In this much-discussed subject, I'm surprised that two huge points never arise:
1. The "if you have nothing to hide..." line is predicated on the viewer having final say about whether something is right/wrong, thus subordinating the subject to the viewer. This is repulsive to the notion of liberty as protected by the American "4th Amendment" right of freedom from governmental inspection without an adjudicated warrant. To wit: it's not that I have something to hide, it's that someone else is going to be obnoxious if they see it.
On a related but semantically distinct note...
2. Those pushing "if you have nothing to hide..." have suspect & ulterior motives. Their existence (income, job, power, prestige) depend on finding something "wrong". They are, by job description, hostile to me. If they derived nothing from inspecting others, they would not care whether anything was hidden or not. Remember: they seek the power to punish, not just what they find wrong, but what they cannot inspect. Your exposure nets you little, but gains them so much they want to reprimand you for any concealment.
Trivial example: a traditional suit-and-tie, senior manager walks by a junior programmer's cube and sees youtube on the monitor and immediately assumes junior is slacking off, abusing company resources. He subsequently spreads negative commentary about junior to his peers.
The problem is both senior's prejudices, AND the fact that he's missing context. Junior might be watching an instructional video. It might be a break after 10 hours straight work. He might be creating videos for the company and uploading them.
In other words, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean someone who looks is going to see the whole true picture.
And that only considers accidentally taking them out of context. As the quote from Richelieu goes, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
THAT is the line that should lead off any discussion of this topic.
Anyone who's sat on either side of the table as a lawyer questions a witness will know how a selective editing of the truth can shade decisions. Reality TV shows and 60 Minutes have along, long history (and they're hardly the only ones) of shooting a great deal of footage, then splicing and editing it together in a way as to tell the story they want to tell.
This is part of a larger topic I'm starting to formulate about power. The key in power isn't to have more total resources than the other side, but to identify the key points from which you can control the outcome. William Gibson noted that the future isn't evenly distributed. Neither are are power and control points.
I'm actually surprised that the 4th Amendment isn't referenced more frequently in refutation to the asinine "nothing to hide" position.
"Nothing to hide" is thematically similar to the groan-inducing "Do you want the terrorists to win?" arguments against civil liberties, in favor of increased security measures, proferred and popularly supported in the mid-2000s. (Sadly, many of the legacies and artifacts of that position still persist).
The answer to any of these half-baked arguments should always begin with something along the lines of "Because we're better than that." Because we have a constitution that assumes we're good people, and that protects our civil liberties from invasion. Because these things are so fundamental to our nation's purpose that giving them up is much worse than being attacked. Giving them up threatens the very purpose of the country's founding.
Even to entertain these arguments, i.e., by trying to cite examples of areas of privacy or liberty that are negotiable, areas that aren't, and so forth, is to stoop low. It is to lose before the argument has actually begun. It is to accept the faulty premise that privacy is about hiding something -- that it is an active attempt to conceal information from the world. No, privacy isn't the action being taken. Invasion of privacy is the action. Privacy is simply a state of being, and one to which we have an inalienable right.
Privacy isn't something we opt into; it is something we don't even really consider until we are made, or compelled, or asked to opt out. "Nothing to hide" begs the question. It assumes, as a foregone premise, that privacy is an opt-in decision that we consciously undertake in defense of something (and that something is implied to be onerous or illegal). This is just fallacious logic, plain and simple.
It's unfortunate that a right to privacy wasn't inumerated directly in the constitution, but was instead defined indirectly. This is one of those areas where the founders really couldn't have known how far technology would go, and how important something like privacy -- which may have been taken for granted back then -- would become 200+ years later.
You're close here, but you're missing the big picture. It's not that the constitution assumes we're good people. It's that many of the founders were suspicious of large central governments. The anti-federalists insisted upon a bill of rights as a condition to ratification. I would assert that most of the bill of rights is about protecting the ability to of the people revolt against the government:
First Amendment - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. Ensuring that me and my buddies can get together and talk about overthrowing the government.
Second Amendment - right to bear arms. Ensuring I have the ability to inflict harm on/protect myself from government actors.
Third Amendment - right against quartering troops. Ensuring the government can't put soldiers in my house to listen to me or intimidate me.
Fourth Amendment - right against unreasonable search and seizure. The government can't come in and take my stuff unless and until I do something "wrong."
I could go on, but to my view, is all about revolution. There may be those who think we've moved to a place in society where governments like ours are benevolent and that the majority will is always right. I don't.
Maybe people think that hanging onto such rights is futile given F-16s and M1 Abrams. I think our difficulty in Afghanistan and Iraq is a pretty good refutation of that position.
Privacy is important because, without it, bad guys can make us slaves.
The second amendment talks about a well-regulated militia. That doesn't sound like it's intended to be protection against one's own government, but against invading armies.
I'd like to point out, for the benefit of others, that the term well-regulated simply meant 'effective' or 'in proper working order'. It did not necessarily mean that it should be controlled by the government.
What about the 'militia' part? Or the 'being necessary for the security of a free state' part?
The second amendment is saying 'we're not going to restrict arms, because we need a body of men to call on who know how to use arms, in order to maintain our independence', not 'fear your government, be prepared to shoot its representitives'.
It's both. The second amendment is necessary to maintain the security of a free state against foreign invaders and against a government seeking to take the 'free' from the 'free state'.
I am not arguing that the second amendment is a provision for overthrowing the government. I really did just want to make sure everyone knew how 'well-regulated' should be interpreted since it's easy to read it naively.
1. Notwithstanding that language, it's an individual right. See Heller.
2. Militias were, almost exclusively, the province Of the individual states. There was not until relatively recently a standing federal army. The point was to keep arms in the hands of individuals.
