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I have nothing to hide |
2013-06-13 15:58 |
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No, I lied. I have a lot to hide actually, and the stuff that I know about is probably only scratching the tip of the iceberg. Tim Carney noted at the Washington Examiner:
Copy a song to your laptop from a friend’s Beyonce CD? You just violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Did you buy some clothes in Delaware because they were tax free? You’re probably evading taxes. Did you give your 20-year-old nephew a glass of wine at dinner? Illegal in many states. Citizens that the federal government wants to indict, the federal government can indict if it monitors them closely enough. That’s why it’s so disturbing to learn that the federal government doesn’t need to obtain a warrant on us in order to get our emails and phone records.
“I have nothing to hide”, they say. They are also lying. You can think of the situation as such: Imagine an entity that has every single record of everything you have ever said or done, and the ability to sort through it very quickly and efficiently. Imagine, now, all of the things that you have probably said or done thinking that nobody was looking or listening. Government was built to serve the people, yet the ball is no longer in our court. What is even more alarming is that Senator Mark Udall has written:
We have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence.
Facebook, Google, et al. are public companies who have to make their investors happy before all. Essentially, they have an invested interest to work towards the money incentives, in this case the advertisers. The real value of a product like Facebook to advertisers is the amount of information that Facebook can use to target ads towards you. Third parties (advertisers/Facebook/etc.) cannot gain access to large quantities of information in the context of end-to-end security, therefore there is also an invested interest in not implementing security measures to protect user data. As long as people aren’t paying a premium for their privacy, end-to-end encryption at scale is dead in the water since there are no incentives to work on it.