In Wired Magazine: The Eternal Value of Privacy, by Bruce Schneier
  2006 May 18

The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of 
ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale 
surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything 
wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no 
cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, 
and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something 
wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right 
as they are -- is that they accept the premise 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.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the 
watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously 
said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most 
honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch 
someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just 
blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance 
information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on 
political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing 
nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not 
deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for 
reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy 
of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. 
Privacy is a basic human need.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the 
framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out 
privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of 
their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was 
unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be 
inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted 
criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to 
the concept of liberty.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of 
correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We 
become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- 
either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be 
brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused 
upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, 
because everything we do is observable and recordable.

How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half 
years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a 
phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message 
exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was 
terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid 
that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our 
paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly 
altered.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. 
This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And 
it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, 
private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The 
real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under 
threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative 
scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, 
security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very 
definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy 
even when we have nothing to hide.


-- 
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  search://"Daniel Reeves"