The Bill of Rights is a check on large centralized government. It's the whole point. Don't forget that these guys had just been through precisely such a revolution. There are some pretty striking quotes from Thomas Jefferson directly on point.
The second amendment is explicitly written to secure a right of the people against infringement by their government: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Protection against foreign armies is already provided for in Article 1 (Congress has the power to fund the military) and Article 2 (the President is the Commander-in-chief of the military.)
The bulk of your logic makes sense, besides depending on taking "privacy is an inalienable right" as a premise. However, on a practical level...
"Because we're better than that"
In order to fight a war[0] from a "better than that" position, you have to have vastly greater power, enough to compensate for the hobbles you put on yourself to remain "better". Otherwise, whoever fights dirtiest wins. When people are trying to kill us, how do we make up for not listening to them, without letting people die?
[0] In a loose sense. Terrorists try to kill us, and the only way to stop them is with force. A lot of the same principles apply.
A group of terrorists lucked into taking down two big buildings and so we have to debate whether we can afford civil liberties? The premise should be self-evidently absurd.
If we'll kill thousands of Arabs to protect freedom, we shouldn't be so eager to walk away from it for the death of a few thousand Americans.
I would also suggest that abandoning principle for expediency can be hobbling in itself. Wars aren't entirely fought by robots just yet. "Power" isn't a column in an Excel spreadsheet.
The only way to stop existing terrorists may be to kill them. The things that go into stopping prospective terrorists from becoming actual terrorists are more complicated.
While I agree with the point, raw budget comparisons are not a valid way to make it; terrorists also aren't defending such a big piece of land (and sea), and are more narrowly focused in scope as well.
The raw budget comparison is not the end of the United States' military superiority; the US has access to cruise missiles and aircraft targeting systems that allow them to put a precisely-measured dose of explosive through practically any window in the world at a few moments' notice. Meanwhile, the "terrorists" are strapping some fertilizer to a Nokia brick phone and laying it on the side of the road in the hopes that a truck will drive by so they can detonate it. The US so vastly out-matches the people it's fighting right now that they're having to write new strategic doctrine to be able to handle it. Are you really trying to make the argument that we don't have enough leeway to keep some principles in the process of defending ourselves?
Of course the raw budget comparison is not the end of the US's military superiority; I said I agreed with the parent's general point: that while additional constraints may make it harder to achieve tactical objectives, we don't have any trouble achieving tactical objectives.
My point was just that the metric being used was irrelevant to the comparison being made.
In the intelligence battle, though, how much can we afford to cut ourselves off? A large budget is of little use, unless we can spend it on surveillance equipment...
Plus, if politicians have nothing to hide, why do they fight Wikileaks? Why don't they publish all administrative documents, accountancy books, meeting reports, etc? Those who push surveillance policies refuse to eat their own dog food. They're hypocrites.
The bigger problem with "nothing to hide" is that it implies that what currently qualifies as right or wrong will hold in the future.
And while people in the US like to take for granted that democracy inevitably marches towards freedom, that simply isn't always so.
There's no guarantee that what was once illegal or suitable grounds for harassment by the community and authorities won't become so again.
"Harmless" records of yourself enjoying alcohol, common recreational drugs, listening to certain brands of music, interacting with currently-legitimate political parties or activist groups -- all could one day be held against you and be found as grounds to have authorities and/or the wider community harass, arrest or otherwise sanction you.
1. Privacy and secrets are necessary because our society demands it. My identity is crucial for me to be able to borrow money, obtain a bank account, sign papers. I am therefore entitled to privacy to my own date of birth, mother's maiden name and a host of other so called "secrets".
2. Privacy also reduces the chance I will be discriminated against. If you've lived in a country where the law decides whether you are allowed to purchase land based on your religious beliefs, then you'd appreciate that the less people know about you, the less they can prejudge you.
3. Private conversations allow ideas to be discussed and discarded if they turn out to be wrong or worse still turn out to have ethical issues attached. If every thought are treated as a matter of public discourse that can be held against you in the future, then people will be keeping their mouth shut.
4. One only have to look at how "suspected symphatizers" were killed when South Vietnam fell, to understand that privacy allows people to keep their heads low, and should the environment turn nasty, to stay out of trouble.
"In this much-discussed subject, I'm surprised that two huge points never arise"
Actually those points come up in pretty much every book about privacy. Your first point is heavily discussed in Jeffrey Rosen's book The Unwanted Gaze, and your second point is sort of the point of Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear. See also any of Daniel Solove's books.
To point 1, that's how all laws work. The person breaking the law rarely gets to decide the legality of their action. Even with a warrant, the suspect isn't the one determining right and wrong.
To point 2, I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. I'm somewhere near the nothing to hide camp, but it's just a matter of picking battles and honestly not expecting everything I do to be private. I do not benefit in any way from wiretapping.
I draw the line as anything some guy with a fake mustache following me around could observe is fair game. I expect my "letters" to be private, my goings about in public spaces are not.
The article does a good job of bringing up processing power and collation of info, which is a concern. Overall though, I'm more worried about actions taken based on intel than on intel gathering itself. You are always going to be broadcasting some "signal", so let's focus on the active use of such data, rather than the passive gathering.
The problem is one of erosion. Your privacy is slowly eroded while the government's privacy remains strong. There's always a reason to collect more data on people, citing the usual tired arguments (kiddie porn, terrorism, drugs) to further those goals. This is very much a power game, and if you're not willing to fight to maintain your power, you will lose it.
