If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument.
Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming.
We still don't "have anything to hide". We're just having a conversation. But the conversation used to be private--that's normal. Now it's not private, which is not normal.
Whether or not you feel like you have to "hide" anything during a bar conversation is not the point. It's whether you think we should make changes to our society where having a private conversation is never allowed.
This kind of analogy, in my experience, helps people understand that the "nothing to hide" argument assumes that privacy is only for evil people, when in reality it's the very normal default of daily life. The parable posted in another top-level comment is also great.
My nothing to hide argument is a little different;
Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surly you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your ___location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from some rich mobsters with kidney problems..
we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.
“My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.”
I completely agree with that. However, it's not always possible to go down the rabbit hole of inherent human rights during a casual lunchroom conversation while you're making a coffee.
These "quips" have their place. Hopefully, they make people think and at least consider the importance of privacy.
That argument doesn't work because some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable to anyone they know or work for. (This is impossible when you know or work for diverse groups, but inside of a monoculture it's possible.)
Somebody thinking they are "safe", inside a monoculture, could easily get caught out saying or doing something that turns out (now, or in a few years) to be racist, sexist, homophobic etc., (or overly politically correct, for that matter), even as a joke, slip of the tongue, or ignorance.
Which we have witnessed with celebrities having 10 year old tweets dug up when twitter was just a stupid little website.
The safest bet is to say as little as possible when it comes to the internet.
Yet there are millions of kids who cannot legally consent uploading to Tiktok et al. I'm so glad this didn't exist when I was 9 years old. I'm not sure how 2020 9 year olds re going to feel about it in 20 years time.
Ask your political conformist, "So I'll give you $20 for a copy of your tax return, your birth certificate, financial acct numbers, and passwords. There's a guy I know who said he'd pay me if I could get them from you, and I'm willing to split it with you."
Some people are also so good at compartmentalizing that they believe this, but ask the right question and they realize they do in fact have (deeply shameful, at least to them) things to hide. Of course, you have to know the dirty secret.
Case in point: I had an ex whose grandparents lived in a mansion on a ranch in the Ozarks, and were very well off (some kind of corporate lawyers). Their public image in the community was one of great wealth and benevolence; due to some bad financial moves, they'd lost everything a few years back and their kids, grandkids, and great grandkids had scrambled to buy the house out from them, a loving gesture, so they could maintain their image. I learned of this secret (which itself isn't really shameful, people make mistakes, even big ones!) after a year or so.
They were both of the "we have nothing to hide," but one day I asked whether they'd like their neighbors to know about their penury; they told me to shut up and mind my own business.
Nothing to hide? Everyone's got something to hide, but for the most part we don't know it, because they're hiding it!!
I don't buy it. We all do things that although not wrong we still wouldn't like to share with anyone. i.e. No person wants to be seen picking their nose, although everybody does it.
If someone believes they wouldn't mind being seen picking their nose, it doesn't matter whether they are correct in that assessment. You won't convince them using such an argument because they won't agree with your premise even though you're right.
Somebody prove it by posting their email password. If we require encryption backdoors, the odds of it all ending up on Pastebin at some point is about the same.
With the poor security practices of the non-technical majority, it doesn't take an encryption backdoor for their password to end up on PasteBin. It already is on PasteBin.
What I think is that many of us in my country, where government is quite powerful (and still democratic) have reached a level of comfort such that the fact of having some state agency looking at some of my detail is totally acceptable since it doesn't change our comfort.
Now, tell those same people they'll have to pay a tax based on the destination they choose for holidays, and you'll get them in the streets (I'm exagerating a bit, but you get the picture)...
"It's not about the government having your bank account details. Do you want scammers to have your bank account details? Identity thieves? If encryption is outlawed, you won't be able to keep it from them."
I use to point out that I'm not even hiding it from the local police, today. Police here are OK.
I'm hiding it from:
- a future where the nazis or another totalitarian party wins the election
- future corrupt police personnel
- other countries intelligence (not everything I say might be compatible with doing work in North Korea/China/Israel/Saudi Arabia/Turkey (edit: added Turkey, I don't plan to go there in my holiday anyway)
- Leaks from police IT systems
And then I point to Turkey who went from approaching membership in EU to human rights hostile dictatorship in two years.
I usually say something similar, "Oh? Let me show your browser history and all your text messages to your significant other, your co-workers, and your boss."
I've used that one before. And for those who truly do believe they have nothing to hide, you can point to the ~1% of wrongfully convicted inmates in the US who probably thought they didn't have anything to hide either.
I like this. I'll offer a third approach, but yours might be better: remind the person that there are plenty of moments in normal life in which no-one is doing anything wrong, but for which privacy remains paramount. This doesn't take much imagination.
It doesn't speak to Internet surveillance directly, but it's enough to show that there's more to privacy than the desire to conceal wrongdoing.
Edit Also, there's a great 2007 paper on this kind of thing, 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy:
No offense to apeace but this is the far better argument. A conversation in a bar is public already; you have no idea if the person sitting across the room might have a microphone trained on you and recording the conversation, because you are speaking in a group within a larger group with no protections. There is no expectation of privacy so there is no argument for privacy in that analogy.
It's far better to ask why we should have encryption (for our safety, our security, and yes, our personal privacy) rather than whether we should have it. The government, with this bill, is debating whether we should have it, when it's obvious to the people that we definitely should. Turn that around on the senators proposing it; ask them if they want to build in back doors into our digital lives, can we as their employers and electors do the same thing to them?
