Brilliant piece from 2011 #Privacy is rarely lost in one fell swoop. It is usually eroded over time, little bits dissolving almost imperceptibly until we finally begin to notice how much is gone. When the government starts monitoring the phone numbers people call, many may shrug their shoulders and say, Ah, its just numbers, thats all. Then the government might start monitoring some phone calls. Its just a few phone calls, nothing more. The government might install more video cameras in public places. So what? Some more cameras watching in a few more places. No big deal. The increase in cameras might lead to a more elaborate network of video surveillance. Satellite surveillance might be added to help track peoples movements. The government might start analyzing peoples bank rec ords. Its just my deposits and some of the bills I pay—no problem. The government may then start combing through credit-card records, then expand to Internet-service providers records, health records, employment records, and more. Each step may seem incremental, but after a while, the government will be watching and knowing everything about us. My lifes an open book, people might say. Ive got nothing to hide. But now the government has large dossiers of everyones activities, interests, reading habits, finances, and health. What if the government leaks the information to the public? What if the government mistakenly determines that based on your pattern of activities, youre likely to engage in a criminal act? What if it denies you the right to fly? What if the government thinks your financial transactions look odd—even if youve done nothing wrong—and freezes your accounts? What if the government doesnt protect your information with adequate security, and an identity thief obtains it and uses it to defraud you? Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm. But the government doesnt want to hurt me, some might argue. In many cases, thats true, but the government can also harm people inadvertently, due to errors or carelessness. When the nothing-to-hide argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions examined and challenged, we can see how it shifts the debate to its terms, then draws power from its unfair advantage. The nothing-to-hide argument speaks to some problems but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised with government security measures. When engaged directly, the nothing-to-hide argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the nothing-to-hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 21:28:44 +0000
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