3 Reasons the ‘Nothing to Hide’ Crowd Should Be Worried About Government Surveillance #NSA
1. Every American Is Probably a Criminal, Really
That Americans think they have nothing to hide in the first place is a sign of how little attention they're paying to the behavior of our Department of Justice. Many Americans have run afoul of federal laws without even knowing it. 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.
Harvey Silverglate even wrote a book about it, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. The Department of Justice has been notably and egregiously using federal laws to destroy lives. Former Tribune employee Matthew Keys is facing federal charges and possibly prison time because he gave his old password to a member of Anonymous, who changed a headline at the website for the Los Angeles Times. The vagueness of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes violating a website’s terms of service a possible felony. We’re not just referring to government websites. All websites. Given the digital focus of the PRISM program, everybody should be concerned about what could potentially happen should that data end up in the hands of federal prosecutors.
The “nothing to hide” crowd's involvement in political activism is likely limited. That’s perfectly fine. Nobody should feel obligated to join the Occupy movement or a Tea Party organization or be the kind of person who might end up on a politician’s enemies list. But to say “I have nothing to hide” is a fundamentally selfish declaration. What about parents, sisters, brothers, partners, and other loved ones? Can we say the same for them? You don’t have to have an illness whose suffering can be eased with the use of medical marijuana to be concerned about the way the federal government treats this industry. Would you say, “I don’t need medical marijuana so I don’t care if they imprison those who do”? Sadly, some people do. Fundamentally, saying “I have nothing to hide,” is similar to saying “I don’t care about those who do.”
Read more at:-
http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/12/three-reasons-the-nothing-to-hide-crowd
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