Even if you grant "only the government has access," I think you still shouldn't be complacent, because what the government considers acceptable can change, and may not agree with what you think is acceptable.
E.g., maybe a govt comes into power that is strongly anti-gay, and punishes you for being pro-gay rights.
Or the opposite.
In general the idea that the government will always be reasonable and should have unlimited surveillance powers is unsound and unappealing.
The counter-counter-argument is the whole history of both individual (against policy) and official (by policy) abuse of surveillance in the history of government. Every expansion of monitoring must weigh the specific expected benefits against the very real cost of expanding both of those abuse surfaces.
That argument doesn't really work. You supposedly know whether you have "nothing to hide" (and don't dare to admit it if you do have something to hide), they need to look to check this.
I think the key here isn't broadcasting, it's storage. In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson's or MS very early through voice/video/typing characteristics.
Your conversations were recorded, the data leaked to or purchased by a fly by night company hired by your bank, and now suddenly despite your excellent credit history you can't get a 30 year mortgage, you try to find a new job but companies are only offering 6 month contracts, etc.
It's hard to prove a database doesn't exist, better to encrypt the content beforehand and make it harder to create.
Thanks, just to be clear I made it up after clicking reply!
If you want to make more of them I just combined a plausible data analysis project with some of the creepiest insitutional aspects from previous surveillance scandals.
Even barring the legal requirement, banks already prices mortgages such that they can handle being stuck holding the title with no payment. Down payments or government guarantees prevent them from holding the bag unless the housing market takes a big downturn.
Yes they can, they just can't use your age or other protected characteristics in the calculation of those odds. The ECOA doesn't say anything about health.
Let me be more clear. Banks don’t give a fuck if you have a high chance of dying a couple of years into a mortgage. It’s no different than you walking away from your mortgage, which they already have priced in.
Additionally, the underwriter of the mortgage sells off the mortgages to other banks once everything is closed up. If a chance of death had any impact on repayment probability, this resale value would be impacted (where age discrimination doesn’t apply) and that doesn’t happen today.
Whether it works is irrelevant. If anyone buys it, the time between belief and disbelief will be longer than the time it takes to screw up individuals' lives.
"Would you give up your right to free speech just because you have nothing important to say? No? Then why would you give up your right to privacy just because you have nothing to hide?"
It raises the important point: of course you don't care about privacy now while you have nothing to hide. You should care about it because one day you might.
It might be a stalker, a corrupt government official or policeman, someone at work who is competitive with you, you might be a whistleblower or learn a family secret that would damage your reputation (lets say, your father is a pedophile) .... all these things happen to completely "regular" people who until that point had "nothing to hide" and they end up needing or wishing to hide them in at least some circumstances.
While I fully support strong privacy & encryption, there is absolutely no logic in this argument because it tries to build upon an unrelated hypothetical.
A stronger argument should have tried to explain how this violates the constitution:
It creates a committee which is extremely likely to pass policies which violate the Constitution. In fact, if there were really effective ways to reduce crime online which didn't violate it, they likely would have been passed twenty years ago without trying to piggyback on another bill.
I agree, the EFF should have elaborated more on concrete examples of how it violates the Constitution.
The potential space for bad policy is gargantuan and hard to explore without additional hints or context. Given that enumerated in rhetoric, tech company policy, recent events and the bill itself:
It may create potential for witch hunts. Think of some recent conspiracy theories here.
To censor speech which comes close to looking "suspicious" whomever is the one to define this. This is most likely the government.
It may push companies to use filters which over-censor speech and it may be impossible to get a remedy at the scale at which they operate.
Trolls could abuse mechanisms to silence opinions they disagree with. If a government decides to smear someone's reputation through a coordinated campaign, they could make the argument they are a danger to society and pressure platforms to silence them.
You'll have to explain to me how it's an "unrelated hypothetical". Both situations:
* Indicate that you have a right
* Which you probably don't have a pressing need for at the moment
* But the lack of a need in the immediate future doesn't mean you won't ever have a need for it
The only real difference between the two, as far as I can tell, is the actual right you're not-using-but-still-protecting.
Analogy != "something different entirely". If we accept such weak criteria for acceptable arguments, one could argue for or against anything by picking a convenient "analogy".
Pointing out that a weakened encryption is analogous to getting a wiretapping order for everyone without a cause is a stronger argument.
> When people say "nothing to hide" they mean nothing to hide _from Law Enforcement_.
I don't think so. I think people simply mean they have a reasonable expectation of privacy in all of their personal activities. There are lots of things I say and do that law enforcement would not be interested in at all, but that I still want to keep private, simply because I want to. I shouldn't have to give a reason; privacy should be the default. People who genuinely want to share every little detail of their personal lives already have Facebook.
I don't know, but its scary here. Police march the streets firing rubber bullets into crowds. A leader who makes repeated and sustained attacks to discredit the media with the deliberate intention of having a population with no trusted or reliable sources of information. Foreign interference in elections.
The funny thing is, the reason I support surveillance and legislation against encrypted messaging (or at least a backdoor for law enforcement) is extremist groups like ANTIFA
I mean, up to the legal statute of limitations they can do that right (eg if they had speed camera recordings that they realized were accidentally unreviewed, they could use those and issue tickets without it being much of a morality issue).
It is maybe unfair because of a sudden burden and no ability to change your behavior before it added up to a huge sum, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with privacy.
I say, no need to look at hypotheticals. Just sit back and watch what the Chinese government likely has done with the social media posts from people in Hong Kong, who are now in a desperate rush to obliterate them. Tough look, those have already been crawled and indexed. It's not quite the same, because these social media posts weren't meant to be private at the time, but it illustrates the point what can happen when 'data is out there'.
