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Law in the Internet Society
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Safety in Obscurity or Irrelevance-- By HumzaD - 13 Dec 2015 The “security” and “nothing-to-hide” (NTH) arguments are persistent thorns in the side of privacy advocates. Eric Schmidt supports the former through the PATRIOT Act by invoking a simplistic version of the latter: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Mr. Schmidt hinders discourse surrounding this debate by leaving privacy advocates to attack a straw man of what is actually a potent argument that we cannot dismiss out of hand. By presuming that privacy serves no purpose other than to conceal wrongdoing, Mr. Schmidt ignores those things which are not secret but still merit privacy, such as information about where he lives and how much he makes (found through a Google search).Eric Schmidt is an outstandingly poor spokesman for this point of view, having himself some very dark secrets to hide. But it's not relevant: he's just being used here as a straw man. Why do you need all these words to say that anonymity is not the same as secrecy, and that its purpose isn't to hide secrets. I've already done all that work for you in the teaching I have either done or tried to do, and you could use the valuable space here for your own ideas.A better form of the argument acknowledges the trade-off between sacrificing the ability to hide anything private and greater accountability through transparency. But as an American Muslim, recent events remind me of the bigger problem with this appeal to transparency: awareness that everything we say and do is being monitored leads to excess self-censorship, which entails the repression not only the illegal, but also of anything that could possibly be construed to be wrong for fear of persecution or prosecution. This fear suggests that anonymity is required to preserve free speech. Benefits of TransparencyThe recent Paris attacks, along with our countless mass shootings suggest that no level of transparency (barring the possibility of precogs) would bring absolute security. Yet it is irresponsible to ignore the clear benefits surveillance can provide. To see these benefits, we need not look as far as China, where utter deprivation of liberty has led to murder rates that (allegedly) are one fifth that of the U.S.What possible evidence do you have that despotism is what accounts for whatever the difference in "murder rates" is between the US and China (assuming that you have some reason to trust Chinese social statistics, which few specialists in any discipline I know of do)? Is it too much to ask for some actual evidence of some kind before we accept the slanderous claim that unfreedom is safer than freedom for anybody anywhere at anytime? If I am required to believe this, I should at least be asked to do so on the basis of something other than pure assertion.Instead we can ask whether we should allow a company like Persistent Surveillance Systems to solve crimes using aerial footage gathered from planes circling cities overhead. The military technology has successfully solved a slew of murders in Juarez and allegedly reduced Dayton’s crime rate by a third. As one would suspect, mere knowledge that Big Brother might be watching makes some criminals think twice. The company’s founder has worked with the ACLU on a privacy policy that seems to infringe only on the criminals’ rights to hide crime (footage is only used to see one-pixel blobs move from crime scene to hideout after the crime). The slippery slope argument against this narrowly tailored program is not enough to outweigh its potential to prevent harm. Similarly, police brutalities are reduced when cops are forced to wear inescapable body cameras. In a clear violation of police privacy (whether such a thing should exist), the public plays God to the police’s conscience to inhibit offensive behavior. Beyond this physical monitoring, greater information and transparency can promote government accountability. First, with unbridled access to our information, the government out struggle to hide behind “known unknown” type arguments. After 9/11, over 700 men with names like mine were detained for behavior sometimes as trivial as having a roommate that developed photos of the WTC. In a world where the government knew everything about these men, the FBI would struggle to proceed with arguments appealing to the danger of letting the men go because of a lack of knowledge. They would also avoid reliance in the first place on intel as flimsy as the PENTTBOM leads. Second, we are now better equipped to unearth hypocrisy and corruption in the government. Anti-gay politicians, for example, are likely to think twice before sending pictures on Grindr. The New Price of RelevanceThis second benefit is only possible because the irrelevant majority, embodying the apathy towards important people inherent in NTH, have approved the heightened cost of being in the limelight. Our public figures need not worry about the heightened scrutiny if they have done no wrong. The obvious problem with this heightened scrutiny is that it may be unwise to impeach our public figures for Twitter affairs, even if that impeachment sometimes seems just. A subtler problem is that if I accept NTH, I strive for irrelevance. Even if I have done nothing wrong, I censor myself to remain unimportant enough to avoid the invasive scrutiny proving my innocence. A third problem is that the called for transparency gives way to false impeachment through (sometimes insidious) misinterpretations. Power knows that six lines written by the most honest man can be construed to have him hanged. My Muslim peers and I have been especially cognizant of this problem, painstakingly divorcing ourselves from anything but the most patriotic expressions, Google searches, and, consequently, thoughts, ever since three Muslim students were detained for one of these misinterpretations. Serving as the community liaison to the FBI on its local Muslim surveillance project, my father explained to me that I had become relevant. But does such self-censorship constitute a loss of free speech? The question brings to mind a situation in which most Americans were rooting against liberty: Giuliani’s prohibition on masks (upheld by Justice Ginsburg) at a 1999 KKK rally, which successfully limited the turnout to 18 Klan members. The Klan claimed the loss of anonymity prevented their ability to express themselves. Should we all be forced to express our viewpoints, however unpopular, without masks as we expect of the Klan, considering the beatdown the Klan received that day?The answer is yes in Mr. Schmidt’s world where the society’s approval serves as moral compass. The Klan do not want their faces shown because they have something to hide. They have reason to be ashamed of their opinions. But Mr. Schmidt would also force all the potential Dr. Kings of the world to choose between the same beatdown and utter silence, guaranteeing freedom of speech only to those unimportant or brave enough to pay the price. An ideal solution would eliminate violence towards unpopular ideas. Until we can figure out how to get everyone on board with that, anonymity is necessary. This draft uses most of is words in ways that don't advance your thinking for the reader. Eric Schmidt doesn't need to be here; you don't need to differentiate secrecy and anonymity; you don't need to explain that anonymity protects the freedom of unpopular thought, or suggest that "the ideal solution" to any problem is that we should all just stop hurting one another. I'm not sure whether it is important to you to argue that mass surveillance is good in some way that produces "trade-offs." If so, I would like to understand whether that's because mass surveillance violates no fundamental civil, constitutional or human right, or because from now on we are supposed to accept mere balancing with respect to such rights, so that they are fully defeasible if "the murder rate" goes down through their violation. Neither of these arguments appeals to me. Indeed I think I can say that I have always rejected both of them completely. But if I'm going to give up on one of them, shouldn't I at least know which one it is on which I am supposed to be surrendering to the force of this argument? As I say, I'm not sure this point is really important to you either. That's because I don't know what the essay is really about, because you don't explicitly tell me. One of the advantages of getting Mr Schmidt out of there is that you could begin the essay with a short, clear statement of the idea of your own that you want the reader to take from the essay. Subsequent paragraphs could then be devoted to developing that idea: showing how you came by it, what objections you considered and how you resolve them, and what further inquiries the reader might undertake for herself in order to use your idea in her own thinking. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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