I've always liked using the social good argument from the same author's previous work[1].
"I don't mind giving up some privacy for safety. I've got nothing to hide."
"Well privacy isn't something you can just give up. It's a right given to society by our framers, not individuals. A smoothly functioning democracy depends on dissent, which requires privacy to allow alternate points of view to gain traction. So privacy is a social good, not a personal right, and if we reduce privacy, we are reducing our democracy. The Soviets didn't have privacy. Free countries must."
Dissent is much more effect when it's done out in the open. Right now anyone can stand on a street corner and state whatever views they hold, start a website, hand out flyers or express any idea using any number of methods. That's the key to democracy, not whispers from secret sources who refuse to name themselves. We reduce democracy when we force dissenters to use privacy as a shield instead of allowing them to use the first amendment as a weapon.
It doesn't matter what the soviets or any other country did. Democracy is and has always been about the right to open expression. If we lose our right to publicly discuss unpopular ideas then privacy is the least of our concerns. Private communication matters in a state that is already telling people what to say and what not to say. We should all be willing to make great sacrifices to make sure that never happens where we live, not planning for what happens when it does.
Common Sense, the pamphlet that inspired many to fight in the early years of the American Revolution, was published anonymously. Don't discount the power of anonymous dissent; the US owes its existence to it.
I don't think the matter at hand here is using privacy as a shield, but rather having the ability to voice dissenting opinions because of privacy. Privacy is a means of preventing oppression/coercion against those holding dissenting views. It ensures that those in power do not have the ability to suppress dissenting views, rather than forcing dissenters to use it as a shield. We still have the first amendment, but privacy helps protect it and mitigates the social pressures related to the first amendment.
There's a difference between privacy and anonymity. Privacy keeps people from seeing the stuff that you don't want others to see. It has little to do with freedom of speech. Anonymity is putting stuff out in the public without them knowing who said it. Yes, it's freedom of speech, but it's also freedom from accountability.
In a fully functioning democracy, you should be free to say whatever you want openly without being threatened. If you can't make an argument openly, I would immediately question why: is it because society is unjust, or because you can't stand behind the argument?
I would argue that you would still need privacy, in so far as to allow an amount of time in which you could form your dissenting thoughts in private, write them down, iterate them before you go to the street corner and announce them to the world.
If everything was in the public space or monitored then people with dissenting ideas may not have the will or motivation to iterate on them as is necessary to create a well reasoned thesis, and hence they would fall flat or be cast out as just another nut job.
Oh, no - I'm not trying to downplay the need for privacy. I'm saying that privacy and anonymity are two separate things and people too often mistake one for the other. Privacy is everyone's right, but it has nothing to do with dissent. Blasting your opinions out into public while shielding yourself with a pseudonym isn't privacy.
I consider that anonymity and pseudonymity are aspects of privacy. What's private there are the associations between activity and identity. We need "privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful" (see Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Julian Assange et alia).
I can speak from experience that the surveillance revealed by Snowden is already impacting the severity and tone of my political discussions with friends and colleagues. We are (mostly) pretty keenly aware of the fact that our conversations are going into a database somewhere, and will likely be processed by some algorithm later.
In my experience, it was almost the opposite. The Snowden revelations illustrated how imperfect the NSA's coverage actually was compared to our prior speculation, and that they had some semblance of decency with regards to handling data.
Of course, I have my doubts that said decency holds at higher levels, and I'm sure it greatly depends on how important you are.
So unless you're a legitimate surveillance target such as a terrorist, politician, investigative journalist, or EFF attorney, you likely have nothing to fear.
I figured the sarcasm was self-evident having put terrorist as the first item on the list. In retrospect, perhaps I should have not edited out the /s tag.
You assume that dissent needs privacy to grow. In a free society, I don't see why that is necessary (or even desired.)
The financial crisis was driven in part by "private" takes on "publicly available" investments - cheating that was enabled through strong privacy. This is a societal "bad."
Dissidents need the ability to conduct private conversations to reduce the ability of the government to silence them.
