the continued operation of that institution.
In either case, if you accept monitoring because "you have nothing to hide" you assume that the standards of what should be allowed and whether the institution should continue to exist should rest with the government. To put it another way, you assume they have perfect judgement in regard to what should be happening in regard to monitored behavior of citizens.
So (for example), maybe the government should be overthrown (because it does some badness such that it deserves to be disolved). Obviously any existing government that needs to be overthrown isn't going to support that notion. By targeting the government's ability to monitor, we better allow for the possibility that a government that is no longer serving the needs of its people might get overthrown (I'm assuming, for the purposes of this example, that "being overthrown" is probably necessary on some regular basis).
A modern day witchhunt.
Privacy protects us from being abused by not just government, but other people (and organizations).
How many Senators have available social security numbers, cell phone numbers, daily date planners, daughter's after school program schedules, etc. It's not just about government, when there's so many more people likely to take advantage of private information.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
...is given to the bad cops too.
Who says you have to be doing something illegal to be persecuted? So to answer the question "I've got nothing to hide" my response would be "Don't worry, they'll find something."
"The right of the people to be secure in their person, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."
In the US, this is the foundation of privacy. It is a mandate to those who govern from the people who allow them to govern. If you really need to ask why, your ignorance of history is so staggeringly complete that it can only be attributed to being negligently willful.
The one I like: "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." - Cardinal Richelieu
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition.
I'm in the minority because I like the Bush administration, but I do have to say that Ashcroft pissed me off when they imprisoned Tommy Chong. For the longest time anyone could buy drug paraphernalia in head shops. There was no law against it. Then suddenly Tommy Chong gets arrested ex post facto. They changed the interpretation of anti-drug laws on the fly so they imprisoned a man who did nothing illegal, and had no chance to stop doing it once they declared it illegal. If I lived in California, I woulda been out every day of his imprisonment holding up a protest sign. I'm sure a lot of people would have been there too, but then the government would have just cracked down on them hard because they'd assume they were drug users. The people knew this and never showed up for a rally.
God spoke to me.
If the government has not done any illegal spying on US citizens, why must the records remain sealed?
Sure... as long as I can know the history and stats of all the cars he's trying to sell me.
Identity Theft. EVERYONE has something to hide. The fewer people that have access to your private information, the harder it is for people to steal from you.
The more people, even people working for the government, that have access to your information, the easier it is for you to be turned into a victim. And in the case of things like identity theft, the less you THINK you have to hide, the more attractive of a target you probably are. (Upstanding citizens probably have good credit to exploit.)
paintball
Well, I downloaded the PDF and waded my way through the turgid prose. The sad truth is that the subject is very interesting and timely. Unfortunately, the author really has nothing insightful to say on the subject. The 25 pages of text are clunky and directly focused on academic publication. He writes a great deal, but doesn't SAY anything. How can he say so little with so many words?
The only thing that I took from his publication is that he doesn't like the Bush Administration. That's fine with me; everyone is entitled to his own opinion. My problem is that this issue as such is far greater than any current administration. It's one of the fundamental questions about the relationship between the individual and the state, and deserves to be treated as an issue of profound significance.
If this is the best justification of our right to privacy, then we're in serious trouble.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
Though it's true that there are good reasons for privacy even if you have nothing to hide, I also wonder if we might want privacy even for those who have something to hide.
I mean, often the whole thing gets framed around issues like terrorism or murder or child porn, and in those cases it's easy to let your emotions carry you away and think that perhaps the ends justify the means. Obviously, we want those crimes to be exposed and the perpetrator to be caught. On the other hand, we've all done something wrong at some point. We all have skeletons in our closets. Maybe there are some young people reading this who think, "I don't have any secrets!" Well wait. Sooner or later, something will happen in your life that you'll end up being ashamed of, you'll commit some act that saddens you to think about, or you'll do something that you just don't want people to know about.
