<story><title>&apos;I&apos;ve Got Nothing to Hide&apos; and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2007)</title><url>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheRealDunkirk</author><text>I got upset about Echelon, almost 30 years ago, and then got further upset with the Patriot Act. The internet kill switch. Etc. Et. al. In speaking with my pastor about these things, he gave me the line, &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ve got nothing to hide.&amp;quot; Sure, he, personally, is above reproach, and would lay his life bare, but he considers conversations with people he counsels to be sacrosanct. Would he like his text messages and emails published? Of course not. Even he absolutely DOES have things to hide!&lt;p&gt;My pastor is a superhumanly wise person. Almost everything he has said has turned out to be true. Of the Patriot Act, he agreed that the government probably overreached, but he said these things are like a pendulum, and eventually it would swing back. On this subject, he has been completely wrong. The pendulum just keeps going. The problem is that both sides of US politics are in on it, so I don&amp;#x27;t know what will ever correct this course. It seems that, eventually, we&amp;#x27;ll have Chinese-style, socially-scored citizenship, just run by corporations instead of the government.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aksss</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a pendulum. To imagine such a thing is a very indulgent way of thinking. The liberties experienced in the United States are quite exceptional as human societies go. In the history of human civilization, the tendency is towards the feudalistic, the imperial, the totalitarian. So the natural course is for liberties to erode. It took bloodshed and great will to carve out freedoms enjoyed by the United States.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s less the dynamic of a pendulum and more the dynamic of oxidation.&lt;p&gt;We luxuriate in thinking that these &amp;quot;Western-style democracies&amp;quot; are a norm, when in fact on the planet today the best of them are very few and I think the case could be made that all of them are showing signs of withering principles in the face of threats and greed. So you find people arguing whether this or that style of loss is &lt;i&gt;rational&lt;/i&gt; today because of some set of de jure reasons, but in the long scope of history it&amp;#x27;s simply a question of maintaining liberty or lessening of liberty - is the fruit rotting? Are we falling back towards the illiberal norm and how fast? The reasons of the day are irrelevant. The bargain is known - de-risk at the cost of liberty. The dynamic is known - the powerful seek to consolidate more power. The rest is filler.</text></comment>
<story><title>&apos;I&apos;ve Got Nothing to Hide&apos; and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2007)</title><url>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheRealDunkirk</author><text>I got upset about Echelon, almost 30 years ago, and then got further upset with the Patriot Act. The internet kill switch. Etc. Et. al. In speaking with my pastor about these things, he gave me the line, &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ve got nothing to hide.&amp;quot; Sure, he, personally, is above reproach, and would lay his life bare, but he considers conversations with people he counsels to be sacrosanct. Would he like his text messages and emails published? Of course not. Even he absolutely DOES have things to hide!&lt;p&gt;My pastor is a superhumanly wise person. Almost everything he has said has turned out to be true. Of the Patriot Act, he agreed that the government probably overreached, but he said these things are like a pendulum, and eventually it would swing back. On this subject, he has been completely wrong. The pendulum just keeps going. The problem is that both sides of US politics are in on it, so I don&amp;#x27;t know what will ever correct this course. It seems that, eventually, we&amp;#x27;ll have Chinese-style, socially-scored citizenship, just run by corporations instead of the government.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gambiting</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt;On this subject, he has been completely wrong. The pendulum just keeps going.&lt;p&gt;Well, the hope is that it will eventually swing back with super strength. Maybe it will take a full collapse of the western society first and it might happen long after we&amp;#x27;re all dead, but I&amp;#x27;m hoping that society &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; go back on this.</text></comment>