Moxie Marlinspike, whom I’ve written about before, has a nice article on Wired about Why I Have Nothing to Hide is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance. In the first place, you have no idea of whether you have something to hide or not. There are an estimated 27,000 pages of federal law and another 10,000 regulations that have the force of federal law1. Some of these laws are about obscure matters that you probably wouldn’t think would be illegal—see Marlinspike’s example concerning lobsters, for example.
If government lawyers don’t know how many laws there are, how is the average person to know if any given action is illegal? Harvey Silverglate estimates that the average American commits three felonies a day. Not nuisance misdemeanors but civil-rights-canceling, prison-punishable crimes. And you don’t even know you’re doing anything wrong. The point here is that whenever someone says they have nothing to hide, they’re almost certainly wrong.
Next, Marlinspike suggests that we should have something to hide. People breaking bad laws is how bad laws get changed. Consider the sodomy laws, for example. Until very recently it was against the law in most jurisdictions to have same sex relations. Now, of course, it’s not only allowed but the right for same sex couples to marry is the law of the land. Marlinspike makes the case that things would be very different with ubiquitous surveillance.
Finally, Marlinspike says that privacy advocates are facing an enormous steamroller built on careers and billions of dollars of surveillance related contracts. There is no compromise. The efforts of those who claim they have the right to examine our every action must be resisted at every turn. The alternative is 1984 writ large.
Footnotes:
Nobody, including the government, knows how many laws there are. You’d think it would be fairly easy to count them but laws are so complex and convoluted that nobody can.