These things might not be crimes. They might be that you have some dirty little fetish, that you cheated on your spouse, or that you screwed-over one of your friends when he/she really needed you. It might just be that you've been a bit greedy or harsh to people who didn't deserve it. Or it might even be that you were in a difficult situation, didn't do anything wrong, but the facts taken out of context could be twisted to make you look bad.
There are plenty of things that are legal that can ruin reputations, destroy relationships, embarrass people publicly, and generally ruin lives. Often, there's no positive purpose in bringing these things to light.
People sometimes fail to realize that civilization runs on forgiveness, forgetfulness, and ignorance. If everyone's skeletons were suddenly dragged into the light, it'd be very difficult to maintain work relationships and personal relationships. If everyone were suddenly punished for everything they'd done wrong, no one would escape a whipping. The way our system works is that a crime must be noticeable, someone must be hurt, and the police and prosecutors need to believe that punishing the offense is worthy of time, effort, money, and perhaps other risks. It's for the best. A perfect judicial system which punished all offenders fully would catch everyone at some point. We'd all be offenders, criminals, and subject to public ridicule at various points in our lives.
In the end, such a system would be harmful and oppressive to our society, while the whole point of the judicial system is to help our society maintain stability by reducing the need for vigilante justice/vengence. I'm afraid that, as strange as it may seem, it's better that some of the guilty are not found or prosecuted, and that some crimes go pretty well unnoticed. There's a reason why courts find people "not guilty" of a particular crime, rather than "innocent" in general. It's far better that many of our bad decisions, indiscretions, and unfortunate situations can be stowed away from prying eyes. We ought to maintain an attitude of faith in men, that all men should be treated as innocent until proven otherwise, in spite of the fact that no one is truly innocent.
And for those who don't like Rand, how about this quote, from a guy who preceded Rand by 17 years, and just might have been qualified to have an opinion on jurisprudence, seeing as how it was his entire career and stuff.
If a right of privacy is obsolete because technology allows listening from a distance, than a right to life was made obsolete years ago because high-powered rifles can kill you from a distance.
It would be very foolish to abandon a right every time a technology makes it more difficult to protect.
Ahem. This all makes it sound very rhetorical or academic.
"Oh, if we give them power, they might be corrupt"... you sound paranoid, you sound like you might be hiding something. Try this...
This is not about what they "might do", its about what they HAVE DONE.
It is well known fact that before the requirement that warrants be issued and that there was review of wiretaps, that the FBI wiretapped none other than the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Are we to believe that the good reverend, one of the heroic leaders of the civil rights movement was a dangerous criminal and needed to be watched?
Forget the theoretical, we need not look far to find real tangible cases of abuse of power. It is not the ability of power to be abused, it is the fact that it has been abused. The watchers have already been proven untrustworthy. There is more than ample real indisputable evidence.
Sure we can understand why a person in power in the 60s would have felt the need to watch the good reverend doctor. However, doesn't that make all the more certain the case that it is folly to allow their whims to direct such powers without real oversight?
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
"Privacy is a responsibility... viewing it as a right only puts you at a disadvantage"
When we talk about our "Rights" in terms of those inalienable freedoms that our Constitutional Republic is founded on, we are specifically talking about prohibitions on the GOVERNMENT. Technology does not render our Rights "obsolete". Just because the government "can" spy on us doesn't mean that we have to give them permission to do it.
"Privacy" is my responsibility in the sense that I need to take certain precautions to protect things like my personal financial information, or trade secrets that I don't want to share with competitors. Privacy is my RIGHT, in the sense that I should NOT need to protect myself against unwarranted government snooping.
"I'm in the minority because I like the Bush administration"
:-)
So YOU'RE the one.
But honestly, for the life of me, I can't think of a reason any group has not to dislike what Bush has done. Liberals hate him by default, he's no conservative, he's done nothing for the libertarians...and he went to war without planning for the inevitable eventuality that the spineless half of the country would stab him in the back when the going got tough.
I'll even give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's a well-intentioned person who's just a bit too optimistic, and that screws things up for him.
But given that, what is there to like? Are you a recently expatriated Iraqi in the U.S. with a Mexican illegal immigrant employer who suddenly needed a Medicare prescription drug plan?
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
It's very hard to convince someone of this, though, when it's their party in power.
Especially when they think their elected leader was largely chosen by God.
I hope I'm not being too specific here.
Hehe. But there's a good way to get around it -- point out the possibility of the other party being in power in the future!
That's what Republican Senator Larry Craig did on the Rush Limbaugh show. Craig was promoting a bill to add more civil rights safeguards and actual oversight into the USAPATRIOT Act. Rush was asking why such a thing was necessary, and was Craig claiming that civil liberties had been violated by George Bush's administration, and did he have any proof that it had happened. Rather than delving into that trap of pre-prepared talking point responses, Larry Craig pulled a wonderful switch. He said no, he thought Bush was doing a great job respecting liberties, but what if Hillary Clinton became the next President?!
Like magic, Rush was stopped in his tracks. He couldn't possibly argue that Hillary Clinton, Card-Carrying-Commie could be trusted to respect civil liberties based simply on her word! Coming from Rush, that'd practically be like an endorsement for her candidacy! No, suddenly the terrible spectre of a dictatorial Executive run amok with too much power was palpable.
This was a while ago, when the probability of Democratic president didn't seem quite so high. Now I think it should be relatively easy to get the my-party-is-fine-your-party-is-evil Republican types to see the danger. I should hope the same people on the Democrat side should be able to see the truth of the argument quite clearly already. But to actually get results, they'd both have to agree at the same time, and I'm not sure that will happen.
The enemies of Democracy are
I think it's pretty hard to disagree with both these arguments, but it begs another question:
Who among us thinks the government should be able to secretly spy on us without either permission or reporting to a court? As we've learned in the last few days, as far as the government is concerned, there is no record of secret wiretaps because, hey, they're secret. So the subject of the surveillance is never allowed to see whether or not they have been watched/recorded/wiretapped (this is exactly the argument made by the Bush Administration in Federal Court).
There's this bit in the Constitution about anybody who is accused having the right to face their accuser and the evidence against them in open court. Who among us does not believe this is a good thing? And if the government says that the citizen that was wiretapped is a terrorist, but doesn't have to show any evidence that the target is a terrorist, even to a secret court, is there any way secret wiretapping or surveillance can ever be Constitutional? Is it even important to pay attention to the Constitution any more in an age of a "terrorist threat"?
There are those here who proclaim support of the Bush Administration's secret wiretapping program, so I'd like to hear their answers to these questions. Since the users of Slashdot are mainly people who work very specifically with the technology that is used and is affected by these issues, it's important for us to have this discussion. Many of us will, in the coming years, directly deal with this issue from one side or the other.
You are welcome on my lawn.
how many people REALLY are affected by murder, terror, and child porn? I mean outside of the lost freedoms. Sure WTC was a tragedy BUT in terms of other wars, we are relatively safe. Nobody thinks Benlain is going to invade the USA and round us all up into camps. Murder is rarely (esp murder by strangers not spouse, relative, crime partner)committed against the GENERAL public. Cameras at stop lights are not gonna stop gang hits OR spousal murder. The gangs will just break the camera's 1st ( or avoid them somehow) and the spouse will likely kill his/her spouse inside. Child porn, according to reliable statistics is not all that common. Commercial child porn even less so. I study in teh 90's showed most widely distributed child porn ( used in prosicutions) to have been produced LEGALLY in sweden before the laws went into effect banning it. They are busting guys for trading the same old images from th 70's. Those children are my age now...Serial pedophiles( the ones who molest strange children, not relitives ) are fairly rare also. As is stranger child murder or abduction. Do not get me wrong, all the things are bad, shocking horrible acts. They are just also rare and not worth spending resources to go after to the degree that we would be with cameras and such. The impact will be too low and the cost in freedom too great
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
See McCarthyism for an concrete example of prosecution/persecution after the fact. The next witchhunt is always potentially around the corner and one can never be sure what it'll be about.
It could be people listening in on your phone calls.
It could be people working to ruin your reputation or to spoil a relationship you have with somebody, by selectively chosen but roughly true stories (false light).
It could be somebody secretly watching you.
It could be somebody openly dogging you as you go from public place to public place.
It could be somebody looking over your shoulder as you conduct a bank transaction.
It could be your neighbor's spotlight shining in your bedroom window at 3AM.
It could be somebody failing to uphold a responsibility they have to treat information they hold about you in confidence.
After years of thinking about this, I have come to this conclusion: all these things are in one way or another crimes against autonomy. Even the neighbor's spotlight it a crime against your right to direct your own attention. As a result, I came up with this definition (which I describe further in a blog entry):
This covers an important point: privacy is not just about being "left alone". It is about being able to engage with others without third parties (like the government, your boss, or your next door neighbor) sticking their nose in where it doesn't belong.
So, the idea behind "You have nothing to hide" is really much, much more sinister than it sounds. It implies, in effect, that you are nobody, at least when it comes to making decisions for yourself. It is not for anybody else to decide what you should or should not hide.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
While this does illustrate an example of a criminal gaming the system, it also lends itself to another point:
If they can do it to a scumbag, they can do it to you too.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Newsgroups: alt.privacy.clipper,sci.crypt
Subject: A Parable.
References: <1993Apr20.013747.4122@cs.sfu.ca> <1993Apr21.210353.15305@microsoft.com>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Partnership for an America Free Drug
scottmi@microsoft.com (Scott Miller (TechCom)) writes:
>Stikes me that all this concern over the government's ability
>to eavesdrop is a little overblown... what can't they do today?
>My understanding is that they already can tap, listen, get access
>exc. to our phone lines, bank records, etc. etc again.
Well, they can't listen in on much of mine, since I already use
cryptography for much of my electronic mail, and will start using it
for my telephony as soon as practical.
However, allow me to tell a parable.
There was once a far away land called Ruritania, and in Ruritania
there was a strange phenonmenon -- all the trees that grew in
Ruritainia were transparent. Now, in the days when people had lived in
mud huts, this had not been a problem, but now high-tech wood
technology had been developed, and in the new age of wood, everyone in
Ruritania found that their homes were all 100% see through. Now, until
this point, no one ever thought of allowing the police to spy on
someone's home, but the new technology made this tempting. This being
a civilized country, however, warrants were required to use binoculars
and watch someone in their home. The police, taking advantage of this,
would get warrants to use binoculars and peer in to see what was going
on. Occassionally, they would use binoculars without a warrant, but
everyone pretended that this didn't happen.
One day, a smart man invented paint -- and if you painted your house,
suddenly the police couldn't watch all your actions at will. Things
would go back to the way they were in the old age -- completely
private.
Indignant, the state decided to try to require that all homes have
video cameras installed in every nook and cranny. "After all", they
said, "with this new development crime could run rampant. Installing
video cameras doesn't mean that the police get any new capability --
they are just keeping the old one."
A wise man pointed out that citizens were not obligated to make the
lives of the police easy, that the police had survived all through the
mud hut age without being able to watch the citizens at will, and that
Ruritania was a civilized country where not everything that was
expedient was permitted. For instance, in a neighboring country, it
had been discovered that torture was an extremely effective way to
solve crimes. Ruritania had banned this practice in spite of its
expedience. Indeed, "why have warrants at all", he asked, "if we are
interested only in expedience?"
A famous paint technologist, Dorothy Quisling, intervened however. She
noted that people might take photographs of children masturbating
should the new paint technology be widely deployed without safeguards,
and the law was passed.
