Privacy Protects Bothersome People (2013)

http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

by happyscrappy • 12 years ago

165 86 12 years ago

Privacy in this case can be replaced with "anonymity", too. The less free speech a country has, the more important anonymity is. But even in super free speech-friendly countries anonymity can be important to hide from the judgement of the masses who might "not get it" because of the status quo culture or whatever.

Sometimes ideas can take years to develop and make their way into a culture. If a person is attacked the moment he wants to plant the seed of an idea, either by the status quo-loving crowd or his or her own government, then progress will happen much more slowly.

breakall• 12 years ago

The article says that "privacy is a fundamental right".

Are you saying that anonymity is also a fundamental right?

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

If you think rights are everything outside of the necessary intrusions of government, yes.

If you think governments grant rights, no.

001sky• 12 years ago

To some extent they are the same, and to other extents they are not. That is why they are two different words, with some conceptual overlap. Anonymity is a type of privacy, and privacy (in the US at least) is a concept that appears in the US constitution and in subsequent jursiprudence.

john_b• 12 years ago

Anonymity is a special case of privacy. Privacy is the ability to control how much you reveal about yourself to others and the circumstances of how you reveal that information. Anonymity is simply the choice to reveal no information about your identity.

icebraining• 12 years ago

As the SCOTUS put it:

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

basicallydan• 12 years ago

This article has been posted before, but I'm glad it's come up again. Personally, it puts into words something I struggle to put into words myself, especially when I am trying to argue against massive breaches of privacy by governments. Thanks for the reminder.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

This is a good argument, but, by now, the practical good of privacy is stone cold obvious. The same agencies that rob us of privacy engage in dirty tricks campaigns against dissidents. As if to prove this point in one neat package.

PythonicAlpha13• 12 years ago

To make it short: Privacy is about protecting Democracy!

As the newest information, we see that we are not only spied on, but there are also stealth techniques to mute bothersome people. It can go thus far, that you will become jailed for something you did not do.

This way, anybody that becomes bothersome to mighty people (and I don't speak about any president here) can become a target. People that are against atomic plants or against chemical fertilizers, or against ... you name it.

This thing can become worse to the democratic nations than killing random people by drones.

return03• 12 years ago

Fact: the worlds biggest and most spectacular privacy-breaching operation is being run by veritably democratic states, the "west". It's not some evil dictator who dictates this, it's the majority of citizens who demands spying on the rest. Another fact is that there are no major (think, ukraine-size) protests about this anywhere.

My conclusion is that even democracy demands some privacy breach. Privacy may be protecting individual rights but it's not a prerequisite for democracy.

PythonicAlpha13• 12 years ago

You follow two fallacies: The fallacy, that democracies will stay forever and that people in a democracy act democratic. Democracy is no virtue of its own.

Your other logical errors, I will not comment.

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

One could counter-argue by claiming that these are not true democracies.

dobbsbob• 12 years ago

Watch the talk ex NSA executive Thomas Drake gave on why spying is kryptonite to any democracy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgg8K26dcXs

wpietri• 12 years ago

Given that many of these democracies arose in conditions of substantial individual privacy, your conclusion is unproven.

It could be equally true that democracies die from insufficient privacy, but it just takes more than a decade or so of massive invasive snooping. In particular, the surveillance apparatus may not yet have been sufficiently corrupted to be used as a source of political power.

I should note that the US had a previous wave of improper snooping [1] which was seen as a threat to democracy and fought off. It provided a lot of the legal restrictions that prevented massive surveillance up until 9/11 got Washington's undies in a bunch.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

dinkumthinkum• 12 years ago

And here I thought it was private enterprises running these mega privacy breaching operations.

anon4• 12 years ago

Now, I hate to invoke this, but... Hitler was democratically elected.

And, to be fair, he did completely follow through on his pre-election promises. He might be the only democratically elected leader to not waver from the plan he laid out before he got elected to power.

That still doesn't mean it was a good idea.

Edit: I don't mean "the sheeple will elect whoever has better PR"; I mean that under specific social and economic conditions electing Hitler starts to seem like a good idea to normal, rational individuals. Same as with taking away privacy.

blazespin• 12 years ago

Privacy is about protecting freedom of speech. That usually leads to democracy, but theoretically doesn't have to.

stillsut2• 12 years ago

Three letters: IRS.