Closer to the US, prominent activists for Mexico's soda tax were targets of a campaign to hack their phones with NSO's exploits, and given NSO only sells to governments and the Mexican government is a known NSO client, it is very likely they were targeted by the government itself: https://citizenlab.ca/2017/02/bittersweet-nso-mexico-spyware...
Americans have a sense that what happens in China (or Nazi Germany, or any other place you'd care to name) can't possibly happen here—even if it is currently happening here.
Gone are the days during the Cold War where you could say, "What is this, Soviet Russia?" and have anyone squirm at the comparison.
This is not a good analogy because if you speed on the highway you are putting other peoples lives at risk, and doing it in public. I think we probably should have a satellite tracking every car and issuing a ticket as soon as a car speeds.
That's complete BS.
Speeds have not been updated to match the technical characteristics of modern cars. There's a reason why Germany doesn't even have a speed limit - the limit itself is pointless. They only fine you for dangerous driving.
This is just misinformation. Of course, in most places, Germany has speed limits. For example, the speed limit within cities is generally 50km/h, around schools and in residentials areas it's 30km/h and outside of towns, it's usually somewhere between 60 and 100km/h. The only exception to this are highways where, in fact, 70% of the time, there is no general speed limit. Even so, specific sections will always have speed limits (e.g. around a construction site), and additionally, there are strict rules for how to behave on the highway (in particular, it's absolutely 100% forbidden to pass a car on the right and you generally have to drive as far to the right as possible unless you want to pass a slower vehicle).
From Wikipedia.
" In 2018, the autobahn rate of 1.7 fatality per billion traveled kilometer is less secure than both the French one at 1.4 per billion traveled kilometers, and the British one at 1.4 fatalities per vehicle-miles traveled[27]. This means the risk of fatalities per traveled vehicle kilometer is 20% higher in Germany than in France, and near 92% higher than in the UK. "
I can't read that one, but I did read a few newspaper articles on the topic and it sounds like there is a lot of debate around the issue. I can imagine its almost impossible to take into consideration all various factors like road conditions, and local cultural issues, and quality of cars and everything. I'd also like to know how much the spend building and maintaining the unrestricted stretches of road, I would imagine you don't want to hit a pothole at 180km/h
But my personal view is that sacrificing safety so people can get from A to B a little faster is not worth it, and perhaps it's not clear whether or not speed is a big factor, but why risk it? Whats the rush?
> But my personal view is that sacrificing safety so people can get from A to B a little faster is not worth it, and perhaps it's not clear whether or not speed is a big factor, but why risk it? Whats the rush?
It's not that simple that less speed equals more safety. Even the posted link shows no correlation.
Some people argue that speed in Germany is not risk, but a safety measure. German highways are already mostly overloaded with traffic. Decreasing the speed by introducing the artificial limits would effective make driving more dangerous because highways would be more crowded with drivers with less distance between, there would be more lane changing during driving, drivers will be more tired because of spending more time on the road. Also, driving at the uniform speed at the speed limit reduces awareness of the road conditions.
Another topic is that limit also works as a framing. On the road where limit is 120, everyone will tend to drive around 120, regardless of conditions. For the road without speed limit, people will generally drive 100 if that's optimal speed according to the current traffic conditions. And if it's safe to drive 180, why not?
> I would imagine you don't want to hit a pothole at 180km/h
You would just kinda fly over it, unless it's huge. The faster you go, the less potholes are a problem. What's more dangerous is that braking distance is quadratic in velocity.
> if you speed on the highway you are putting other peoples lives at risk
If you drive at all you are theoretically putting other people's lives at risk. Everyone always has to exercise prudence when they drive in order to mitigate that risk. If their judgment is bad and they cause an accident, they are held legally liable for the harm they cause, and that gives people a strong incentive to not cause an accident. That, in a sane society, would be considered sufficient as a matter of public policy, and the government could just stop worrying about it and move on to more important things.
But ticketing someone because of an arbitrary number posted on a sign, which might have little or no relationship to the speed a reasonable and prudent person under the actual conditions on the actual highway would choose to drive, is not protecting people's lives. It's the government tapping an alternate source of revenue because it doesn't want to just admit it needs more money and raise taxes. Not to mention decreasing everyone's respect for the law, since everyone knows that under current conditions speed limits are unenforceable (and what enforcement does exist is arbitrary), and doing what it would take to actually enforce speed limits completely would be a draconian violation of our rights that no citizen of a free society should accept.
> I think we probably should have a satellite tracking every car and issuing a ticket as soon as a car speeds.
I think the government should stop trying to micromanage every aspect of people's lives and focus on protecting our rights.
This is the same kind of self destructing thinking that has the US on the ropes right now.
So much of our society has rules and penalties because people are not very good at "exercising prudence". Instead we ask experts to think carefully about problems and set limits around what we should do so that we can all get along in a safe and peaceful society.
We don't allow doctors to practice surgery without a license and training. We don't allow tall buildings to be built without approvals. We mandate that a restaurant kitchen must be reasonably clean.
We need to have faith in our societies ability to set and review these rules and limits. If we can't trust the experts and the public servants we employ to enforce the rules, then we need to ask why not?
What we should _not_ do, is just blow off expert advice because its inconvenient or because somebody on Fox News told us to.
> So much of our society has rules and penalties because people are not very good at "exercising prudence".
Speak for yourself.
> Instead we ask experts to think carefully about problems and set limits around what we should do so that we can all get along in a safe and peaceful society.
