Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean you don't need privacy
by digby
I urge anyone who is the least bit confused about the issues we've been discussing this week-end to read this extremely thoughtful meditation called "Why you should care about privacy even if you have nothing to hide" by law professor Daniel Solov from Georgetown University. I can't do it justice by synthesizing it, but suffice to say that it takes the premise that so many have evoked in the past few days (perhaps even silently to themselves) "I've got nothing to hide" and deconstructs it.
This is just a very short excerpt which doesn't give the full flavor of the piece, but I thought it was a particularly interesting insight:
The Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control), might be apt to describe government monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases, such as one's race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status, isn't particularly sensitive. Many people don't care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own, or the kind of beverages they drink. Frequently, though not always, people wouldn't be inhibited or embarrassed if others knew this information.
Another metaphor better captures the problems: Franz Kafka's The Trial. Kafka's novel centers around a man who is arrested but not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrest and what's in store for him. He finds out that a mysterious court system has a dossier on him and is investigating him, but he's unable to learn much more. The Trial depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people's information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.
The problems portrayed by the Kafkaesque metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition. Instead they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than of information collection. They 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.
Privacy is a precious human commodity. A necessity actually. The question is, how does it change us and our relationship to our world to lose it?
To me, the idea of having my life examined by strangers, putting together a "profile" of me by combining details of various trails I leave behind in this world, whether virtual or real, without my permission is chilling, particularly when it's the government that is doing it, even as an abstract exercise. How can I trust this vast entity to not make a mistake, to not use this information in some way that will end up hurting me? It would be so easy. Too easy.
It's not that I am hiding anything. It's that I know how simple it is to put together disparate strands of a persons life to make it look as if they are someone they are not. And when it's people with the full force and power of the United States government who are doing it, it changes how I see such principles as the bill of rights. It becomes a mere concept, not something solid that I reflexively rely on in the way I conduct my life as an American. It's a small change that may not mean anything in itself. But as the article points out, it's the accumulation of those small changes that eventually leads to a very different society than the one we have.
Please read this piece if you care about the issue (or even wonder why you should.)