Based on their whim, your privacy can be completely invaded, and you can be thrown in jail. This happens ALL the time.

What is the NSA going to do? Bring you ("meddlesome kids") into court based non-admissable evidence from PRISM? Never heard of it happening once. Please cite a case if you disagree.

And bothersome people working way outside the law like Deepthroat, LulzSec, etc. already do take enormous steps to preserve their anonymity in communications. NSA changes nothing for me.

codelap2• 12 years ago

Here is how it can go down, the cops are chasing Bill, because Bill is able to demonstrate that fracking is causing cancer, and all the politicians knew about it and were bribed. PRISIM intercepts bill talking to his dealer, and knows that he will have a small amount of weed on his person for sciatica because his state doesn't have medical marijuana. Send the cops an "anonymous" tip, and are instructed to make an example of this guy, and throw the book at him. Any hard documents are now confiscated as part of the arrest, and the state simply declares the documents to have been tampered with, but include sensitive data, so the public will never see it.

diminoten5• 12 years ago

Why so convoluted? If we're going to make up completely unsubstantiated stories, let's go with a simple one.

Bill gets shot in the head because the cop doesn't like him.

The end.

You greatly overestimate how complicated corruption has to be.

sneak• 12 years ago

PRISIM intercepts bill talking to his dealer, and knows that he will have a small amount of weed on his person for sciatica because his state doesn't have medical marijuana.

Forget the state; possession of marijuana is a federal crime rendering the possessor eligible for jail time in all 50 states, including the states where it is regarded by the general public as "legal".

This strikes me as an incredibly dangerous development that most seem to ignore. Selective enforcement of laws broken by everyone, all the time, is just as terrifying as the loss of privacy.

j2kun2• 12 years ago

There are more than enough examples of people jailed without trial/representation for things they've said on Facebook under the name of national security or terrorism or whatever. Law enforcement doesn't need admissible evidence to wreck someone's life.

stillsut2• 12 years ago

Now this I agree with. See: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/05/23/a-methuen...

The line I'm trying to draw is between Intelligence/Communications-intercepts Vs. Enforcement.

All the police needed to do in the above case is go on FB, no spycraft needed. It's always a question, like with the IRS, of what they can do to you.

j2kun2• 12 years ago

Privacy laws also protect the people who don't think about privacy. Those are the ones most susceptible to being manipulated by people tracking their activities.

See http://mathbabe.org/2014/02/26/what-privacy-advocates-get-wr...

onion2k2• 12 years ago

privacy is a fundamental right

The problem here is that there's no such thing as a "fundamental right". All we have is government and our legal framework; nothing about what we can or can't do exists outside of that[1]. Philosophers have looked at this many times[2], and none have managed to come up with a satisfactory definition of 'rights' that works. Consequently all we have to work with when it comes to saying what we can do, what we have the 'right' to do, and perhaps more importantly what the government can do, is the law. Really, the problem is that governments are tasked with limiting their own power over us; surrendering power is something that very few people are good at.

[1] There's morals and ethics, but that's what you should do rather than what you can do.

[2] If you're interested, I highly recommend reading about Jeremy Bentham who wrote about the topic more than 200 years ago: http://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/#SH5b

PythonicAlpha13• 12 years ago

I am not interested in, what philosophers say or what the government says, or even what the law books say.

It is just obvious to me, that living together (and that is basically what laws, governments etc. are all about) is only possible and can last, when some fundamentals are respected. One of them is privacy (this becomes more and more obvious in the digital age).

onion2k2• 12 years ago

I absolutely agree with you - that's the same society that I want to live in. The notion of 'rights' won't get us that society though. The only way to get there is to elect governments that understand what we want, respect what we want, pass laws to make what we want happen, and ultimately realise that those laws also apply to what the government itself does.

While people believe that they have privacy by virtue of something outside of the law and government, they're never actually going to have privacy.

aric• 12 years ago

There's morals and ethics, but that's what you should do rather than what you can do.

Ethics is also in the realm of what one can do. Civil disobedience is critical in rejecting tyranny. First comes mental freedom. Then comes knowledge. Then comes action. This is how systems are destroyed, changed, and built anew. It's detrimental to the human mind to stay mentally incapacitated by a particular system's arbitrary framework of laws at a point in time. The extent of a person's thought need not be limited and shall always supersede everything external (e.g. governments).