That's a nice myth, but it's not the reality. The reality is that governments use this power for purposes that have nothing to do with a safe and peaceful society.
> We need to have faith in our societies ability to set and review these rules and limits.
Sorry, but the track record of governments and "experts" is way too poor to justify any such faith.
> If we can't trust the experts and the public servants we employ to enforce the rules, then we need to ask why not?
And what if the answer is that either there simply are no actual experts in the problem ___domain, or there is no way for any actual experts to credibly communicate their expertise, because of principal-agent problems, conflicts of interest, and other inconvenient realities?
Because that is in fact the answer in most problem domains that are relevant to public policy.
> What we should _not_ do, is just blow off expert advice because its inconvenient or because somebody on Fox News told us to.
What we should also not do is treat people as experts just because they say they are. We should demand a track record of accurate predictions. Most so-called "experts" don't have one. That's just as true of the talking heads on CNN or MSNBC as the ones on Fox News.
>What we should also not do is treat people as experts just because they say they are.
Agreed 100%. Experts should make decisions based on open data that anybody can review. Also there are a lot of grey areas, so often we look for "scientific consensus" where a community of experts can debate issues and attempt to decide whats best.
The rest of your comment is basically that government does a bad job at a lot of things, but my view is we should fix government rather than reject it.
I live in a much smaller country, and here, I feel a small group of individuals _can_ make enough noise to shape policy. Sort of. At least they have a say. A good corruption watchdog would help - we don't have it yet, but at least there is talk of one. No climate policy. The whole witness K thing. Massive expansion of Defense this week. Cuts to the ABC. Err, dark times for Australian politics, but it _could_ be all rolled back at the next election. It will be a close race. I'm rambling now.
You got me interested in the subject so I did some searching. This document, while doesn't address speed as a factor of accidents directly, does seems to show that speed cameras do push down Australia's fatality rate on the roads. (I'm Australian)
Of course, from a physics perspective, lower speeds means less force in an accident. To take an extreme example, if we set a nationwide speed limit at 1 mph (1.6 km/h in kangaroo units) and enforce it completely, we might not have any traffic fatalities. What if at a 5 mph speed limit, one person dies in total across the entire country? Do you say that driving at 1 mph is safe and driving at 5 mph is putting lives at risk? Well, I guess statistically that is the case, but only if you ignore all of the other factors that went into the crash and attribute everything to speed.
For most accidents there is more than one factor that contributed to the accident. While speed is a measurable and oft-cited factor in a crash, it is not necessarily the reason that the crash occurred. Example: Someone drives 75 in a 70 zone, stops paying attention, and drives off the road into a wall. Speed and inattention could likely both be cited by forensic examiners as a factor, but the crash may have had the same outcome regardless of the speeding and entirely determined by the inattention.
And to the other opposite, there are plenty of scenarios where someone could follow the legal speed limit of a road while operating their car at an unsafe speed. Someone could drive 65 in a 70 zone on an icy road, or past stopped traffic, etc. While they are following the legal speed limit, they are operating at a speed that puts others at risk.
Basically, speed limits are an easy to understand approximation of what is usually a good idea for most drivers in most cars under reasonable conditions. Given that, sometimes they are too high and sometimes they are too low.
Higher speed makes all road behaviours riskier. I'm also from the Kangaroo states and while I know of not a single person who likes getting a speed fine I think the vast majority agree that having some speed limits makes things safer.
Australia doesn't have the same cultural views as America with regard to freedom. We have high taxes, virtually no guns, heavily enforced traffic policing, etc. On the Wikipedia page for road death per 100000 population Australia is about 5 compared to the US at 12. A large number of Americans seem to be culturally ok with this as long as the government doesn't interfere with their life. Hacker News has an international audience and you often see the different value systems at play in the comments.
I’m not arguing that speed doesn’t increase risk, nor that we shouldn’t have speed limits.
I’m arguing that they’re approximations of safe behavior. Prevailing traffic science suggests safe traveling speeds are heavily dependent on conditions, yet most speed limits are static.
I’m okay with the idea that people should not exceed the speed limit because we’ve chosen it as a reasonable compromise. I’m less okay with saying that those who break the speed limit are unsafe by default, or that those who follow the speed limit are driving at a safe speed.
In addition, hackers from the US probably tend to lean more libertarian than the general US population. By contrast, the hacker scene in e.g. Germany, while of course being government-critical, tends to lean more traditionally left
I consider my politics left-leaning and not libertarian.
I'm making an engineering argument about risk and blame, not a political argument about freedom. I am not arguing that we shouldn't have speed limits. Speed limits are like democracy. It's a terrible system... except for all of the others.
Ideally we'd have a better measure of unsafe movement -- We could much better measure risk if the speed limit was set to an equation based on the difference in momentum vectors between vehicles, the capabilities of the drivers and vehicles involved, the weather conditions, etc... but that has a much larger weakness in that we don't have a way to effectively measure/calculate/communicate those expectations to drivers.
I am all in favor of a utilitarian solution to the problem, but I'm under no illusion that it is a rigorous benchmark of risk.
The libertarian argument is that we shouldn't penalize risk at all. I am saying we should penalize risk, but that speed limits do a mediocre job of measuring it.
Fair enough, I was just adding to the parent's comment about different cultural viewpoints, but I failed to consider your own perspective on its own. I think your point of view is valid.
That said, to get back to one of your original examples: at least where I live, even if there is a general speed limit of, say, 80km/h, you could still get in trouble for driving that speed under adverse condition, like ice, heavy rain, heavy fog or darkness. I think the rule is that you have to guarantee to be able to stop within half of the visible distance So it's not like the law is completely static either.