Take the example of the Black Panther Party marching into the California State Capitol with shotguns. Under the laws of the day, it was perfectly legal. There was no intent to break any law. Yet, had the authorities been able to determine that they were planning this, they would have been stopped.
Private communication is essential to the planning of public discourse.
The government silencing protest is the problem there, not a lack of privacy. Dissidents don't have that need if society and government allow free expression.
Dissent is indeed important - and so is the right to compose your thoughts and make non-public comments which are not perfectly formed. Time and again we've all argued with others over something which was a not-well-thought-out comment imperfectly formed & delivered. So long as there is a line delineating "something to hide" and "dissent" and "libel" and etc, we need a right to form & craft our words through imperfect expressions thereof until we form something we can take public with confidence. Sometimes ideas just sound bad at first glance, and require polishing & presentation before the positive value therein can be present and not inspire visceral reprisal.
There's a building right down the street where they preached hatred for people like me not that long ago. I had something to hide (came out a year ago), and it was effectively a felony as recently as 2003.
If the US ever plunges into theocracy, I'm as good as dead. I don't hide it since I live in a relatively liberal and progressive part of a socially conservative region. I'm a little concerned about backlash from a favorable SCOTUS ruling, but it's too late to go back. Maybe the Presbyterian church next door will send someone over to help them adjust.
I wonder if Brenden Eich would go back and hide his Prop 8 contribution. Mozilla (and hence the rest of the technological world) would be better off if either it was hidden or the backlash was less unreasonable.
It's not just governments and corporations that misuse information but even society.
Brendan Eich has the right to support laws which correspond to his political views, even when others find those views morally reprehensible. And he exercised that right, and our society is all the better for it.
However, neither he, nor you (nor I) have the right to insist that the outrage of those who find his political views reprehensible meet some standard of 'reasonableness' just because he runs a tech company. Nobody dragged him out into the street with torches and pitchforks, they just insisted that a company they supported not be run by someone they considered a bigot.
Right or wrong, this wasn't 'misuse' of information, it was just activism.
I don't think it's a fluke of history, theocracies have been increasingly hard to come by in the past 1000 years (especially in the Western world). The US has never been a theocracy.
Religious organisations are not growing in power.
Even if the US were to become a theocracy, that =/= you're as good as dead.
So there are a few reasons why you shouldn't feel threatened. Not saying it can't happen, but as I said it's extremely unlikely. Thankfully(!).
> Even if the US were to become a theocracy, that =/= you're as good as dead.
All it takes is someone like Scott Lively getting a little power. His views are not as rare as you probably think. Like I said, I'm surrounded by people who think I'm an abomination. They're deadly serious about it.
You're either naive or a Christian doing a "no true Scotsman". And don't confuse my comments regarding abuse and misapplication of religion as demonizing people of faith, because that's not what I said.
I was given a helpful bit of honesty from a former Facebook friend. I told him I'd never vote against his freedom of religion. He flat out said he couldn't say the same. I don't know how far he'd go to deny rights to people unlike himself, but it's probably more common a view than people like to admit. We're always one bad year from a new and worse way of life.
Yeah, nice isn't it? For all of my dislike of organized religion I completely support people's right to practice how they see fit, even knowing that their faith thinks I should be killed for not believing in it.
And if zombies rise from the dead to eat our brains, it would suck if they were able to track me via a GPS tag built into my skull, but even that invasive loss of privacy is obviously not the real problem.
Some might take that as hyperbole, but I'm convinced that is indeed the case. I'm sure that if it was legal there's plenty of Good Christians who would be thrilled to hunt Liberal Atheists for sport.
The directed & stereotypical bash of Christians is unwarranted (not the least of which is that the whole point of "Christian" is proselytizing, not killing). Goes in every direction; if you're going to bash like that, try the recent Greenpeace activist calling for beheading "climate change deniers" http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/01/25/greenpeace-activi...
