by Admin
I love a good argument. Most that I have these days tend to focus on civil liberties, and the issue of government surveillance comes up frequently. It’s usually during these debates, running on some soliloquy-within-a-soliloquy about the ever-increasing Orwellian surveillance state, that my counterpart will let this argument stumble out:
“I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s apparatus for collecting and indefinitely storing troves of innocent peoples’ internet activity and metadata sparked one of the most important conversations our society has had in a generation. Even the politically uninvolved started to wake up. The experience was visceral for many. There was something inherently wrong about an opaque government agency collecting some of our most personal information.
Simultaneously, another group of people emerged from this debate. I affectionately refer to them as The Panopticon Nihilists. These folks aren’t evil extremists. They’re not a subversive cult who meets bi-weekly in an underground bunker. They’re not even plotting to take over the world. Quite the opposite.
They’re probably your kindly neighbor who just bought an Amazon Echo for their kitchen.
They tend to be politically disinterested or perhaps actually trust that the government uses its technology for the sole purpose of preventing terrorism. And for the record, I don’t think they’re necessarily bad people— many of them have been effectively deceived. On one hand, they’re coaxed daily into allowing small, innocent-seeming encroachments on their privacy. On the other, they’ve been routinely conditioned to accept a “by any means necessary” attitude towards “preventing terrorism.”
If you start speaking out against mass surveillance, I guarantee that you’ll at some point hear the “I have nothing to hide” defense.
When you do hear it, call it out for what it is: misguided, near-sighted, and intellectually lazy.
Let me explain why.
This hollow argument personalizes a constitutional standard that was never meant to be personalized. Edward Snowden once deftly remarked during a Reddit AMA session that “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Well said: just because a certain right doesn’t apply to your life doesn’t give you the right to waive it off as meaningless. Our right to protection against unlawful search and seizures is guaranteed in the 4th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This should be indisputable, and yet when I’m forced to explain why having “nothing to hide” isn’t a good argument, I’m met with vacant stares.
Let’s follow this logic to its fully-realized conclusion:
What if our government started taking steps to dismantle the 19th amendment?
Sure, women should be afforded the right to vote you might say, and it theoretically sounds like a good thing to have it protected by a constitutional amendment, but hey, I’m a man, and my right to vote’s not in jeopardy. So it doesn’t bother me that the government’s trying to subvert it.
This line of logic is twisted and myopic. We need to remember that our constitution was crafted (and subsequently amended) to guarantee equal treatment under the law for all citizens of this country. And yet while the voting rights example above seems ludicrous, this exact same rationalization is the philosophical foundation for those who proclaim that they “have nothing to hide.”
Why is that? How can so many be so cavalier towards this assault on our civil liberties? Privilege probably plays a huge role. But the greater fault lies with our government’s concerted post-9/11 fear campaign to repeatedly convince us of two disingenuous narratives:
1. That this overreach is necessary to prevent terrorism
2. That their mass surveillance is used solely to prevent terrorism
Both are bullshit.
First: if law enforcement suspects someone of plotting a terrorist attack, our constitution allows them to obtain a warrant to legally spy on them if there’s reasonable cause. What gets lost in this discussion too often is that when you throw reasonable cause out the window as a necessary prerequisite, you simultaneously give authorities the unilateral ability to target innocent populations, a power that is easily and frequently abused.
(By the way, if the threat of terrorism inspires you to take action, go use that energy to educate yourself on the effects of the reckless wars we’ve been waging in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and elsewhere for last half century rather than guilt-tripping the rest of us into giving up a fundamental civil liberty).
Second: government agencies have a history of intentionally abusing their surveillance capabilities to prevent things other than terrorism. It’s well documented that prominent civil rights figures like Martin Luther King Jr. were routinely spied on by the FBI, not because he posed a terrorist threat, but because he posed a political threat to the country’s ruling classes. How can one possibly rationalize that MLK Jr., a steadfast advocate of non-violent protest, was a security risk whose actions merited surveillance?
You can’t, and the government couldn’t either— that’s why it was kept secret for all these years. Their objective was not the security of the American people, but rather maintaining control over political dissent.
The FBI’s behavior hasn’t improved since. One will recall the efforts of the protestors at Standing Rock, beginning in April 2016, to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. While their efforts were civilly disobedient, they were also unquestionably non-violent. Yet what justification could the government have possibly provided when it was revealed that certain key members of the protests were later targeted and approached by by agents of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in their own homes?
Think about that for a moment. This was a non-violent assembly of indigenous people and environmentalists. What right does the FBI have to spy on them (using a private contractor to deploy anti-terrorist technologies to identify these ‘insurgents’ in the first place)?
Ask yourself: do these protesters “have something to hide”? Should law enforcement consider them “terrorists”?
If your answer is still “yes,” let me leave for you a parting thought:
If there’s something in this world you feel passionately about, whether it’s the environment, your children’s education, or the state of the economy, know this: the government will continue to use surveillance technology as a tool to suppress dissent, and if such expansion is left unchallenged, its scope will continue to expand dramatically.
And when we reach that critical moment of total control, you finally will have something to hide: your opinion.
The author is a resident of Oakland, California and an active member of Oakland Privacy