Most people think the federal government would have no interest in them, but many discover to their horror how wrong they are
By Scott
Shackford
Responding
to a popular reaction to news of the National Security Agency’s massive data
collection program, blogger Daniel Sieradski started a Twitter feed called
“Nothing to Hide.” He has retweeted hundreds of people who
have declared in one form or another that they are not concerned that the
federal government may spy on them. They say they have done nothing wrong, so
they have nothing to hide. If it helps the government fight terrorists, go
ahead, take their civil liberties away.
In his blog, a frustrated Sieradski listed many of
the abuses of power our federal government is known for; he is not happy with
the "nothing to hide" crowd.
There are
many, many reasons to be concerned about the rise of the surveillance state,
even if you have nothing to hide. Or rather, even if you think you have nothing
to hide. For those confronted by such simplistic arguments, here are a three
counterarguments that perhaps might get these people thinking about what
they’re actually giving up.
1.
Every American Is Probably a Criminal, Really
That
Americans think they have nothing to hide in the first place is a sign of how
little attention they're paying to the behavior of our Department of Justice.
Many Americans have run afoul of federal laws without even knowing it. Tim
Carney noted at the Washington Examiner:
Copy a
song to your laptop from a friend's Beyonce CD? You just violated the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. Did you buy some clothes in Delaware because they
were tax free? You're probably evading taxes. Did you give your 20-year-old
nephew a glass of wine at dinner? Illegal in many states.
Citizens
that the federal government wants to indict, the federal government can indict
if it monitors them closely enough. That's why it's so disturbing to learn that
the federal government doesn't need to obtain a warrant on us in order to get
our emails and phone records.
Silverglate even wrote a book about it, Three
Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. The Department of Justice has been
notably and egregiously using federal laws to destroy lives. Former Tribune
employee Matthew Keys is facing federal charges and
possibly prison time because he gave his old password to a member of Anonymous,
who changed a headline at the website for the Los Angeles Times. The vagueness of the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act makes violating a website’s terms of service a possible felony. We’re not just
referring to government websites. All websites. Given the digital focus of the
PRISM program, everybody should be concerned about what could potentially
happen should that data end up in the hands of federal prosecutors.
The
“nothing to hide” crowd's involvement in political activism is likely limited.
That’s perfectly fine. Nobody should feel obligated to join the Occupy movement
or a Tea Party organization or be the kind of person who might end up on a
politician’s enemies list. But to say “I have nothing to hide” is a
fundamentally selfish declaration. What about parents, sisters, brothers,
partners, and other loved ones? Can we say the same for them? You don’t have to
have an illness whose suffering can be eased with the use of medical marijuana
to be concerned about the way the federal government treats this industry.
Would you say, “I don’t need medical marijuana so I don’t care if they imprison
those who do”? Sadly, some people do. Fundamentally, saying “I have nothing to
hide,” is similar to saying “I don’t care about those who do.”
Next:
The problem with trusting the government.
2. The Federal Government Has Abused its
Surveillance Powers Before
US Congress Biographical Directory While
most Gen Xers were still very young and before any Millennials were born
America went through similar controversies in the wake of the Vietnam War and
the Watergate Scandal. In 1975, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) put together a
committee (which would eventually be known as the Church Committee) to investigate abuses of the law by
intelligence agencies. Abuses included spying on leftist activists, opening and
reading private mail, and using the IRS as a weapon. Sound familiar? There’s a
reason why Baby Boomers have started comparing Barack Obama to Richard Nixon.
The value of doing so has been lost to the ages; everything politically awful
that happens in America is compared to Tricky Dick.
The defense
that the current secret NSA/PRISM data collection plan can only target
foreigners in foreign territory shouldn’t settle anything, even if it’s
actually true, because that’s just a description of how the plan is currently
being used, not how it might be used tomorrow or under the next presidential
administration. And we have absolutely no way of knowing that the description
of how the program operates is true anyway, because the oversight has been
hidden from public view. We do know that a court ruling in 2011 determined that
the U.S. government had engaged in unconstitutional behavior in its
surveillance program, but the Department of Justice is trying to block
Americans from seeing this court ruling and
understanding what happened. We’re supposed to trust this oversight. We know
they’ve broken the law once, but we don’t know what they did, what's stopping
it from happening again, what harm was caused, and whether there was any sort
of punishment or discipline.
Next:
Not even the government can really control where data ends up.
3.
Government Is Made of People, and Some People Are Creepy, Petty, Incompetent,
or Dangerous
Gilberto
Valle had an unusual sexual fetish. He fantasized about kidnapping, killing,
and eating young women.
FacebookValle
was also a member of the New York Police Department, and was convicted in March of plotting to make his
fantasies a reality. Whether he really meant to do so is up in the air (his
defense was that this was all sexual roleplay), but he was also convicted of
looking up his potential targets in a national crime database, accessible due
to his position of authority.
While
the federal government is arguing that all this massive metadata being
collected by the National Security Agency is subject to significant oversight
and not subject to abuse, it is at
the same time trying to blame the IRS targeting political and
conservative nonprofits for special questioning as the actions of rogue
employees and poor management.
You
don’t have to be a privacy purist to be concerned about bad or dangerous people
getting information about you. Some of them work for the government, and they
may be interested in you for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. Even if you have
nothing to hide.
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