When I was growing up, "Irish Catholic" was synonymous with "terrorist." Only in those days we had more words for terorists: "Libyan hijackers," "IRA members," and so forth.
I challenge your implication that "proselytising" is harmless. "Proselytising" in my experience has been nothing less than psychological torture and sustained verbal abuse.
You can have your religion, but please keep it to yourself. If I am curious, I will ask.
What the fuck? I said "plenty of Good Christians". Maybe I should have quoted the "Good Christians" part.
I have family and friends who are Christian and I have no problem with it. A person's relationship between themselves and God is their business.
Are you prepared to state that there are no Americans who consider themselves "god fearing folk" who would have no trouble with harming those "not like themselves"?
After all, we've never seen any sort of violence against blacks by "Good Christians", have we?
Or violence against gays, when there are plenty of preachers expounding upon how evil and sick they are, and what a threat they are to society? No, of course not. No Good Christian would do that.
And how many people have been beheaded by Greenpeace activists?
Really sorry to have offended you with my blasphemy /s
I'm Christian and I don't think anything pstuart said about "plenty of Good Christians" was either inaccurate or imputed a propensity toward religious violence to Christians generally, merely indicated that the human propensity for such things was not especially lacking in the Christian community, and which could be expected to erupt from some segments of that community were it sanctioned by law.
Which any honest Christian would have to admit is well-grounded factually.
Are you trolling or stupid? I never said all Christians are violent. I said that there are plenty (that's a number that means "enough to matter") that are.
Time to own up: are you a Christian? Is that why you are butthurt and making up lies about my intent?
You didn't say "all", but you did say "plenty" when there aren't any. When implying mass murder, that is indeed a sore point - when there IS another [sub]group which IS, today, beheading Christians and pushing homosexuals off buildings for their views.
Ok. You're a Christian. So you're completely biased which comes through in the way you distort what I say, e.g.
> You didn't say "all", but you did say "plenty" when there aren't any. When implying mass murder[...]
Aren't any? You have no proof and history suggests otherwise. And it wasn't mass murder that I was suggesting, it was targeted attacks.
By your username I'm betting that you're Irish Catholic. You've been conditioned to never question the faith and demonstrate that by attacking everything I've said. We all know the Church has never done anything wrong at all. Ever!
But if it makes you feel better, I think your new Pope is great -- he walks the talk and espouses the "good stuff" about Jesus. His only failing to date has been to condemn blasphemy, which is a horrible mistake.
Lastly, I offer this thought experiment: do you think any of the islamic terrorists we read about consider themselves "Good Muslims"? Can people be devout and do horrible things colored by that way of mind?
I'm not so certain that public lynchings for homosexuality wouldn't occur. On the other hand, there's plenty of people on the other side of the fence who'd see conservatives jailed and beaten (They'd not sully their hands themselves, just require the increasingly large nanny-state to do it) for disagreeing with their concept of 'progress'.
Maybe we just need to open the floodgates and let these factions kill each other off.
People are being pushed off buildings or beheaded precisely because of their beliefs. Today. Oh, sure, it's some war-torn region and done by extremists...but they weren't doing it more than a few months ago, and now the for-that-reason dead are numbering well into 5-6 digits and rising fast. It's real, it's growing, and there's many people who would "hunt you because of your beliefs" if not for the normalcy of rule & law.
Here you completely agree with my original point. But you're only willing to point fingers at the other dominant religion and take umbrage that your own flavor of Abrahamism could ever inspire bad behavior.
Anything you say today, however innocent, is potential "evidence" against you by a later government. "Your Honor, the accursed is on record, and admits, that he regularly voted for the Repugnicratic party. Why, he even admits to giving them money!"
Any personal fact collected and stored, however politically or criminally innocuous, is potentially retrievable by criminals breaching the storage system.
It doesn't matter how pure of heart today's collectors may be; if it's not observed or collected today then it can't be abused tomorrow.
If there isn't anything inherently wrong with collecting, and future abuse is the only thing you are worried about, then you should probably worry about protecting against abuses, not collecting. Especially if you have no other point to be had for privacy, when the opposition claims unobjected that giving it up can and does save lives.
