Responding to "Nothing to hide, Nothing to fear"

Every time we talk about mass surveillance, privacy or the security services’ powers we and our supporters find ourselves at the other end of that familiar phrase, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”. It's time to challenge that.

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This powerful sentence does many things:

• It encourages a complete trust in state powers - that you will never face wrongful suspicion or misuse of powers, for only the guilty are affected by mass surveillance.

• It encourages people to embrace their own innocence, to look inwards, and not to look at how other people have been treated or targeted.

• And after all, this is a climate of fear. Being told that nothing to hide means you have nothing to fear is reassuring. We all want nothing to fear.

• It also introduces the vague threat that just maybe, if you haven’t behaved, you do have something to fear. Not something to challenge, or criticise, but to fear.

• And so it keeps us in our place.

So let’s give some answers back:

I wrote a piece about how 'surveillance makes us less safe' earlier in the year. I will say again that I believe we should choose to look outwards, and think about all the people who really need the protections of privacy, and all the examples of when they've had that right invaded:

• Victims of police misconduct. For example, Doreen Lawrence and her family were surveilled in attempts to smear them and undermine their fight for justice.

• MPs need privacy in particular for their constituency work, which involves meeting with people who share very personal stories and situations, and challenging the actions of the government. For example, recently MPs confidential calls with prison staff were recorded and monitored.

• Disabled people are often scared of speaking out about mistreatment because they are can be put under direct surveillance by both government bodies, and neighbours, to try and 'catch them out' as 'not really disabled'.

• Environmental campaigners have for many years been under direct surveillance, particularly women who were deceived into having relationships with police officers.

• Journalists are frequently at risk of big business and government surveillance tracking their leaks, their stories, their whistleblowers, and their criticism of the government and the police.

• Whistle-blowers cannot expose wrong-doing, whether by the state or powerful businesses, in a world that always watches, but are meant to have special protections.

• Lawyers rely on client confidentiality, a principle which is key for a fair trial, and for a working justice system.

• People of minority sexualities and identities can lose their families or jobs or security when robbed of the control over who they share their identity with.

• Doctors, hospital workers and their patients expect to have confidentiality when discussing personal health.

• Encryption advocates and researchers are monitored for what they know in case they discover existing secrets, or new knowledge of security and software, which the government can use.

• Muslim community face racial profiling and Islamophobia.

• Women being harassed need the safety of anonymity and privacy, to defend against abuse in their online spaces and aggression like swatting in their homes.

• Women stalked or tracked by abusive partners, which has become a problem so common that Women's Aid has a clear and prominent guide to hiding your tracks online on its website.

These are all people for whom surveillance turns into real, felt harms. The vulnerability created by an all-watching surveillance state affects everyone who needs their privacy. When they are listed out like this, you can see how so many people fall into one of these categories. Perhaps you find yourself in this list, or know people who are.

Even if a service is something that you are not using in your day to day life, whether that is a hospital, a library, or the local bus service, we understand that those things should still exist for those who rely on them. In the same way, if one person does not feel that they actively need the right to privacy, we should campaign and fight for all those for whom privacy, and the security it provides, is vital.

However, there are a lot of other perspectives on the cliche, "nothing to hide, nothing to fear", and here are some of the best ripostes our members shared with us as their preferred answers:

• "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."
  -- Edward Snowden, US government whistle-blower and former NSA worker

• "The premise [is] 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."
  -- Bruce Schneier, computer security and privacy specialist

• “Equally, what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people. There are things we are willing to tell our physician or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse or our best friend that we would be mortified for the rest of the world to learn. People can very easily say that they don’t value privacy, but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief.”
  --“Why privacy matters" TED Talk by Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, journalist and author

• “There is the inherently selfish response of ‘I have nothing to hide’. Well it is true that I am not ill. It is true that I am not blind. But I still want to live in a world that has hospitals. I still want to live on a street that has accessibility for blind people. And it is also the case that I want to live in a world where everyone has privacy, thus dignity, confidentiality and integrity in their daily lives, without having to ask for it, to beg it from a master. Because it is the case that when you ask someone for those things, they may not grant them. And then you will know that you are not free”.
  --Jacob Appelbaum, computer security researcher and hacker

• "You may consider yourself law-abidingly white as snow, and it won’t matter a bit. What does matter is whether you set off the red flags in the mostly-automated surveillance... When you frequently stop at a certain bar on your way driving home from work, the Department of Driving Licenses will draw certain conclusions as to your eligibility for future driving licenses – regardless of the fact that you think they serve the world’s best reindeer meatballs in that bar, and never had had a single beer there. People will stop thinking in terms of what is legal, and start acting in self-censorship to avoid being red-flagged, out of pure self-preservation."
  --Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish pirate party.

• "The broad purposes of the surveillance and its secret nature prevents open debate and deliberation in Parliament, thereby preventing democratic authorisation and oversight. "If you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide" is not the language of a democratic society. Our right to privacy forms the bedrock upon which all of our other rights and freedoms are built. The Lords Constitutional Committee (2009) agreed that "Mass surveillance has the potential to erode privacy. As privacy is an essential pre-requisite to the exercise of individual freedom, its erosion weakens the constitutional foundations on which democracy and good governance have traditionally been based in this country."
  --The Don't Spy on Us coalition (of which ORG is a member)

 

Share image by Brian Yap (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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