Then comes the problem of how this information is being used against you. Since you're now more of an open book, and the government is opaque-as-usual, you can't know how they're using your information in many cases, or even how it's affecting your life. Sure, you can send FOIA requests, but then you need to know WHAT to ask for, and even that kind of information is a jealously kept secret, and such requests can be vetoed on "security" grounds. You simply cannot know EVERYTHING that they're doing, but they sure as hell want to know everything that YOU'RE doing.
It's like poker, except you have to show all your cards and you're not allowed to see theirs.
Exactly. The "public surveillance cameras" in the UK mentioned in the article (although the number is probably a slight exaggeration) have now been turned against us further. So instead of being used to protect the public, they are now being used to raise money for the government by issuing tickets for traffic violations such as illegally parking. I such a ticket for stopping in a bus pick up area for less than 30 seconds whilst a passenger got out. It may all start off with good intention but it's exactly how their long term agenda is snuck in.
I would contest that even in a public space you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy to accept anything less is to concede defeat the in entire argument. For example if I trip over my shoelaces while walking along a street then my feelings of embarrassment are confined to the passers-by that witnessed the event. If someone happens to video the event and posts it on YouTube to everyones amusement then I would say that was a gross violation of my privacy.
hmmm, so nobody should be allowed to record video in public? I mean, what if I'm recording my friend's party in the park and you trip in the background. Am I allowed to upload the video? Do I have to edit you out first? What if I upload the video figuring you're anonymous in it, but then a friend of a friend recognizes you and edits out just the highlights? This argument can be carried to extremes; I just prefer to draw the line at public spaces are public, which even if it's not the best demarcation, is at least fairly black and white.
Regardless of that, I was talking about monitoring, not broadcasting. If the police cameras record what happens on every street corner and the video is archived for potential review, I think that's quite different than live streaming to the internet. Almost all of these arguments hinge on the police watching something, and then doing something unpleasant. Maybe the doing is inevitable, but I don't think that's a foregone conclusion, so therefore I also don't think such what if scenarios are slam dunk indictments of monitoring itself.
A "reasonable expectation" can only ever be a standard for conduct rather than a law. The important part of this perspective is that members of the general public are allowed to conduct their affairs without monitoring or intrusion by default, a baseline if you like. From there it become much easier to determine whether people in positions of authority have a credible need for surveillance. In the free-for-all, unless explicitly banned, world that we have today this is impossible to control.
It seems to me that this point of view is becoming less and less common - now that most people have cameras in their pocket, we're starting to lose the intellectual distinction between "seeing" and "recording", and without that it's hard to have any nuance about what you are and aren't allowed to do with video you captured in public.
Eventually, there will be new social norms about it, but for now, you must expect that "in public" means "potentially seen by any person on Earth"
Even that person could have a backstory that causes people to give him good will where something hidden could affect him from getting a place to sleep, smiles/encouragement from strangers, etc (ie could be a war vet who unknowingly did something that should have caused him to be dishonorably discharged.)
The second point did arise in the article (sort of):
"They [privacy problems] affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives."
Point 1 is brought up all the time, and it's not the viewer who has the final say, it's a (theoretically objective) court.
As a practical matter, getting to court and fighting a case is often so expensive that the viewer's determination may be effectively final. However, your comment assumes the worst and then works backward in search of a logical antecedent.
If someone knows something about you, he gains power over you.
This is the most fundamental reason I have seen yet, reflected (often unconsciously) in our daily lives: We have curtains, we talk in private, we have secrets we only tell to those we trust, have company confidentials, discretion, spokesmen, and don't negotiate our salaries in public.
Why? Because we instinctively try to minimize those who might take advantage over us.
Knowledge can be exploited in so many ways that it is very hard to tell if a certain piece of information is harmless or not. If you're at the mercy of someone else, depending on him not to exploit his knowledge over you, you lose freedom.
Most people at least feel this and therefore - in their social interactions - act accordingly.
Interestingly, as soon at no human face is involved, my observation is that these instincts break down. I believe that's the core issue today, where most information isn't collected by some creepy stalker, but by web services, governments and card readers. They seem so detached from a real (potentially threatening) person, that our deeply engrained secrecy patterns fail us.
This is an excellent point, but there is yet another subtler and more benign point of view.
Private information is valuable social currency which we use to measure and define the distance between ourselves and others. There are things that are only told to the significant other for instance. By knowing them she/he not only has more power on me but also rightly feels closer to me than anyone else.
When someone finds out such information about me - harmless or not - without my consent he/she positions him/herself too close to me and I feel justly violated. The same way someone may try to diminsh the distance by disclosing facts that are not told to a stranger, expecting me to reciprocate. But at least then I have the option to decline.
I think this is the core issue: wanting privacy is basically wanting to retain control of how close I let other people come, and controlling the amount of facts they know about me is the tool to define that distance. Stealing this valuable social currency does not differ that much from stealing any other type of currency.
> If someone knows something about you, he gains power over you.
I couldn't agree more. When I graduated from high school, coming from a small town, I wanted to get a college degree. Unfortunately, I had a low self-esteem and many friends and relatives that would belittle me or my goal. I don't know if they were jealous or I was such an underachiever in high school that it was hard for them to believe I could reach my goal. This really undermined my confidence and my ability to study, leading me to drop out more than once. Finally, I stopped hanging around that town, did not tell anyone about my plans except a few people, and cut off the relationships that put me down the most. Then I went back to college and it was a breeze. I'm not totally cynical, but I believe there are a lot of people out there that will use personal information to hurt you, and it's best to minimize what you tell others until you know who you can trust.
Surface conformity is one of the best skills you can cultivate. People like few things more than believing, "this person is just like me in all the important ways."the larger the group is, the more important it becomes.
* In the 1930s being Japanese in the USA was perfectly legal. After 1942 it was not.