That said, I think the criminal breach argument is a valid one but the one that really nails it is one already mentioned above:
"privacy isn't something you can just give up. It's a right given to society by our framers, not individuals. A smoothly functioning democracy depends on dissent, which requires privacy to allow alternate points of view to gain traction. So privacy is a social good, not a personal right, and if we reduce privacy, we are reducing our democracy. The Soviets didn't have privacy. Free countries must."
Sans the soviet part, in my opinion... Seems useless and even fallaciously counter-productive to mention it, I don't get why it's even there
edit: What I mean by the first paragraph, in case it's not clear, is that most technologies can and probably will be abused, which doesn't go a long way to say that they should be forbidden right at the start, if there is good to be had in them. You just have to be careful not to allow abuses (which by your post I figured you don't think are happening at this moment)
> What I mean by the first paragraph, in case it's not clear, is that most technologies can and probably will be abused, which doesn't go a long way to say that they should be forbidden right at the start, if there is good to be had in them. You just have to be careful not to allow abuses (which by your post I figured you don't think are happening at this moment)
Collecting data isn't a technology, it's a use of a technology. And preventing mass data collection is how you disallow abuse.
The vast majority of the productive use of e.g. location tracking data is possible when you have the data on yourself and nobody has mass data on everyone. The things that are only possible with bulk data collection are almost universally bad.
He donated money to a popular political cause and a few years later, after the political winds have shifted, a leak about this lead to him being forced out of his job.
A lot of people are alright with this because the find Eich's position to be repugnant. Maybe it was but that's not the point.
They need to remember that sometimes, they're not going to agree with the herd and it well could be them on the chopping block.
Ubiquitous surveillance will make future McCarthy-style witch hunts possible and arguably it even makes them likely.
Well, the hardest pulling argument I have for privacy is the following:
1. The government claims it must violate everyone's privacy in order to look for a few individuals, planning terrorist act X.
2. Though I wasn't involved in X before, I now go out of my way to avoid appearing sympathetic to X or involved in Y, which, while different from X, is adjacent to X, and therefore suspect in the eyes of the government who are hunting X. By a broad and ridiculous interpretation of X, X and Y come to be equal in the eyes of the government.
3. Discussions of or relating to X and Y are squelched sans privacy for fear of backlash; Z is next on the chopping block because it is adjacent to Y. At the start of this chain of events, discussion of Z was probably not quite mainstream, but it was certainly not equated to X, which was never acceptable by anyone. Thus, the slide from X to Z is complete, and the fallout from whatever is after Z can begin.
Dissent is treated like treason in the USA.
Anyone with an opinion that differs from the government has their speech targeted by reductions in privacy, and their speech will likely be chilled the more the government pushes the dissent-as-terrorism angle that they've shown to be keen for. They've already pulled "journalism", "privacy", "aiding or abetting by making youtube videos", "protesting", "whistleblowing" and "terrorism" into the same perverted continuum.
This article misses a huge thing everyone does have to hide, and that is the private information they have about their own family and friends.
My Facebook, my contacts list, my emails, my messages, my call history... all of these have private information about friends and family, and this private information should not be shared with others without the full consent of everyone involved.
I never viewed the internet as private. I hid my tracks not because I'd done anything wrong but because there are 'crazies out there', I have plenty to hide and why take a chance? Then 'wow' forums - I could say controversial things, play devil's advocate, really push the discussion farther than IRL with little fear of reprisal or even rebuke. Which was great for me because I'm the guy who parks the other way round in the car lot. I have always been a natural dissenter. Then my friends joined facebook - early days before it was humungous. It raided their contacts and my little cell was exposed. I had not used a separate email address for each person I had ever met. Silly me. Then Zuck said 'privacy is dead' and I remembered that even before that in college he had said 'I can't believe these idiots are trusting me with all this information' - or something like that I can't really recall - and I knew he was right. I wish it weren't so. We speak more guardedly now. Still get downvoted.
