Anything Else

As a follow up to my yesterday's post, I was looking for replies to my comment in Schneier's blog. The very first comment was:

One of the suggested responses to "I've got nothing to hide" is "can I see your credit card bills for the last year?" Good luck trying that when you're pulled over by a cop or when the FBI is at your door.

It is quite easy to make people agree that it makes sense to have privacy from one another.

It is much harder to disprove the notion that "I've got nothing to hide from the government," and I don't see this essay addressing the question why individuals need privacy from the government.

This reinforces my argument that privacy advocates are not doing their job well enough. If I was to do this job, about the first thing I will do is create awareness about the difference between the notion of privacy against government vs the privacy against citizens/private firms/marketers. These are so different concept when you are talking about privacy, these should have been two different words, and yet a 25 page paper written in support of privacy, that is trying to define it, evaluate its value, could not point this out. Half page long bullet list of taxonomy of privacy and such a basic thing missing, this is failure to me.

I will do the needful, I call privacy against government "absolute privacy" and privacy against citizens/private firms: "general privacy", or just privacy. This is the first taxonomy one should understand before one starts making further arguments for or against privacy. A lot of arguments in favor of privacy are only applicable to general privacy, and are wrongly used against absoulte privacy.

Moving on:

@Amit:

The government is not forced to collect data under the covers, it chooses to do so. This is not a problem of privacy, but of a government which is not the servant of the people (as it should be, at least in a democracy or realanarchy), but has its very own agenda.

In the same way, one could argue that governmental torture should be legalized, as otherwise the government will still torture, but secretly (IIRC this argument came up on this blog before).

Kristine

P.S: The "terrorist" horseman of the apocalypse is a bit overused, especially in conjunction with "might potentially help". So it does not scare me

Let me repeat why I feel government is forced to collect data under covers: privacy is a very abused term, privacy advocates to blame mostly, and the masses are not educated. I trust politician much less than security advocates(who have failed in my thesis), if privacy-loss has widespread negative connotation in public, government would be tempted to avoid disclosing, this is the nature of democracy.

Torture is real, privacy is made up paranoia, if you differ, I will give you my gmail password, and you courier me your chopped fingers. :-)

Terrorism is a funny business, if Americans have had enough of calling themselves victims of terrorism, may be, just may be, they should consider the countries really suffering from terrorism, like India for example. 10 years of evidence of direct support by Pakistan in Kashmir, and the American press still calls terrorism in India "freedom struggle". Imagine millions of suffering because an entire state being victim of real terrorism, and then compare with flukes like 911 that had just few thousand dead, years ago, you may get some perspective. Anyways, coming back to topic.

Let me summarize my position. Privacy is an important issue. General privacy should be my constitutional right, no one should have right to post my emails or phone call records, on internet for example. This is not freedom of speech. This is not a IP/copyright issue. This is a privacy issue. This is missing today. Absolute privacy, governments should have right and means to do data-mining, to go through my emails and phone records, to study demographic trends, to look for unusual activities. We as society has to come up with systems and norms to make sure these things do not get misused. If government singles me out, it is an abuse. If government does not take suitable precautions to keep my data safe, or shares it with private parties, it is an abuse. We should help build public awareness towards these issues, and participate in government's data warehouse building projects with suitable gaurds to avoid the real issues. This is missing too. A knee jerk, "privacy is the holy grail, anything else and you are totalitarian government in making" argument would only hurt privacy in the long run.