* Prior to 1947, Americans had freedom of association. Starting in 1947, numerous people were denied employment, and some were jailed ("Hollywood Ten") because of their association. This was a campaign of both government and corporate intimidation.
* Over the past decade or so, numerous people have been denied a certain amount of freedom of movement without any sort of due process because their names generated a match on the TSC's No Fly List.
Those are three very easy examples taken just from the USA. You could generate a much longer list with a bit more effort and expanding to other countries.
This speaks exactly to the general point I wanted to make: why should I put so much trust in the government? I'm not anti-gov by any means, but government is a large group of people, and among any large group, there are going to be some untrustworthy people, some liars, some stupid people, some irresponsible people, some committing crimes, some covering up crimes (which is just another crime)... And certainly, in government, there are going to be some people who have agendas, and some people who have only their interest or their small group's interests in mind.
So turning over everything to this large group, with all its power is... risky to say the least.
The number one reason for the government to create a comprehensive register of something is enable later legislation to ban it. We've seen this several times in Canada with firearms - first a law requiring registration of a certain class of firearms, and then once the government knows where they all are, a new piece of legislation requiring them to be surrendered.
The more information the government has, the more it enables future oppressive action.
Let's try to keep the gun control debate separate from the privacy debate. Despite the shared aspect of the individual, these are entirely separate issues. I can't extremely easily kill someone with my private information. Private information is not a direct tool for committing violent crime, or for that matter, hunting game.
You seem to have misunderstood my point. I'm not commenting on whether or not it is appropriate to ban guns. I'm merely using information /about/ guns (not the actual possession or use thereof) as an example. I think it's a salient point no matter how you feel about the ownership of firearms.
Registering a person's lawful property or activities (whatever they may be) is a great way to target them in the future. If the government decided to outlaw, say, baking soda, it would be prohibitively difficult to enforce because there is no existing mechanism for tracking the sale, ownership and transfer of baking soda. Persons owning baking soda could easily bury it in their backyard and claim they never had it. Not so if the gov't has an inventory of all of your property (or access to your credit card statements, for example).
So my point is in line with the OP: simply because an activity is lawful doesn't me we should accept unlimited government surveillance of it.
Not to mention that some countries have radically different gun laws from the USA, and some people who support privacy don't want to be seen like those crazies over there who think everyone needs more guns.
When I use this example to illustrate how an information that was once "clean" can become "dirty", they don't seem to understand. They act like that "incident" is soo far away, some sort of horror story(!) that has nothing to do with today. Everything will stay like it is now.
I guess the idea of something like 1933 happening again is so frightening or detached that they just dismiss it.
EDIT: I should add that people who actually lived in the time of Nazi-Germany might have a very different reaction to jgrahamc's argument. I made my observation above mainly with young people.
I would also extend my distrust to corporations. While I don't have a ready-to-mind example, I am sure that, humans being human, gross abuses of power by corporations based on certain datapoints being available exist. I am pretty sure the LGBT community has a slew of great examples there, as well as other outsider communities.
Since you mention LGBT issues I can give one example from my country. In Ireland being gay is legal and generally well accepted. LGBT groups exist on every campus, we have openly gay politicians and (limited) civil partnerships. However one of the reasons some people keep their sexual orientation private is to avoid employment problems if they work in education. Under the scope of "ethos" religious schools can deny employment to whomever they see fit as they have a opt-out in equality laws[1]. Obvious examples would be discrimination against non-Catholics, divorced and LGBT people. Unfortunately the Catholic Church controls 93%+ of primary level schools and the vast majority of second level schools. Although this law is being openly debated, challenged legally and expected to change soon, it still leaves people living in fear. I personally know one person in this unfortunate position.
So there wasn't widespread persecution of Jews and horrible crimes against them as a people before there was a government database? As horrible as the events were, and they were truly despicable, the logic is flawed. The conclusion is eradicate government census work and we'll eradicate racial persecution.
The conclusion is that government statistical work should be limited to exclude data that is sensitive. For example, French law prevents the collection and processing of sensitive information on individuals where sensitive is defined as "the person’s racial or ethnic origins,
political, philosophical or religious views, and trade-union membership, health and sexual life"
I am surprised that this subject is so hard to grasp. The core of this issue is not about privacy. The core issue is about giving a small group too much power.
Giving one organization too much power in a society is bad for long term health of that society. If you want your children to grow up in a healthy society it's on your shoulders to fight laws that give organizations too much power.
By giving the government unlimited access to our privacy it gives the government great amounts of power.
Historically when an organization (such as a governments, FBI (J. Edgar Hoover), Churches, etc) have been given large amounts of power it has quickly lead to a spiral of corruption and destruction of morality and societal values.
If some one tells you:
"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
Tell them:
"I want you to sign over all of your assets to
a government official of my choice. If you
trust the government, you've got nothing to fear."
The "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." statement is analogous to a lover, locking a bomb to your neck and telling you "If you don't plan on hurting me, then you have nothing to fear". The desire for this kind of power over some one is clinically insane. The desire to have this kind of power over our citizens by politicians is just as clinically insane. It will destroy our society.
I think the simplest argument against people who propose "nothing to hide" is to say, "I have nothing to hide, I just don't trust those morons to keep my data safe and secure."
I used to work in the education sector, and we had access to "anonymised" data. I was able to determine my own National Insurance number using only my address as I'd done an HND a few years before. Basically, anonymising meant removing the first and last name fields only! This was working for a private sector firm that was given the data by the government. I was also on only £10k/year and so presumably a vulnerable target for corruption. And this wasn't even one of the more "secure" datasets we had access to.
How many others are there like me out there with access to your data?
I don't like to pick apart articles on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but I have to take issue with this bit:
>In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television.