I think you're right, the author doesn't cover those collaterally affected by secret information. However, this is outside of the author's main point.
The author is focusing on the principle privacy is not just about secret keeping things secret. Your example of people who may collaterally affected falls under this category. It's just an example of using the word private to equate secret.
... and you've shared that information with Facebook, your e-mail provider and your phone provider. The question shouldn't be whether or not you have information to hide (everyone does), but what information are you hiding from who and why?
Whenever I think of this topic I think of a simple comedy skit done as a commercial.
EX: We at the all seeing eye believe in transparency.
From our naked policy (Queue lots of fat and somewhat blurry people), our computers (no cases) or our bathrooms (no stalls), we have no problems with you watching us watch you. (All Seeing Eye logo.)
PS: I can easily see a long list of really creapy skits in this vein.
EX2: At work (Moving all seeing eye coffie mugs) at play (kids tossing an all seeing eye ball) in sickness (All seeing stethoscope) and in health (pool lined with all seeing eyes) we are watching you (queue logo).
Privacy matters at this moment in time for few reasons. There is little risk to an individual's rights due to profiling based on available information (which is the result of no or limited privacy). That doesn't mean there is no risk, but for most of us the risk is negligible.
However, in the not-so-distant future it will be a much bigger deal. As data about our personal lives becomes more accessible and prolific, especially with the growth of IoT devices, and we get better at those big data profiling techniques we will see wider uses of profiling beyond nation security and marketing purposes. It is not hard to imagine a future where universities profile potential students based on available data and eliminate those deemed unfit (without ever looking at an application). Or employers doing similar things. Or insurance companies basing rates on profiling information.
Reasonable scenarios become easy to imagine with the end result that discrimination becomes commonplace. Discrimination for those that listen to a certain type of music, or use a certain type of grammar, or view certain websites. That is a dangerous future and we are heading down that path. We, as a society, need to figure out how to address this before it is a problem, and paramount to successfully thwarting that type of future is to ensure we maintain our privacy. That is why privacy matters.
Here's a potentially new argument to bring to the table, in addition to the usual: putting aside criminal or embarrassing issues, saying that you have nothing to hide is saying that your data is worth nothing.
Someone might find connections about you that you didn't know, like the fact that you are more willing to pay higher prices for the same product when you and your partner are trying to have a baby (just saying hypothetically). I don't think that information should be free. At the very least, I'd want to charge.
Someone might find out information about your children in indirect but legitimate ways. Perhaps your son is more likely to nag you to buy some product based on some controllable factor. I'd at least sell that kind of information for no less than $500. That's an iPad.
Nice article! One of the authors points was that people are not effected in their daily life through privacy problems (or at least that's what I read between the lines during that "dead bodies" metaphor).
So here's my idea: I'll place a warning in my email signature, that people should take care what they write to me because my email account is spied on and everything is recorded.
There are two points in this; first, it is quite accurate to reality, my (and everyone else's) email IS scanned for suspicious content for example. Second, it will shift the focus of people writing their text to this fact, that they are being monitored. This in turn should raise their awareness of the problem and put some effect on their life that they can easily perceive.
It's a bad thing that records will exist documenting the sexual proclivities of those with their fingers on the nuclear launch button. When senators, presidents, and generals can be blackmailed, we've got a problem. The largest levers of power will be moved by the most trivial information.
The scenarios will range from invading countries to who gets that city building permit. All because someone is cheating on their spouse.
It's not strictly "government officials versus us." Government officials will also be spied on. That, imo, is the real problem. Even people who have nothing to hide don't want to live in a world like that.
The thing that bugs me most is the asymmetry. I don't think the location of every person everywhere being public is really that scary. But that means lots of things. For one, the spouse fleeing from the abusive partner - scary situation, but full tracking enables actually enforcing "stay this far away" court orders.
it's easier to rob banks when you know how long it will take for the police to get there, it's impossible to deny you were at the bank at the time.