Fundamental rights don't exist in a tangible sense. I'd agree. However, they're healthy intellectual notions that exist. They compel people to dismantle or change current societal models in ways that demand going beyond the suppression of a "legal" realm.

protomyth• 12 years ago

The founders of the US believed in "fundamental right" read their writings including the Federalist Papers.

anExcitedBeast• 12 years ago

This runs contrary to how modern governments claim the origin of their power (at least the USA). It's largely based on the work done by John Locke in "Two Treatises of Government", as well as other enlightenment thinkers. The theory is that one man has no absolute domain over another in a state of nature because one can always find a way to kill anyone else, even if we have to wait for them to sleep. A social contract is essentially the pooling of your right of self defence and some property, which allows some in society to focus on defence (government), leaving the rest free to participate in social and economic engagements. However, the government can only claim the rights you've consented to handing over (explicitly or tacitly). In the US, we explicitly consented to representatives through elections who ratified the Constitution with that consent. Therefore, every action the federal government takes MUST have foundation in the Constitution. Anything without that foundation is a violation of your rights (eg, Obama can't order a citizen to shine his shoes, because there is no origin of that power in the Constitution).

Are there holes? Sure. But to say that none have come up with a satisfactory definition is subjective, and many would strongly disagree.

applecore• 12 years ago

John Locke (who hugely influenced Jeremy Bentham) makes a strong case for the existence of certain universal, inalienable natural rights, entirely independent of any particular legal system, government, or culture.

stan_rogers• 12 years ago

They're not particularly strong arguments unless you are already convinced of the conclusions. "Natural law" (constraints) can be demonstrated to be necessary for societal functioning, but they don't extend to "natural rights". That is, a societal necessity to prohibit unsanctioned killing of its members does not in any way imply a right to life. And the idea that the natural state of humanity is the lone savage is entirely unfounded (and contrary to all evidence dating back as far as we can manage it); it's merely a convenient way to begin an argument that ends up "proving" its own unfounded premises.

ratscabies• 12 years ago

Bentham is still around, but sadly mute on the topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham#Death_and_the_Au...

dsugarman2• 12 years ago

it is not a fundamental right, it is a constitutional right. You can not collect evidence without probable cause.

tribe20122• 12 years ago

I agree that privacy is a fundamental right. However, has anyone thought about how we haven't seen any real terrorist attacks in the past decade? There are people out there wanting to hurt the US. And it's not difficult to do. It really isn't. Clearly the NSA is doing something right.

Like I said, I wholeheartedly agree that privacy is a fundamental right. But, I would like to see more people acknowledging the flip side of the argument.

amirmc2• 12 years ago

"Clearly the NSA is doing something right."

Unfortunately, there's no way to independently verify this statement. Only those inside the security apparatus have any data to examine this but they have a clear incentive to make themselves look indispensable (and indeed, get more funding).

tribe20122• 12 years ago

Poor choice of words. What I'm saying is that there have undoubtedly been thwarted terrorist attacks. I would like more transparency from the government on what led to those. That way, we can at least have an intelligent debate.

AJ0072• 12 years ago

What about the children and non-combatants who have incorrectly been killed due to drone strikes? What is the correct number of non-terrorists that should be killed per terrorist who is killed?

After September 11th some Americans thought a mass termination of people in Afghanistan would be a good idea (you had to be an adult or teenager at the time, people spoke this, they certainly did not print it in the NYTimes.)

The point is, once you begin making judgements solely on outcomes, those judgements become amoral. That can be ok when its an amoral activity, like optimizing server architecture, but when the activity involves who to kill and not to kill, the decisions last forever.

insuffi2• 12 years ago

http://www.globalresearch.ca/5352917/5352917

1) All the public ones they have published on their website are false, made-up bullshit. You'd expect the NSA bringing forward some credible evidence of thwarting terrorist plots in light of incredibly heavy criticism, yet they can't.(the article says 13, but it was later proved that it was exactly 0.)

2) From that, we can infer that, if your assumption of people wanting to hurt the U.S. is true, only old fashioned ways of countering terrorism work e.g. human intelligence.

3)"There are people out there wanting to hurt the US" sounds rather naive fox-news-like.

analyst74• 12 years ago

This sounds less like a complaint about breach of privacy, but more of complaint about information asymmetry -- where the powerful have access to the data, while the commoners have not.