I'm stealing your analogy but I'm also ready for people to smugly proclaim that they would have no issue with livestreaming their entire life since they have nothing to hide.
That’s the best part. Remind them that it’s not about you. It’s about whistleblowers and journalists who need to protect their sources, and lawyers who need to communicate with their clients. That tends to bring the ego down a peg ;)
But honestly, it’s best not to be aggressive. Some people don’t care much, and you won’t convince them.
FWIW, all my non-technical friends use Signal with me, and they know about verifying safety numbers! It can be done.
Have you been to my family reunion because I think that may constitute a direct quote. Of course four years ago they espoused the opposite standpoint toward whistle-blowers because obviously the other-side was bad-wrong and this administration is right-good.
Unfortunately, as the current coronavirus case data shows, a large number of people here think everything is about them and them alone, so we'll need to make an argument that speaks to them personally. I'm not sure there is one that's universal—as suggested above, asking for their salary might be as close as we might get. That would then leave government employees.
May be it's not about 'nothing to hide' vs 'something to hide'. May be it's about inadequate responsibility level for a bar conversation.
When people make public speeches they tend to choose words more carefully because they aware about possible dramatic consequences.
The same level of awareness for each private conversation in the bar can lead to a lot of efforts. It's another level of efforts to formulate things correctly. Sometimes people just need a safe place to formulate and try ideas without worrying about being punished for consequences.
If everything is livestreaming it's hard to achieve certain level of relaxation.Because it becomes a hard work to avoid saying something they didn't mean.
This kind of hard extra work would result in overloads and intentional faking to be on the safe side.
And 'that' is the core damage effect of any mass surveillance: Inability to have a free and open private discussions.
So even when there is 'nothing to hide', there is a lot of work just to 'avoid to show' something you didn't mean.
I like to tell people about programs like "LOVEINT" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT). Where there is personal information available to others, it can and will be abused in ways you won't approve of. Privacy might seem like an abstract concern until you or someone you know is being stalked, etc.
> Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming.
If we are doing imaginary situations, the proponents of this bill can also do something like this:
Imagine there is a bar, where the police are unable to go inside. Every day, people go into the bar to plan terror attacks or to spread hate and racism. They can have whoever from across the world join them in the private bar without the police being able to find out. Sometimes they also bring young children into the bar to sexually exploit them. Other times, they bring vulnerable young men and indoctrinate them with their racist hate. The owner of the bar knows that those kinds of things are happening, but they say, a lot of people just come into the bar to talk with friends, so we never allow the police to come. In addition, before serving drinks, the owner puts on a blindfold and stuffs their ears with cotton so they won't be able to see or hear what is going on. They live by the principle: See no evil, hear no evil. The owner of the bar is making a lot of money from the people using the bar.
Don't you think we should keep the terrorists, and neo-Nazis, and child molesters from having a bar that they can go to to do and plan their evil stuff that police cannot get to? Don't you think that the bar owners, instead of stuffing their ears and covering their eyes so they are unable to see the bad stuff, should make sure that bad people aren't using their bar for evil stuff. Sure, just like in the real world, you will have your privacy just like you have in your home or at the local bar. But, you would want a real life bar owner to not close their eyes to people using their bar as a planning ground for terrorism, or who are bringing young kids with fake id's to the bar to exploit them, or who are filling young men's minds with hateful, racist lies? Also, just like the police can get a search warrant for a bad person's home or a bar where a lot of bad people are congregating and planning and doing bad things, we think they should also be allowed to do that in the online world.
Now tell me, to the average non-tech voter, which will pull the most emotional strings?
So now, the terrorists and child molesters still use the bar, but they always go into the bathroom to talk. The owner suspects that they are talking about bad things in there, and installs surveillance cameras so that if the police ever need to know what's happening in there, they have access. Would you want a real life bar owner to record you on the toilet just so that one day the police can track some bad guys easily? Probably not. Do you think it's reasonable to expect privacy on the toilet even when you're in a bar owned by someone else? Yes, even if it might one day make law enforcement a little harder. And just like we think that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using places intended for that in the real world, we think they should also have it online.
An open source messaging app that actually does end-to-end encryption regardless of whatever law? It might be less convenient to use, but people who feel they need to encrypt their stuff, will be able to do it anyway. So the end result will be just less privacy for people who "have nothing to hide".
People use both of them when they want to do something in privacy, instead of sharing it with the whole world.
If you invent a message app that tells everyone it posts every message to a publicly visible website, then I'd agree that people using it aren't expecting privacy. I don't see it catching on though.
> just like the police can get a search warrant for a bad person's home or a bar where a lot of bad people are congregating and planning and doing bad things, we think they should also be allowed to do that in the online world.
Bad analogy, because a search warrant for one bad person's home or bar does not require the government to have keys to everyone's home and bar, just in case they need to search it.
In other words, the problem is not the "get a search warrant" part. It's the "break strong encryption so no one's data is secure, just in case we need to search anyone's data" part.
Filling someone's head with hateful, racist lies is 100% legal so it would not be applicable to the proponents of the bill. Terrorism is another beast.
You will find a lot more people than you would like in a lot of communities are racist. I do not approve of it but preventing it would enter the realm of thought policing and would require a totalitarian police state.