"The government"? Very tricksy linguistic sleight of hand makes us sound like an police-state-controlled surveillance society with no privacy and a tyrannical government.
What rot. By far the vast majority of CCTV in the country is owned and operated by private companies on their own private property. This is a huge difference.
>In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
Come on now. That's almost cartoonish levels of sloppy writing. No such slogan has ever been used by either our government, or, as far as I know, any organisation concerned with security.
It's not an either-or. The UK has many private surveillance cameras. The UK also has many governmental entities at all levels that have undertaken specific programs to install large numbers of publicly-owned surveillance cameras. If I type "UK to install" in Google, the four autocomplete suggestions provided are all about surveillance cameras. To a first approximation, the UK isn't known for installing roads, or daycares, or traffic lights, or dictators, or shelters for the homeless, but only for surveillance cameras. Congratulations.
The UK just passed a law appointing a Surveillance Camera Commissioner to oversee all the uses of such cameras nationwide. I am not aware that any other countries have found such an appointment necessary.
It's even worse than that. Camden Council (in northern London) where I live has "CCTV vehicles", which drive the streets recording what goes on around them (imagine a Google maps car). A more creepily fascist thing I've not yet seen.
I just did the same thing on Google and got different results, probably because Google adjusts results and auto-completion based on previous search history. Using Chrome and incognito mode, "uk to install" without quotes got me suggestions for the UK installing wind and solar power. With quotes, I got two suggestions for installing programs (iTunes and Skype) and two about installing cameras in private homes.
The latter seem to be referencing a tabloid scare from two or three years ago about supervised housing for families of repeat offenders (which wouldn't necessarily have involved cameras, according to the top result). There are also some results about the legality of installing cameras in private homes in the UK, which makes sense as a search.
Anyway, you would never really talk about "installing" roads, daycares, or homeless shelters. Traffic lights and dictators, maybe, but Google's auto-suggest is not an objective measure of anything.
Yeah, that's the one that seems to be a tabloid scare. All the stories are from a few days in August '09 and all cite a single Daily/Sunday Express article (apart from the Wired one, which has some later corrections). And the Daily Express... isn't the most reliable of news sources. They've got a reputation for scare stories and, weirdly, conspiracy theories about Princess Diana. Russell Howard sums them up quite well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq5_joo5l5I.
The research involved police community support officers
counting every camera in Cheshire and extrapolating the
results nationwide to provide a reliable estimate of the
level of CCTV surveillance in the UK.
Officers counted 12,333 cameras in the area, according to
a study published in CCTV Image magazine, the majority of
which were inside premises, rather than facing public
street.
The research also found that most CCTV cameras in the UK
are likely to be privately owned, with only 504 of
Cheshire’s cameras run by public bodies.
In a county of about a million people, only 500+ of the 12,000+ cameras were owned by a government body.
Of course, one would think that it wouldn't be very difficult for the authorities to obtain footage from privately-owned cameras.
It might be important to note that government owned cameras are by definition pointing to public property (where everybody passes), whereas private cameras should be targeted at some private property (enforced by law, at least in some countries).
If this distinction remains true in practice, it would at least seem that privately owned cameras are "morally" a bit more in their right. (You submit to the house rules when visiting vs being filmed when doing something that is nobody's business, like just passing by)
Regarding the "processing" argument in the original article. It seems to me that government owned cameras are a bigger concern, if we assume that they can provide a general combined view (while privately owned cameras provide a lot of isolated views).
The fact that the majority of camera is privately owned is not relevant. The question remains: "Is 500 cameras too many, too little or just about right, for a county of 1 million?". I have no idea, but I don't see why the ratio public/private is important.
The article cited never asked "Is 12,000 ...". They say "Look cameras are not that bad since most are on premise and are privately owned and operated." I find that this comparison is dishonest and is not relevant.
edit: changed "you cite" to "cited", The response is not to the OP.
> "Of course, one would think that it wouldn't be very difficult for the authorities to obtain footage from privately-owned cameras."
As an individual I've easily been able to obtain stills from privately operated security cameras, once when I left something in a taxi, and needed to track down the operator (got that within minutes), and another in relation to a no-fault car accident (feckin' motor-cycle courier!), in both cases just by tracking down the owner of a public facing camera and asking nicely. On that basis, I doubt the police would have any more difficulty doing the same, but there is still a significant difference between this and the "police state" image this article portrays.
It's also "economical with the actualité" to put it in parliamentary langauge
A number plate recognition camera logging everyone entering London is owned and operated by the contractor providing the billing for the congestion charge - so it's not a government camera. But you don't think the government could have access to the data?
It's like saying there is no government cell phone monitoring - the monitoring is all done by commercial cell phone companies.
Last time I was in London I did see a bunch of signs trying to convince me the eyes in the sky where such great things that enhanced my safety and should make me feel comfortable...there definitely is propaganda out there supporting them...
Personally, I don't really think of CCTV cameras as a privacy issue at all. If you're in a city street you should expect that nothing you do is actually private. Its always been perfectly legal for a cop to stand in the street and notice who enters or leaves a particular building, and in a small town they'd be able to figure out just as much about you from that as a CCTV system with face recognition could in a big city.
The important this is that people be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects", not whether the police can see you walking down the road.
Technology makes a difference here. For example, it is not illegal to follow someone on a public street. But attaching a GPS device to their car is going over the line, even though the concept is the same. The difference is the lack of physical limitations. You no longer have to follow one car for a short time from another, you can follow hundreds of cars for long periods from your living room.
Similarly, if someone is speaking out loud in public, you can listen, but wiretapping is still wrong.