An obvious way to level the field is privacy, so that nobody has access to anybody else's information; another way would be transparency, so it's difficult for the power to hide their abuse of power.

PythonicAlpha13• 12 years ago

Interesting idea. But not practical, I think. The mighty will always find ways to hide their doings and as you can see at the current state, those with the bigger resources will always win in such a battle.

nilved• 12 years ago

No, that isn't a viable strategy. This Hacker News thread is evidence that transparency of some kind exists, and that public scrutiny is completely, 100% inconsequential for the elite.

cinquemb• 12 years ago

Information asymmetry exists as a continuum and less as definitive states. Say, what if the avg person could boot up an NSA terminal to be able to search (and everyone know that they are logged in and searching) the database? That, to me, would seem to be on the other side of the spectrum than it is now, and I highly doubt that would be 100% inconsequential for the current elite. Would something like this possibly enable a future elite, possibly (as all systems seem be good at doing eventually), but at least it will be a change of the status quo where the few can leverage an information advantage against the masses.

And if the startup I've founded with a friend and been working on for two years is any proof of concept of something like that working (yes we are revenue generating as of a month ago, and growing with plenty of things in the pipeline), I beg to differ. We have managed to get people who never would have heard of/or read Hacker News to care (because we made it relevant to their everyday lives in ways they can see the manifestation of their collective behaviors these past decades) about mass surveillance/data collection and acknowledge that as a society if we have collectively let things get to this point, to think that a roll back of the technical capabilities of governments/corporations/other organizations through political pandering will placate, is naive at best. Here's a post I made before the Snowden leaks[0]. I think about these things everyday, and work on ways to show that the emperor of mass surveillance is naked for everyone to see if they remove their hands from their eyes and plugs from their ears because perhaps at the end of the day, we will only see ourselves in front of the mirror reflecting upon our individual and collective actions we make everyday.

[0] http://blog.pictobar.com/post/47787766458/why-so-silent

falconfunction• 12 years ago

a box filled with rocks does not need locks

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

You might reconsider your statement if said rocks are diamonds ...

at-fates-hands3• 12 years ago

I find it interesting people are all for protecting their privacy and against NSA intrusions, yet the US just handed over millions of people's health records to a government who clearly doesn't care about their privacy.

I don't understand this logic at all.

PythonicAlpha13• 12 years ago

I am not so current in US politics. What do you mean?

at-fates-hands3• 12 years ago

http://www.trunews.com/obamacare-law-creates-data-services-h...

The federally-run exchanges, euphemistically called “new health insurance marketplaces,” are accompanied by collection of a wide variety of personal data, which can now be legally shared numerous faceless government agencies — agencies which previously had to snoop, steal, or spy to get it. No longer will any of our intimate medical details be reasonably considered either private or protected.

To facilitate this forfeiture of individual privacy, the Department of Health and Human Services has created a massive, comprehensive database to record and store Americans’ personal information called the Federal Data Services Hub. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that the purpose of the Data Hub is to provide “electronic, near real-time access to federal data” and “access to state and third party data sources needed to verify consumer-eligibility information.” No longer will any of our intimate medical details be reasonably considered either private or protected.

AJ0072• 12 years ago

Who is "people"? The average US citizen doesn't express much concern about the NSA & GCHQ intrusions. Many suffer from celebrity-ism and fantasize about having paparazzi follow and photograph them everywhere. Even after admitting blanket spying occurs on elected Senators, there are no indictments or criminal sanctions.

What is a little stranger to me are those on hacker news that want the government to gain complete control over their personal autonomy with a "basic income." While they insist that the income would be unconditional, it would be from a government which currently revokes many rights -- voting, free speech, and even life from citizens and non-citizens alike.

dsugarman2• 12 years ago

if you think about this like an inductive proof, you will see that giving up privacy to catch 'bad guys' will lead to a very scary Orwellian life for all of us. I would say most everyone I know does something illegal every day, certainly all of my friends in NYC jaywalking as a way of life and it is scary to think of the ways that computer systems can be used to enforce all of the shitty laws that serve no real purpose. Red light cameras for example are proven to cause more accidents than they prevent but they pay the bills.

Privacy Protects Bothersome People (2013)

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