Feels like out of all the amendements, the 4th is the most violated one in US history.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Privacy
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Fuck me, the last part hit me HARD. I won't get into the details why because it is painful for me to talk about it.
One of the things I warn people about privacy is that it's not about what they might find, it's about what they might pretend to find.
Plenty of dirty cops plant evidence. Who's to say they don't like someone and keep a flash drive full of Cheese Pizza to plant on their computer. Usually that kind of logic gets people on board more easily.
He misattributes that quote
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1558
You will find the quote in this book that predates Nazi Germany
Not merely was my own mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friends—people residing in places as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about this matter: "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."
So the quote was about the American secret service?
Yes
Here’s a scientific dissertation on how and why that phrase sucks: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
It’s so easy to use but very hard to fights against. Worst case of bullshit.
We desperately need a constitutional right to privacy, but I doubt that will happen in my or our country's lifetime.
Which country? Plenty of countries have at least a nominal right to privacy, but it doesn't end up meaning much when US companies own your country's communications platforms.
I'll let you guess, although you probably only need one guess.
My response to this is usually "Do you have curtains?"
Very late edit: I have found it very effective. It causes pause for thought because everyone values privacy, they just find it hard to picture themselves needing it. Curtains.
My response is similar, usually the good old 'Do you shut the door when you shit?'.
When we start getting specific, I'll often try and frame data harvesting in a much more visceral way. If they say they don't care that xyz keeps track of everyone they talk to, I ask them to imagine an actual person standing behind them, making notes on a clipboard about every interaction they have with someone, and how that would make them feel.
The answer to that Reddit post is to delete your account on Reddit.
I have "nothing to hide" but I STILL like privacy tyvm. Hence I'll shit in public with the stall door closed, and not disclose my wank schedule on Facebook
ok ill be the one to say it then: the NSA are fascists. the NSA is evil.
Lol i really cringed at that phrasing about "good people doing bad things". Theyre literally fascists doing fascism to advance their interests, it really doesn't matter if they are vegan and have dogs.
I also have plenty to hide (crimes)
Goebbels certainly didn't believe in the right to privacy but there is nothing connecting him to the "if you have nothing to hide..." quote. He certainly wasn't the first to come up with it, as it can be found in a 1917 piece by Upton Sinclair.
It seems like Goebbels' connection to the quote is one of these "it feels so true that it has to be true" misattributions that floats around on the internet and in popular culture.
And by the way, the NSA are Nazis, they are bad people doing bad things for evil reasons.
Snowden doesn't even think the NSA is evil:
The lesson of 2013 is not that the NSA is evil. It’s that the path is dangerous. The network path is something that we need to help users get across safely. Our job as technologists, our job as engineers, our job as anybody who cares about the internet in any way, who has any kind of personal or commercial involvement is literally to armor the user, to protect the user and to make it that they can get from one end of the path to the other safely without interference,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague.
He reaffirmed his view a year later at Fusion’s 2016 Real Future Fair in Oakland, California. “If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change.… They’re not gonna jump up and protect your rights,” he said. “Technology works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.”
The nazi loved the "nothing to hide". What better than all your information, like religion, nicely written down in official records if you want to suddenly round up one specific group of people. Or DEI wanting to deport a certain group, and DOGE doing their best to suck up all information on everybody. You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who's going to be in office soon.
I still think DOGE is just feeding all that information to Palantir, and everything else is a pretext to that goal. They want an AI embedded directly into the government, making a large dependency on it, and bypassing checks and balances quickly has allowed that to happen.
Like those people that signed up for DNA sequencing for heritage research. Now that info is going to be sold. The problem is it could be used to discriminate for health insurance or other nefarious reasons
You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.
The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don't care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who's pushing for it.
It's like due process - you don't want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don't understand why then it's time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.
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