And just because someone can view your actions in public doesn't make it okay to monitor and log every person on every square foot of public space continuously.
It might not be possible to make such a distinction in the near future. In a world where quadrocopters are cheap, and everyone is wearing Google Glass with a camera right in front of their faces - the assumption should be that you're being recorded. We'll need to figure out what the social rules are, but I'm pretty sure "don't record strangers" isn't going to be one of them.
This is part of the same argument that allowed the FBI to start whacking GPS trackers on people's cars willy nilly.
The difference is that the real person costs a lot which mean its guaranteed to be small-scale and overseen and they couldn't keep it up indefinitely nor go back over their old recordings.
A cctv camera represents a completely different threat and has long-term implications compared to a plain clothes policeman.
Personally, my fears are not about any current laws, but laws that might be created. I'd much rather for our society to respect privacy in these matters, especially if we have the potential to create laws I'd disagree with.
Also, if people have nothing to hide, let me access their computers for an evening, and also let me send any "proof" of breaking "stupid laws", like watching a dvd on their computer, or accessing a file with unwarranted DMCA takedown notice out for it. There's a lot of potential for innocent people going to jail in a video taped society.
Would they go to jail? Police ignore trivial laws like those against jaywalking all the time. I remember as a kid riding back from a Boy Scout event and with a cop driving and him describing which laws every vehicle we passed were breaking. Not that he'd ever pull them over for those normally - unless he had a hunch that they were carrying drugs or something.
If crimes as minor as decrypting a DVD were actually prosecuted then it wouldn't be a lot of people going to jail. It would be everybody. Including all the cops and judges. Which is never going to happen.
The real danger here is selective enforcement of laws, and the selective enforcement of laws. Well, we have the later already (see "Professional Courtesy") but the former gets much more dangerous to the extent that police officers can control which videos do or do not end up at a courtroom. If a lawyer can show that the police are regularly ignoring an offense in other contexts that can be a defense in the US, but in practice the US justice system does a very bad job of getting exculpatory police collected video evidence into the hands of defense lawyers.
Just getting sent to court can be a punishment too, though. It makes you waste money hiring a lawyer, or waste time going to court yourself. I got sent for being in a park after dusk the other day, something police never seem to enforce around here, but suddenly started doing in one certain area because there was a shooting a while back. So selective enforcement basically let them nail everyone who spent any time in the park after dusk when they decided it suited them. Maybe not with jail, but at least with court time or lawyer fees.
Exactly. Building on jgrahamc's comment - it's the future laws enacted that have cause for concern. At which point will the legal suddenly become illegal and precedence is set?
It's really very simple. I'm not doing anything "wrong," but I cannot guarantee that my definition of "wrong" is the same as the government's.
Recently I've come across an argument that I think helps reveal the problems to those who are not prone to see them: if you have nothing to hide, would you give a copy of your house key to the police to check on your house whenever they want?
Suddenly everything becomes obvious: the cost of inconvenience (what if I'm asleep?), the cost of potential corruption or incompetence (what if they lose the key?), the cost of potential misinterpretation, etc...
Exactly. Translate "doing wrong" to "commiting a crime" and then you end up with a list of hundreds or thousends of criminal laws that you just can't know, each of which is subject to interpretation by individuals with different motivations and attitude towards you, based on potentially incomplete or misleading data etc. etc.
I've always thought the simplest retort to this argument came from Bruce Schneier:
Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
Once i spent a week researching Lotteries on google. Days after, i was getting an almost constant stream of ads for the National Lottery. If anyone were to have used my computer during that time, they might have been puzzled by this and though "Whoah! Is this guy a gambling addict?".
Just imagine if i was researching something slightly more taboo. Someone could easily jump to the wrong conclusions.
I might have nothing to hide, but it certainly isn't right that my information is being used to generate a potentially scandalous false picture of what i might be looking for.
That's why information privacy is so important: those ad networks shouldn't be required to expose your browsing history to anyone (especially the government).
"If your private thoughts were broadcast on a television screen above your head for everyone to see, its fair to say we'd all be more careful what we thought about. We would be forced to practice thought control to give others a good impression. Mental self-discipline is great, but this imaginary scenario illustrates a critical point: the absence of privacy has the ability to influence.
Moreover, the one who usurps privacy is the one who wields that influence. And such control at the cost of privacy is the opposite of freedom. Democracy and freedom are upheld by the individual's right to form thought and opinion and to communicate within the haven of privacy."
If yours were, perhaps. But if everyone's thoughts were constantly being broadcast, we'd learn to accept that sometimes people think strange thoughts, and that it's silly to care so much about it.
That's another way of phrasing the "if you have nothing to hide" argument. A simpler example of the link between privacy and democracy is that voting is private. There's a reason for that.
Although using this argument promotes the idea that privacy equals secrecy. Privacy is a lot more than secrecy. You expect in day to day life to be ignored by most people, and certainly are not expecting that your every move is recorded. If you were, and knew about it, your behavior would be affected. That's another dimension of privacy that's not usually discussed, there are more.
The problem is not "strange thoughts" but hurtful thoughts, even about your loved ones. Everyone has them once in a while, but they never would say them aloud.
Central and Eastern European Jews first had their privacy violated before their jobs taken, moved to ghettos then to concentration camps. Imagine having a German last name but a Jewish grandmother, privacy matters. Or imagine if Germany did not have a handgun registry-- then its harder to confiscate guns from Jews, which makes its much more dangerous to herd them into camps.
Privacy loss ends in dead bodies-- but only after its too late to regain.
None of his retorts really do much for me. I'm fine with people seeing me naked, seeing my credit bills, querying about relationships, etc.. I do have curtains, but it is just so the neighbors don't get pissed their kids see me walking around naked when it's hot.