But income is definitely something that people love to hide. There's a lot of things that all people would love to keep quiet, mostly because their friends or loved ones would find out and may disown them
For those who aren't convinced by this argument, you can take it a little further by introducing a hypothetical situation in which their political opponents obtain power and criminalise criticism of government or other powerful "common-good" entities. Now your recorded conversations could become evidence of sedition, and even if it wasn't criminal at the time it could certainly be used to show evidence of previous behaviour.
There's other ways. Ask them for their passwords, ask them to hand their phone and riffle through their conversations and photos. If I know they won't be offended them I'll ask them to send me nudes or if they would let me put a camera in their shower.
After all, if you're have nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, so why should you close your shower curtain?
I've used most of the arguments against 'nothing to hide' mentality mentioned in this thread, and guess what: most of the people still don't care enough to change a single one of their bad privacy habits. Their eyes glaze over, or they think you are just overly dramatic or a conspiracy thinker, or "I'm not that important" or "Small chance it happens to me", "I trust the government" (when it comes to encryption), etc. Some friends and family I educated in length, and still they are not even willing to e.g. switch their Samsung browser to FF, or install an ad-blocker.
The concept of privacy and the consequences of not having it are too abstract for them. It is like saying that climate change will lead to disaster unless we all act now. They will only act after something bad happens to them personally.
My take:
The “nothing to hide” argument is a fallacy for two reasons:
(1) The connotation that things discussed in private are bad. True, criminals may discuss illegal activity in private, but that does not mean everyone’s private conversations are illegal.
(2) The notion of what needs “hiding” is subject to opinion, and changes over time. You may not be breaking any laws today, but if the law changes and governments have access to your past data, you are now vulnerable and have nowhere to hide.
I find it much easier to argue from the moral perspective.
It's my right to hide whatever I want, regardless of whether somebody else considers it "something to hide" or not; just as it's your right to buy a 3m tall chocolate statue of yourself, regardless of whether I think it's something you need.
The question is not "is it really necessary?" but "who the #£$! gave you the right to decide whether I consider it to be necessary for myself?"
Then again, here in (east) Germany, somebody argues "I have nothnig to hide", you just tell them "Neither did people 40 years ago" and the conversation is pretty much over.
I won't try and summarise it because I think I'd do a disservice to it, but it's another really good argument, ostensibly from experience, re corrupt countries and surveillance.
Another argument is that a conversation we are having today (nothing to hide and between friends) may be used against us in the future. It could also be used against your children.
But YouTube Live is publicly accessible, it's not the same as a law enforcement warrant. I think a better analogy is whether it should be okay for a judge to allow police officers to storm into your private residence with only a few seconds warning, and then proceed to examine and even take away anything in your room.
No, because when police have a search warrant and storm your home, they can't seize the private conversation you had in bed with your partner a year earlier. They can't suck the memories out of your head. Technology like mobile phones and messaging have become an extension of us, they are used for private conversations and personal memories. Breaking encryption on these is not like search warrants of yesteryear, and not like wire taps. In traditional search warrant they would not be seizing communications. And in wire taps they would only get conversations going forward, not years in the past that they can search through, and even with conversations going forward they sometimes wouldn't be allowed to listen to personal conversations.
The Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the constitution) is all about protecting us against abuses of government officials. It presumes people in government could be bad, and we need protecting from them. By allowing a government official to seize all our private conversations it could allow a bad government official to go fishing and find things things that they can use against their enemies. There are many, many laws. Many of them aren't enforced, but could be.
For example in some states adultery is illegal, even a felony in some states. Not just in small states, but in New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan. In Massachusetts there hasn't been an adultery conviction since 1983. But if law enforcement was allowed to decrypt an iPhone, and find private bedroom things, it could be used as an attack on a political enemy.
It isn't only "bad people" that should be worried about the government. I think pretty much everyone agrees Martin Luther King Jr. was a good person. But the government at the time didn't think so. When he was killed the first people on the scene were the police officers who were doing surveillance of him from across the street. That is the kind of government we need to be protected from.
Whether traditional search warrants or breaking end-to-end encryption violates privacy more really depends on specific cases and the details of how the end-to-end encryption gets broken. Search warrants definitely aim to seize communications and intrude into private notes, collections, offline-only meetings, affairs, and all kinds of potentially embarrassing bedroom items that were purchased anonymously.
The only real defence against government abuse is strengthening democratic institutions, respect for human rights, strong oversight, transparency etc.. End-to-end encryption is quite a shallow/weak protection since a truly tyrannical government can easily make it illegal at any time. A lot of government abuse is also possible without breaking encryption.
So I think the benefit of end-to-end encryption in protecting against abusive governments is often over-stated. But what about the costs? For example technological progress is making the world more dangerous. Should it be easy for a bunch of people to use unbreakable encryption to coordinate the development extremely dangerous genetically engineered bio-weapons from their homes? If one such person is caught should it be really impossible for 5 judges to allow the police to find all those they've been talking to?
There is no evidence to suggest people are developing extremely dangerous genetically engineered bio-weapons in their homes or will be capable of doing such in the future.
Unless this bill's critics are mistaken, if your friends are using "file encryption", i.e, encrypting the contents of the communications themselves before sending, then this bill has no effect on that.
IMO, your friends, unless they are nerds, are never going to place much value on encryption when they never actually use it themselves. When some third party tech company is doing the "end-to-end encryption" for them then your friends are really not in control of the situation, let alone having any reason to understand it. It could be a sham and they might not know it.
This bill stands to hurt tech companies but according to its critics (surprise: it's the tech companies) it does not interfere with any individual's use of encryption for communications.