I realize it's risky to tell our enemies where our generals, senators and president are, but if the accessibility isn't total the information pretty much instantly becomes a tool for tyranny.
I wish there was a gmail plugin that would make the users email publicly accessible, but read only. This would clearly test their "I have nothing to hide" argument.
This is a strawman or reduction to the absurd (I can't decide which) and it is throughly unhelpful to convincing anyone of anything - I'm getting rather tired of seeing it.
There is a huge difference between refusing to have a lock on your front door and being okay with advertising to pay for a free service.
There is also a huge difference between publicly broadcasting your email and only the government having access to it.
Here's a hint: The NSA is not the general public.
(This comment should absolutely not be construed as acceptance of spying)
I've seen this article several times now, and every time it has been equally impenetrable. I think one of the major flaws is that this sentence appears in the 10th paragraph:
"To evaluate the nothing-to-hide argument, we should begin by looking at how its adherents understand privacy"
Why do we only begin to evaluate the argument in the 10th paragraph?
This article has gravely serious implications, but it is needlessly long.
I'm not from the TL;DR crowd, but this is TL;NC (Not Cogent)
The only real solution is to build a culture where nobody (private our public) expects or gets privacy.
There are lots of things people "would rather not share," that don't matter if we all know that people are people.
Besides, for capitalism to work, we need rational actors with /perfect information/.
I'm afraid that our political system is non-responsive to the mainstream opinion of the public. This privacy battle is unfortunately going to only change when something like all of Facebook's private messages end up on torrents
If you look at all the top privacy theorists, one of the standard arguments for privacy is that it protects minorities and other people whose opinions are currently unpopular for whatever reason. But if you look at a lot of the recent writing coming from the feminist movement, over the last year there have been a ton of folks arguing that privacy mainly protects men and those currently in power, and actually oppresses women and minorities. Not sure what's going on here, but it's certainly something worth keeping an eye on.
Freedom of speech also protects those who speak nonsense.
Privacy protects those not currently in favor with the rulers or the mob, without a doubt. But that is not the only thing it is good for.
I am not exactly certain how keeping your own business secret is a tool for oppression, other than the sort of anonymity desired by criminals as a means of evading retribution under the law. But you cannot pull the hood from the Klansman without also outing closeted homosexuals.
Public information can be used for good or ill, but private information cannot be used against those who keep it secret. Thus the default expectation of those who infringe upon your privacy is that they wish to use your information against you. Even when your private information is used for your benefit, it usually comes off as creepy.
Privacy is an essential part of how we control our public image and reputations. Stripping away privacy removes our essential ability to be who we say we are. So it does protect to a greater extent those who are more dependent upon good reputation, such as politicians. Or owners of professional basketball franchises. Or celebrity chefs. It enables the prosecution of thoughtcrimes in the court of public opinion.
I did some searches for (all without the quotes) "privacy patriarchy", "privacy protects men", and "privacy feminism," but I mostly found old articles from the 80s and 90s about how Roe vs. Wade should not have been argued from a privacy standpoint and arguments about how drawing a line where family is "private life" can enable domestic violence and inequality due to the state being reluctant to interfere with people's private lives. Can you provide some examples from the last year of the trend you're describing?
> Can you provide some examples from the last year of the trend you're describing?
I don't remember any specific articles, but they've mostly revolved around campus sexual assault and domestic violence.
The Newsweek article from yesterday, What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women, was also complaining about a tech CEO who received a relatively lenient sentence for a domestic violence incident, which happened because the main evidence against him was thrown out due to being seized without a warrant. I'm not saying the author of the piece was definitely coming out against the 4th amendment in this instance, but that is more or less the general sentiment.
"Under the banner of free speech, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been host to rape videos and revenge porn — which makes female users feel anything but free."
I say similar because the right to free speech has also traditionally been seen as protecting the rights of minorities, whereas recently we've seen an uptick in folks claiming that free speech mostly protects those with power.