There is one thing that convinces me, though. I see lots of companies with data just completely misinterpreting it and screwing people over all the time. For instance, I can open a bunch of tabs in Google Groups from Google Reader with the intent to read them later, and get banned by Google Groups because Google decided in their all knowing wisdom that anyone opening tabs that quick must by a bot who has to be banned. Similarly you see AdSense and PayPal accounts banned all the time when the person is actually innocent.
These draconian policies may be good for the company (since it makes sure the actual fraudsters are banned too) and bad for the innocents caught in the way, but as an innocent who can be caught in the way, it makes sense to give them as little data to make up imagined offenses with as possible. Having Google ban innocents all the time is one thing, but we can't really let the government get away with that. That's what the whole innocent until proven guilty business is about and the show me the corpse/evidence and trial by jury things came about because of.
The problem I have with the "nothing to hide" argument is that it is aimed at secrecy and hence invalid. The issue is never about secrecy, it's about privacy, and that's a huge huge difference.
"I dont need privacy because I have nothing to hide" doesn't make much sense.
I have long looked for a more crystal clear way of formulating the importance of privacy and why it's different from having something to hide.
That was a torturous, long winded, poorly written article. The author identified early that the retort "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" was a powerful one. He then reinforced the power of that retort by struggling to rebuke it in this article.
Forgive me for kicking the hornet's nest, but is all this outrage about privacy or about the abuse of government power?
The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading an email about a friend passing away.
Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private? What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at work be completely private?
The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?
What I find most interesting is that few people question why privacy is so important? Children have no sense of it - they have to be socialized to begin to value it. Many smaller societies have no sense of it. Yet a small child and someone from these societies understands immediately if you restrict their ability to move (and thus "freedom") I'm not sure privacy isn't just an extension of shamed based cultural values vs a universal human right like freedom of movement and thought.
I think such naturalistic arguments don't hold up. Children have no sense of many things - they don't see dangers in stepping onto a street without looking, and they don't see dangers in giving up their privacy. If they don't value it, should we not protect their privacy?
Children and some small societies often don't have a strong sense of property rights either - yet would you argue from that that a more complex society still doesn't require property rights?
A somewhat related video that often gets posted, but is worth posting again: Why you should never talk to the police (even if you have nothing to hide!):
It includes some stories that illustrate why information about you, even when you have done nothing wrong, can be used against you by authorities, even purely by mistake not accounting to any corruption/bias/pressure-to-catch/punish-somebody, etc.
Why are there trade secrets? Why is there classified information? Why is there encryption? Why are there door locks and window blinds and fences? What was the big deal about Wikileaks if you have nothing to hide?
If the US government or some MegaCorp wants to dump all of their correspondence and data, decrypted, onto the internet for my perusal, and unlock all the doors, safes, fences and windows on their buildings, then I might consider opening up my personal life to them as well.
It bothers me when people equate the right of privacy (i.e. the right to be let alone) with a perceived right of seclusion (i.e. a perceived right to not be seen/heard/disturbed by others). The disconcerting reality is that privacy is far more encompassing.
Privacy isn't just about freedom from unwanted attention. It's about your right to remain free of unwanted intrusions in your life. Privacy law protects a woman's choice to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, a homosexual male's choice to privately engage in sodomy with the consent of another, and a heterosexual couple's choice concerning the use of contraception for non-procreative sex. Privacy also protects your right to refuse medical attention for yourself and, in some jurisdictions, on behalf of your minor children. It additionally applies to a family's choices in rearing their children: the right to privacy protects a family's choice of religion, meals to eat, whether to participate in religion, etc.
When people claim that they don't mind putatively invidious legislation because they have "nothing to hide," they are doing an enormous disservice to privacy law. They might as well say: "We don't mind the government acting as our (family's) autopilot."
'Nothing to Hide' - many peoples think this way, but for friends i was always trying to explain why privacy is important, why should you use anti virus and firewall, and do not leak data to Internet my main arguments:
1. You're computer might be in use for spam or hacking banks and governments sites.
2. Data leak - credit cards, accounts, and main - personal information.
3. In Ukraine we have joke - Facebook.com - let your wife meet your lovers.
4. From your info it is possible to find info on your friends.
And this is for people who have nothing to hide.
Questions of privacy in Internet is a big problem.
But privacy should be privacy, not anonymity.
As for cameras on streets... In future we will have no chance to hide. Nothing.
The "nothing to hide" argument seems to work just like the "God moves in mysterious ways" argument. It's sort of an end-of-the-road conversation-stopper. It's hard to reply to it, therefore the party who said it gets to feel like they're right.
I’m honest, and not a huge fan of clothing, so I ostensibly do have nothing to hide. But there is a difference between being an open book and letting anyone read you at any time for any reason. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear—if and only if no one will abuse your information. Not to mention people just like privacy, and it’s a basic right.
If someone were to walk in on me having sex, I might be a bit embarrassed, but not unduly bothered. If a voyeur were to surreptitiously watch me, that’d be a breach of privacy. It’s about who’s consuming the information, not who’s producing it.
It seems like whenever people say this they are only considering wiretapping or similar invasions that don't cause them any personal inconvenience. They're not thinking about the TSA, personal searches, searches of their property, confiscation of their property for further investigation, etc.
My response is something like "so you'd be fine with a random mandatory search of your house twice a year, that takes 12 hours, during which all your electronic devices will be confiscated for two weeks of processing?" They'll say "no, that doesn't happen." But it will with their attitude.
It depends heavily on the type of information, and how secret it is.
I'd be thrilled to have access to a complete real time data of every financial transaction.
