Since this blog is called Live Free or Die, I feel I should occasionally try to focus on issues of freedom. This essay is a thoughtful refutation of an infuriating argument:

The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures. To return to my discussion of literary metaphors, the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.

I attended a conference on the uses of healthcare information once and confronted the “nothing to hide” argument from a physician. However, his point was that he wanted to know if people had a condition that might affect their performance, so he could exclude them.

UPDATE: I was going to make a separate post, but on reflection I’ll just draw your attention here to Mike Konczal’s article today on the National Surveillance State. Konczal quotes from a paper by Jack Balkin on the specific dangers to freedom that a Kafka-esque information-gathering bureaucracy can create. I particularly liked this bit:

Ordinary citizens can no longer assume that what they do will be forgotten; rather, records will be stored and collated with other information collected at other times and places. The greatest single protector of privacy— amnesia—will soon be a thing of the past. As technology improves and storage costs decline, the National Surveillance State becomes the State that Never Forgets.