> And similarly, the right to free speech has traditionally been seen as protecting the rights of minorities, whereas recently we've seen an uptick in folks claiming that free speech mostly protects those with power.
This seems like a self-refuting argument. You want privacy if you need to be protected from those in power. You want someone else to not have privacy if you want those in power to protect you from them. But those in power being against you is practically the definition of a persecuted minority.
Think about the phrase "women and minorities." The reason women have to be mentioned separately is that they're actually a slight majority of the population, but not (always) an ideological majority of the power base. What matters is who has the majority of the power, not who has the majority of the population.
But then that goes the other way too. There are specific issues on which a demographic minority (or women) have the support of the majority of power. In that case the "minority" consists of e.g. falsely accused defendants.
Which means that when you hear some historical minorities saying they don't want privacy, what you're really hearing is that in some cases they are no longer ideological minorities. Which I suppose you could call progress, but that doesn't make the new majority any more right than the old majority about what what the minority needs.
Then the government might start monitoring some phone calls.
"It's 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."
What I've learned from the privacy debate culture over the past years is that even amongst many privacy advocates the "So what?" mentality is prevalent. Their actions, not words, reveal this. While everyone rushes to use Threema, TextSecure, Telegram, OTR, GPG nearly no one bothers to check key fingerprints. That leads me to believe that the majority of people in this scene are using privacy technology as a means to simply feel better about themselves. To feel morally satisfied with themselves. It's not entirely dissimilar to the "support the troops" yellow ribbon, fight cancer "livestrong" wrist bands, or support the fight against AIDS red iPod. What we see is that people, even people that believe this is an important "fight", actually wind up with the same behavioural pattern of the "So what"'s. Both they and the "nothing to hide"'s reveal that this fight is actually not a fight at all but a window into the changing definitions of self and identity.
Privacy is a deeper topic than government surveillance. I suppose the article attempted to get slightly past that but not far enough imho. The change of this social contract has little to do with the NSA scandal. The focus on government intrusion of privacy is actually a distraction from the more existentialist issue at hand. That being we have and are changing.
The importance of secrecy is actually a great point from which to understand how the social contract of privacy is and will change. Philosopher George Simmel (born 1858) describes the importance of secrecy as:
You are only an individual to the extent at which
you are NOT transparent.
(shout out to philosopher Alice Lagaay for her work on the topic) But Simmel, other dead philosophers, dead poets or dead "founding fathers", were products of their time. In retrospect it is clear that, with the latency created by the physicality of their world, they lived in a transparency surplus. For this reason I argue that the debate surrounding this social contract lay not in post-privacy but in the understanding of post-existentialism (a relook at existentialist thought from the understanding of the networked-self -- identity increasingly built on relationships and extroversion).
The majority of people arguing "I have nothing to hide" aren't doing so because, as at one point this article argues, they feel the security value outweighs their concern for privacy. They are doing so because the networked self is creating very relevant non-security values to individuality. Something induced by the change from the physical self to self of the network. They are individuals that are focused on just living a better life, not some moralist agenda for a better life that used to be. If you hear "I have nothing to hide" and are inclined to enforce your moral understanding then you're missing the opportunity to understand these changes that are happening.
If you do want to argue it, regardless, the best argument I've heard is from the Privacy Extremists:
Because I value many things, therefor I hide many things
When you fight evil, you hide your moves so they don't move first. Evil will try by all means not letting you hide your moves by asking you, telling you, imposing you there is nothing to hide. Now you know where evil exactly is, and you hide even more, you mutate, you dissapear from the eyes of evil. That's the only way you fight them.
"I don't mind giving up some privacy for safety. I've got nothing to hide."
"Well privacy isn't something you can just give up. It's a right given to society by our framers, not individuals. A smoothly functioning democracy depends on dissent, which requires privacy to allow alternate points of view to gain traction. So privacy is a social good, not a personal right, and if we reduce privacy, we are reducing our democracy. The Soviets didn't have privacy. Free countries must."
That last part is usually what does the trick.
[1]: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf