Nothing to Hide

http://danielsieradski.com/nothing-to-hide/14572

by dylangs1030 • 13 years ago

73 11 13 years ago

This is a brilliant piece. Great examples too. Thank you for writing this.

Tycho• 13 years ago

As always, the default assumption is that the government can be trusted completely. It can't. It's made up of corruptible human beings with their own interests.

Even if you personally have nothing to hide, you should be worried at how much power the holders of this data have. If you blackmail someone into doing something, it's not necessarily just the blackmail victim who suffers. It can be used to corrupt any of our institutions.

dylangs10303• 13 years ago

Exactly.

Historically, governments have never been an altruistic entity that helps people; rather, it has always fulfilled the Hobbesian need for order.

Human beings are quite capable of being good, they may even be inherently so. But the outliers are so bad and corrupt the system so absolutely that no innovation or progress can be had for mankind without an organized system of law.

Unfortunately, this comes with a consequent liability for those in charge of the system ("government") to abuse their power, deeming their short lifetimes and microcosmic plans more important than the needs of the people and the society as a whole.

This is the fundamental problem that prevents utopian ideals from being plausible. This is what we need to constantly fight against, because governments are unfortunately a choice of either chaos or control - appropriately defined as "which option is less worse?"

This is also why we need checks and balances. We cannot allow agencies like the NSA to conduct surveillance on a wide scale. They use fear and the threat of unknown danger to wield powers we do not know about, let alone elect to them. It is corrupt and an abuse of the founding principles of this country, and it needs to be stopped.

natch• 13 years ago

Kudos for putting something up, but I'm afraid this is ineffective.

It's not apparent to an impatient visitor which side of the argument you are on, especially to an unthinking visitor, the kind who falls into the "nothing to hide" fallacy.

People on the internet don't read, they skim. And they are unlikely to follow the link at the end that finally, unlike your page, contains an explanation that attempts to refute the "nothing to hide" thinking.

It would be more effective if you started out at the top with a clear statement, then made an attempt to back it up by explaining it in terms even "idiots" (to borrow your word) will understand.

rschmitty• 13 years ago

Nothing to hide but the title and subtext of this article?

antninja• 13 years ago

It's worth repeating that the name for people who are constantly being watched is 'prisoners'.

roryokane2• 13 years ago

No, that’s not what ‘prisoner’ means. My dictionary says it’s either someone in an actual prison, “a person captured and kept confined by an enemy, opponent, or criminal”, or “a person who is or feels confined or trapped by a situation or set of circumstances”. Those definitions are close to what I had guessed the definition of ‘prisoner’ to be (“trapped or restricted in movement”).

People who are constantly being watched may be prisoners in that they feel trapped by the surveillance, and limited in the actions they can take, but that is not an instrinsic part of being watched. Some people being watched are prisoners, but not all. You want a word that means “people under surveillance”. I don’t think there is any such single word, like ‘surveillee’.

dylangs10303• 13 years ago

Do you not feel trapped or confined by the breaches of privacy commited by the government? That would satisfy your definition.

dylangs10303• 13 years ago

I think the founding principle of the United States is the truth that governments cannot be trusted. Historically, governments represent, at best, a necessary evil. At worst they destroy human society utterly in a maelstrom of corruption and power abuse.

The founding fathers (imperfect as they were) put an incredible amount of effort into defining a rigorous checks and balances system. These were people who rebelled against the tyranny of "divine rule" and the right of monarchs to wield supreme executive power.

They could not have anticipated the tyrannies we have to rebel against, but it's our turn. Privacy is not even defined as an explicit right in the United States constitution - this is not because it isn't lawful, but because it is deservedly a proposition not requiring proof.

I'm not suggesting a revolution, but the United States government has devolved from the ideals it once represented. Surveillance of this magnitude and breaches of constitutional right (in the spirit of the law, and in the spirit of fundamental propositions) would never have been done by the fledgling American state.

That would be more closely characterized as the sort of injustice that caused our revolution. We need to bring the government back into alignment with its historical ideals of liberty - the zeitgeist of "land of the brave and home of the free" is no longer ours to claim if we don't have the courage to demand our liberty.

diminoten• 13 years ago

Well, that first paragraph disqualifies the article almost immediately. Considering the most important words in that sentence, "vast majority" have no citation, it sets the tone for the rest of the article.

The second paragraph insinuates that monitoring activists is an immoral act on the part of the FBI, which is completely untrue.

The third paragraph calls the leaking of information to the press a constitutional right, which is absolutely not true. Is it immoral of the government to keep any secrets at all? If it's not, then is it immoral of the government to take steps to prevent their secrets from being released? If that's not, then isn't "monitoring" for potential leaks at their source just another example of the government attempting to prevent leaks?

Paragraphs 4 and 5 are spot on. So is paragraph 6, except for the last sentence. "Protecting innocents from harm", and the link is to a generic body scanner article? If the argument is that the government has at one point in recent history caused emotional or physical harm to someone who didn't "deserve it", then I guess it's right, but it's both as right and as useful to say the government didn't cure my kid of cancer or fix my broken bicycle. It's completely irrelevant to the argument the paragraph is trying to make, specifically that even if the government did collect data about a potential attack, they're incapable of saving those people.

Paragraph 7 is also correct.

Paragraph 8 is downright offensive, but that's probably the point. There is absolutely zero evidence to suggest that the FBI had credible and actionable information about the Tsarnaev brother's intent, and to attempt to try to talk about pre-9/11 government agency behavior with regard to today's situation is about as useful as talking about how Roosevelt may have known about Pearl Harbor. Historically interesting, absolutely irrelevant to now.

You had an agenda, clearly, before you wrote this. You shoehorned in irrelevant facts and articles to attempt to make a point that doesn't need to be made. Now you're calling people idiots because you think this is a black and white issue.

Frankly, I think it's you who's the idiot.

Nothing to Hide

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