Soon it was discovered that some citizens would cover their mouths
while speaking to each other, thus preventing the police from reading
their lips through the video cameras. This had to be prevented, the
police said. After all, it was preventing them from conducting their
lawful surveilance. The wise man pointed out that the police had never
before been allowed to listen in on people's homes, but Dorothy
Quisling pointed out that people might use this new invention of
covering their mouths with veils to discuss the kidnapping and
mutilation of children. No one in the legislature wanted to be accused
of being in favor of mutilating children, but then again, no one
wanted to interfere in people's rights to wear what they liked, so a
compromise was reached whereby all homes were installed with
microphones in each room to accompany the video cameras. The wise man
lamented few if any child mutilations had ever been solv
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
You make a good point.
An even better question is about taking away their right to vote, especially considering that some felonies could easily be considered political crimes, eg smoking a joint in the privacy of your home. Once convicted you can never vote to change the possibly unjust law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Oh, they're reading. We've all seen them here, complaining about us dirty hippies who think the Bush Administration may have crossed the line with their extra-Constitutional claims and assertions of the power of the "Unitary Executive".
Whether they'll respond is a different question, though. It's tough to support secret wiretapping, even when a mighty, courageous war-president is doing the wiretapping.
You are welcome on my lawn.
O'Rly?
/. previously.
No, O'Reilly. (Sorry, I just couldn't resist.)
Here's something I wrote for my site a while ago. I also posted it to a similar discussion on
Quoth below:
["If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Ever heard that one? I work in information security, so I have heard it more than my fair share. I've always hated that reasoning, because I am a little bit paranoid by nature, something which serves me very well in my profession. So my standard response to people who have asked that question near me has been "because I'm paranoid." But that doesn't usually help, since most people who would ask that question see paranoia as a bad thing to begin with. So for a long time I've been trying to come up with a valid, reasoned, and intelligent answer which shoots the holes in the flawed logic that need to be there.
And someone unknowingly provided me with just that answer today. In a conversation about hunting, somebody posted this about prey animals and hunters:
"Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!"
but in a brilliant (and very funny) retort, someone else said:
"If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
Suddenly it made sense, that nagging thing in the back of my head. The logical reason why a reasonable dose of paranoia is healthy. Because it's one thing to be afraid of the TRUTH. People who commit murder or otherwise deprive others of their Natural Rights are afraid of the TRUTH, because it is the light of TRUTH that will help bring them to justice.
But it's another thing entirely to be afraid of hunters. And all too often, the hunters are the ones proclaiming to be looking for TRUTH. But they are more concerned with removing any obstactles to finding the TRUTH, even when that means bulldozing over people's rights (the right to privacy, the right to anonymity) in their quest for it. And sadly, these people often cannot tell the difference between the appearance of TRUTH and TRUTH itself. And these, the ones who are so convinced they have found the TRUTH that they stop looking for it, are some of the worst oppressors of Natural Rights the world has ever known.
They are the hunters, and it is right and good for the prey to be afraid of the hunters, and to run away from them. Do not be fooled when a hunter says "why are you running from me if you have nothing to hide?" Because having something to hide is not the only reason to be hiding something.]
Around the corner? I'd say it is already here, and instead of witches or communists, the target is terrorists and others deemed "anti-American" or "unpatriotic".
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
To me, this is the only acceptable reason for privacy. It is the same reason that individuals have unalienable rights to own guns. If we ever get to where we can't destroy the government by force, then government will drift towards dictatorship. If we have guns, we can take the government back when it goes to far - but without privacy, those guns cannot organize an effective resistance.
So we need privacy just like we need guns, to keep the government honest. It is expensive, in lives lost to criminals and similar, just like gun ownership. But it is the only reason the government will not become a dictatorship.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I admire your sentiment, but I doubt that private gun ownership is keeping your government honest. For one thing, I don't think a citizens' militia would have a hope in hell without the support of the military. For another, is your government honest to start with? Speaking as a citizen of another first world country, you guys sure have it rough these days.
.evom ton seod gis eht
I'm living in Europe where we don't have guns but still we have mostly honest governments that respect, and to some extent even fear, the people. Guns kill people, they don't create democracies. One should think you people (Americans) had learned that by now...
A government should fear the people, not because the people might kill them, but because the people have the power to remove them. If the government has to be removed with guns you already live in a dictatorship.