No one wants third parties to have potential access their communications. However there is no law preventing a tech company that provides "encrypted messaging" from decrypting people's communications. There is not even a contract with users. If they do this, their liability is zero. There are only "promises", something like, "We promise we won't do it, unless we receive a valid subpoena" or "We have made it technically impossible to see your messages." (Nevermind metadata.)
Well, what if some other third party, like the people pushing this bill, made the same promises? Would that be "good enough"?
Of course not.
For the record, I am not taking a for/against position here. I am not a tech company nor someone trying to get access to encrypted messaging services provided by tech companies. However if something came along -- not suggesting this is it -- that created the necessary evolutionary pressure to make every person, not just "bad guys", have a basic understanding of how to encrypt a file and send it over an insecure network, without relying on a third party for the encryption, then I would think that would be a good thing.
> "We have made it technically impossible to see your messages."
That one's not actually a "promise"; it's either true and sufficient (although it's hard to imagine how if the software supports automatic updates), or a direct lie because they have not in fact made it impossible.
Seems like it is impossible to verify whether it is true because we cannot see exactly what they are doing. We are just taking their word for it. It can be nothing more than a "promise" because we are not the ones responsible for carrying out the encryption. We have to trust both (a) the encryption software, which we can examine, and (b) the third person doing the encryption, who is unfortunately operating outside our view. Even if the third person is trustworthy, if they make a mistake, they are not liable for anything. They are not even obligated to tell us they made a mistake.
Usually when we trust people to do something important for us, we have some recourse against them if things go south. It is more than just a promise. They have skin in the game.
"Promise" generally means a statement about someone's future behaviour; they're lying (or theoretically not) about something they already did (write the software in such a way that they are literally incapable of retrieving the plaintext of messages). If I say I'm not going to steal and eat your cookies, that's a promise, which I might reneg on or never have intended to keep in the first place, but ultimately it depends on future events; if I say I didn't eat your cookies, that's a statement of fact, true or false.
Edit: Er, obviously you should never trust tech companies about anything, promise or otherwise; I was making a distinction about what kind of deceit they were engaging in.
You don't feel you have anything to hide, now. But if ever the government started doing something you disagreed with, like started getting too powerful, or using that power unjustly, your ability to check that power would be significantly diminished.
While this is on the right track, one would point out that these conversations wouldn't be public they would only be visible to government authorities.
I think the due process argument is more compelling. Part of preventing abuses and corruption by law enforcement is ensuring they can only surveil people with reasonable suspicion. Yes there are people who should be under surveillance. But it's crucial that this gets approval from the courts to prevent agencies from snooping on people not for law enforcement but to gain leverage and power. Your privacy helps us prevent the next J Edgar Hoover even if you have nothing to hide.
>Yes there are people who should be under surveillance.
When I read this as you put it . It comes to me something we tend to forget that surveillance is a form of attack on a person's freedom obviously. The fact of it presence is already an insult actually.
Humans need privacy because of the selfishness of our survival biology. There simply are bad people in the world, and I wish it were different, but it's not. 'Just trust us' are words often told to us by people who only want power - at our expense.
The best sentiment I've ever heard about privacy is from Shoshana Zuboff, and it's now influenced my thoughts. It's at the end of her amazing 2018 book 'Surveillance Capitalism', the best book on tech I have ever read. She shares a conclusion along this line: To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity.
She explains that there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled. We need freedom of diversity - to will - to decide for ourselves. Otherwise, and now I conclude, bad actors with power lust will only bend the world to their vision.
The guilt-tripping words of "nothing to hide" come from a place of privilege - or worse, hypocrisy. It is an insult to anyone who is different from the norm, and who wants to be themselves. What you have every right to hide does not even have to be illegal, but often it is, like LGBTQ people last century. Illegal ≠ immoral.
Privacy is a core freedom to protect human diversity. It must not be shamed. It must be loved. Cherished. Treasured.
Privacy begets diversity. Surveillance begets conformity. Which one is more important for the development of life in the universe?
As a child, I instinctively knew that privacy was something natural and important in life. Now as an adult, with education and intellect I can articulate why - and resist psychological manipulation and intellectual dishonesty from others trying to tell us that privacy should die.
I'm able to see the insanity of my own age. And I will guard privacy with my life on the street, if I have to.
> To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity.
>there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled.
I would agree. Those are very important points.
When people being watched they are not as free as they could be in their actions and exploration of ideas, because they measure what to say and what is forbidden to say.
This can have a huge damaging effect in creativity ___domain.
> This can have a huge damaging effect in creativity ___domain.
If this is true, then Apple's privacy brand has some long-term legs and some pretty powerful ads in their future - showing creators not being tracked while they freely, privately explore their art on an Apple device.
>I'm able to see the insanity of my own age. And I will guard privacy with my life on the street, if I have to.
I think what we may not realise yet is that we are possibly under new attack of 'modern communism'. They changed clothes and they do not call themselves communists, but their actions and principles they protect are revealing who they are and we know how many people died in 20 century because of this ideology.
>It is an insult to anyone who is different from the norm
And now they attack the basic principles of a free society.
>Privacy is a core freedom to protect human diversity. It must not be shamed. It must be loved. Cherished. Treasured.
I would also add it's a core freedom to protect a free society respecting human rights.
You could move that a notch up and say that only the owner of the bar and their friends get to watch all these conversations and they keep copies. That should really freak out some people.
I'm not really sure this is a good argument at all. In your scenario, if the two people have nothing to hide why would they care?
You're better of appealing to things that they normally might want to hide, like an embarrassing act or things that are said that are questionable out of context, etc.
