At the link above is an excellent research paper by Daniel J. Solove. It’s absolutely worth the long read.
Was your light rail ticket checked by a SWAT team while getting off the train, along with hundreds of others at a checkpoint in RTD station?
License plate being read everywhere you go?
Your cell phone’s location and everything said and done on the device available for the asking, and some people keep saying “So what? I have nothing to hide. This should only worry people who are hiding something. Go ahead and track me all you want and the SWAT team is no threat to me, I’ve not done anything wrong” is a common point of view that is also just incredibly wrong minded.
What about the woman divorcing an abusive husband? How is she supposed to contact her lawyer and escape without personal privacy? The methods used by law enforcement also work for abusive spouses.
You know why you didn’t get that job buddy? Because your potential employer asked you for your Facebook password and you actually gave it to him because “you have nothing to hide”. He finds out you’re friends with a guy he fired three years ago and that’s it, he hires someone else.
The cops come knocking – they don’t know they have the wrong address. They ask if they can “come in and look around” and you do, hands up. You don’t ask for a warrant, you “have nothing to hide” – you have a medical marijuana card and everything’s legal, above board. The cop arrests you anyway and your wife for dealing, when in fact they were supposed to be knocking on your neighbor’s door. How many years are you going to spend getting your life back?
All of the above are events I’ve either experienced or seen firsthand.
A priest does research on heroin addiction from a confessional session. Paparazzi discover the search and the resulting news articles lead to the loss of his parish. IT security staff do research for a case at work and when you get an unintentional eyeful, so does your ISP. What are they doing to do with that information and who are they going to call with it?
The fifth amendment is designed to protect us from : circumstantial evidence. Dragnets for anything and everything have nothing to do with “innocent until proven guilty”.
“Nothing to hide”, hm? Every hypocrite who’s ever said that closes curtains over their bedroom window at night. No, if the US government had a back door to all encryption, it wouldn’t have stopped 9/11, and child pornographers have been caught without it for years. Paul McMullan ignorantly proclaimed “privacy is for paedos”, and there are many others like him who are wrong minded. There is no encryption that “only good guys have a back door to”, and it’s NOT necessary to trade off privacy for security. Do you think Las Vegas has an insider threat programme that breaks down the privacy of the casino owners? Of course not – these are lies told to citizens, don’t you believe it.
To quite the research paper, “it’s not about whether you have something to hide – it’s about whether it’s anybody else’s business”.
By voting against privacy laws, people inflict their point of view upon others who are rightfully hiding something, such as their investments, whistleblowing human rights violations or the abused spouse trying to talk with her lawyer. Votes against the privacy of individuals close the basement door and lock in abuse victims and the repressed. In the end, what one has to hide isn’t other peoples’ business; by rejecting the overall right to privacy they do nothing but crucify everyone – including themselves in the long run – to benefit an oppressive regime.