Imagine looking at any object around you, and being able to tell how much each component cost, the source of the component, and the company info that transformed the parts into an object, recursively all the way down to dust.
That would be amazing. Even more, that would be enough for me want to make my financial info public to the world, rather than just credit card companies, and everyone that buys that data from them.
Plus, how can we ever relent our right to privacy from a government that is content with its own mountains of hidden information. If we are to be wire tapped, photographed and body scanned, then filming of government agents, like the TSA, should be something the government is not only in favor of, but is excited about.
The nothing to hide argument doesn't stand unless every person in the country is constantly surveilled and all information collected is fully accessible to everyone.
To me it's seems the real problem we're having with privacy today is there's nothing protecting our privacy beyond a thin layer of legislation. The best real solution I've come across is providing individuals with apps and services that generate fake data about you, masking your real behavior. For example your photo gets tagged at some bar. In response you have a tool able to tag you in 30 other photos supposedly taken at the same time but in different settings.
This is the worst argument I've ever seen in response to the "nothing to hide" statement, because it's simply the retort, "Yes, you do."
Can someone give me an argument against "nothing to hide" that doesn't boil down to "yes, you do!"? Honestly, I live somewhere squarely in the middle of the "nothing to hide" camp, and would really like to not be, if at all possible. I just can't justify changing my position on this if I don't know of a valid argument, however.
And how is this mass surveilance in US/UK/other "free and democratic" countries different from what was happening in USSR way back? Western propoganda was all over it, but I suspect that it was just a way to hide the real threat (own government). Since USSR ceased to exist few attempts have been made to invent a new threat, but that worked only partially...
The reality is, try as we might, there is no way to regain full privacy. Ever.
I had a friend that had no problems with giving up privacy in regards to his personal communications over the internet, but he would go totally bananas when a hospital asked to hold his ID so he would stick around to give an outpatient their ride home. People are very irrational regarding these matters.
I'm almost as scared about privacy breaches in the private sector. I read a while back about Target sending out ads for pregnancy related products to a teenage girl. Their data crunching algorithms had picked up on the fact that she was pregnant before she even told her parents.
Any state with national security already understands that we all have something to hide and we do it because it is in our own best interests. The state, after all, does not act in our best interests, but its own. Or to be more precise, the people that run it!
There's a huge difference between privacy and secrecy. Any debate about this topic that does not immediately make that distinction is futile. I don't keep secrets from my wife, but I still close the door when I use the washroom.
An analogy I always like to use is: would you object to a team visiting your home, searching through all your physical and electronic belongings and then replacing everything exactly as they found it?
Has a download link in it to the 28-page essay. Compared to this really turgid article by the same author, the essay is really engrossing. Incidentally, I just finished reading it a few days ago on a privacy paper binge, and I also recommend
which is an even better paper, although it clocks in at 77 pages. Also free.
Some fun findings:
1. The combination of ZIP code, birth date (including year), and sex is unique to 87 per cent of Americans. Cross-reference this with voter data, and you're busted.
2. The information of how and when you rated any three movies on Netflix can identify more than 80 per cent of its users (68% for two movies). Cross-reference this with IMDb database, and you're busted.
It's scary as hell to learn that privacy is an even harder problem to solve, as someone who cares deeply about it. The key take-away from the latter paper is that privacy and utility are mutually exclusive - you can't "anonymize" data. The second is that we have to rethink our concept of personal identifiable information, because everything can be used to whittle down the candidates to a unique person with the right information.
We are so far from implementing useful privacy measures legally and practically that it's ridiculous. We are being embarrassingly myopic by only turning our attention to social networks, when there are privacy vulnerabilities everywhere.
Unless it's biometric data that we can relate to our own body - retina, fingerprint, facial features, DNA, etc. - , there is some psychological mechanism that makes us less averse and sensitive to the collection of data about us. Compare how you feel about the police storing DNA and fingerprints of acquitted suspects to how the NSA is trying to basically data-mine the entire communication infrastructure. That is, when careless companies or witless users don't just hand the information to them directly.
For people who care as much as privacy, as people in technology circles do, we have a really bad habit of focusing our attention narrowly at mainly what Silicon Valley does. But consider the value of something as simple as your zip code, birth date, and sex, and how many sites you might hand out that information to - the last information of which can usually be inferred by the service or commodity you buy, or your name.
The 'nothing to hide' arguments almost always seem to focus on the individual, but the full power of mass surveillance is not really about the control of specific individuals, but rather about control of the group. Just as in the measurement of temperature, where the motion of individual atoms is unimportant compared to the average, so the information gathered about single people is unimportant compared to the ability to accurately measure the group. If you want to hunt down single actors you do not need cameras everywhere, you just need to infiltrate their social circle. But to influence entire societies and to learn how to steer them is something that requires a ton of hard data on as wide a range of people as possible. Kafka's The Trial might be the perceived effect on the individual, but Asimov's Foundation series would seem the ultimate political aim of these kind of policies.
1. The "if you have nothing to hide..." line is predicated on the viewer having final say about whether something is right/wrong, thus subordinating the subject to the viewer. This is repulsive to the notion of liberty as protected by the American "4th Amendment" right of freedom from governmental inspection without an adjudicated warrant. To wit: it's not that I have something to hide, it's that someone else is going to be obnoxious if they see it.
On a related but semantically distinct note...
2. Those pushing "if you have nothing to hide..." have suspect & ulterior motives. Their existence (income, job, power, prestige) depend on finding something "wrong". They are, by job description, hostile to me. If they derived nothing from inspecting others, they would not care whether anything was hidden or not. Remember: they seek the power to punish, not just what they find wrong, but what they cannot inspect. Your exposure nets you little, but gains them so much they want to reprimand you for any concealment.