Irreal

This is the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 25 anniversary. ars technica celebrated that anniversary with a nice article on the EFF’s most influential cases from its first 25 years. The takeaway from the article is that the EFF has been fighting to make the Internet a better and safer place for us by resisting corporate attempts to control what content can be published and government attempts to monitor what we do on the Internet even if we’re not doing anything illegal.

I’m a member and urge all of you to become members too. Even if you can’t afford more than $10, send it off to them. They’re fighting the good fight and they’re fighting it for us. They deserve our gratitude and support.

…you’ve got nothing to fear.

For those of you who are as sick as I am of hearing that bit of tendentious nonsense floated by those who want to stick their noses into every aspect of your affairs, Jacques Mattheij has a nice summary post on the past, present, and future of if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.

Even a moment’s thought exposes it for the absurdity it is. As Mattheij points out, privacy is not the same thing as secrecy. Cory Doctorow notes that what goes on in the toilet is not secret but it sure is private. But Mattheij goes well beyond that obvious fact.

He revisits the example of the Amsterdam Census collecting information about residents’ religion for completely benign reasons and then having it used by the Nazis to hunt down and kill Jews during WWII. Closer to home, we have the example of a huge number (at latest count 21.5 million—7%) of Americans’ most private information being lost by the Office of Personnel Management. Again, data collected for benign reasons end up being used in harmful ways.

It’s time to stop being polite about this. The next time someone tells you you have nothing to fear as long as you’re innocent, laugh in their face and walk away. Nothing else they have to say is likely to be worth listening to either. If that reaction is too strong for you, point them to Mattheij’s post and tell them to come back after they’ve read it.

This is why you must always resist government overtures to impose surveillance programs: You can never get rid of them. Despite expiration of the enabling legislation, the clear fourth amendment issues, and the lack of any productive results, the FISA court ruled that the NSA could resume collecting it.

The ruling is meant as a stopgap to cover the period before the new law—where the metadata is held by the carriers and requires a warrant to access—takes effect but nonetheless has no statutory authorization. The ruling could be appealed, I suppose, but the issue will be moot before it ever gets heard. Once a surveillance program is in place, the government will resist any efforts to end it. They’ll trot out the usual four horsemen and scare tactics to convince Congress and the citizenry that it’s absolutely necessary and that disaster will result without it.