The
Eternal Value of Privacy
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 custodies 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 eaves dropped
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.