A person who truly has nothing to hide, by definition, would not care about privacy. The entire point of privacy is that there are things that we do not want to share, for whatever reason.
People tend to feel attacked when you argue that they do, in fact, have something to hide. Even when you come from the perspective that everyone has something to hide, mostly small things.
I've had the best success with the argument I posted. It helps people understand that privacy isn't "hiding", it's normal. What's not normal is guaranteeing your government can see everything you do all the time, and we should think about whether that's what we want.
Actually it reveals a twist in those in favour of surveillance . What they do they falsely accuse you of 'hiding' while you simply naturally expected not to be invaded.
They invade you and then they they kind of ask you what is the problem? you have something to hide? And some people say : Oh, we have nothing to hide. But the problem is the fact of invasion, not wether they have to hide something or not.
It's like someone invades your territory or takes your stuff and you say, oh, i don't really need those.
It's not the problem wether you need those or not. The problem is that you can't decide about it anymore, you right to decide was taken away.
In case of property you loose right to private property.
In case of free speech you loose your right for free speech.
In case of privacy you loose your right choose not to be watched. You loose ability to decide to be private if you wish. That is the problem.
What's actually happening is that Facebook, Google, et.al. can read your messages and the Government can do so with a warrant. Nobody is planning on broadcasting everything to everyone. We don't have to ask people if they would do that or not. The vast majority of them do that today.
Strong encryption is another tool of the rich and powerful to help evade public oversight and scrutiny. Unpopular thought here, cuz, well, most people commenting here are the top wealthy 5-10%, the rich and powerful. It would be a cognitive dissonance to blieve otherwise.
Having a conversation in a bar thinking it's private..
Anyway, it might at well be Pleasantville 1950s for a lot of people. They are both hiding everything and being suspicious AF of anybody with something to hide.
Basically it isn't about having anything to hide but the instability of democracy and what power bad actors have.
Do I have anything to hide from Google? Not really. But do I want that same data that Google has to be in the hands of someone like Putin? No. I don't even want it in the hands of the NSA. The issue is that if we say that ads can manipulate people to buy things, why can't they manipulate people to do things like vote or divide. Russia's strategy since the Cold War has been to divide and prod The West, to sow disruption. That disruption has caused consolidation of power but also makes it difficult for coalitions to get things done.
It is clear that anger generates more clicks, so why is it unrealistic to think bad actors can use that data to better divide us and sow discontent?
The next factor is that democracy relies on a distribution of power. Data collection is a means to consolidate power. There's the term "turnkey tyranny" that's thrown around. The reason isn't because we think a tyrant is going to come to power and destroy our way of life, but rather that we recognize that such a thing is possible and want to ensure that such actions would be infeasible if a malicious actor gained power. In democracy power is distributed. This has pros and cons. But the point of distribution is so that consolidation is difficult and we can never have a monarch or tyrant.
So it has never been about having something to hide (which btw, do people know they are referencing Goebbels?), but about stability in democracy. Distribution of power that was inherent to the system in the past is no longer built in. Technology has changed and enabled things we never previously imagined.
Sadly I've come to the conclusion that people don't really actually care about the stability of democracy so long as they have food on the table and a warm bed at night. No matter the fact that a stable democracy free from the tyrannical rule of a monarch is what gave rise to their entire lifestyle as they know it. But people forget so quickly what we sacrifice for democracy. It's almost irrelevant, though. Our once pristine western democracy has been slowly eroded by the forces free markets. So I don't know who's crazier, the people who seem to care less about the values required to maintain a democracy, or the people who still think we participate in one...
I believe you are right. In fact, I think China serves as a perfect example of this (so does 1930's Germany, but I don't want to draw too much parallelism there). When there's massive growth and you're substantially better off than your parents, who cares what the government does? Clearly you're doing better, so they must be doing good. Right?
I think part of the unrest we have is that we're NOT better off than our parents. But another key component is that covid made it so that we have to worry about food on our table and we have an abundant amount of time to worry.
At the same time this is a great opportunity to talk about democratic stability. Discussing things like why privacy matters and not just to bad guys or with the silly "you wear clothes" analogies. It is also a great time to talk about structural reforms like switching to better voting methods, such as STAR (see my comments for rants on why you should not use IRV/"RCV"). At this time people have the time to think and research, but there is also the drawback that it is hard to think when you are worried about food and future. But this time to also talk about solving problems while they are small. If the Great Depression taught us anything it is that those people learned a lot about frugality but their children forgot. Luckily it appears that each time we do this we get slightly better (think like a damped harmonic oscillator). So don't give up hope, help the dampening coefficient.
That might be technically true if you consider woke cancel culture as a single entity and compare it individually to each of the 200-ish less-than-median-size countries (and is definitely (technically) true if you count each state/province/city/county/etc government), but we don't actually care about the average government, we care about the governments that are the biggest threat to honest people, like America, Russia, and China.
Speaking for the Third Reich, the Gestapo heavily relied on Blockwarte, the equivalent of the modern SJW,people who have been manipulated into believing snitching on other people is morally good. A fascist state cannot work against unwilling people.
Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming.
We still don't "have anything to hide". We're just having a conversation. But the conversation used to be private--that's normal. Now it's not private, which is not normal.
Whether or not you feel like you have to "hide" anything during a bar conversation is not the point. It's whether you think we should make changes to our society where having a private conversation is never allowed.
This kind of analogy, in my experience, helps people understand that the "nothing to hide" argument assumes that privacy is only for evil people, when in reality it's the very normal default of daily life. The parable posted in another top-level comment is also great.