Why Privacy

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

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Here's one of my old essays that I found while doing disk cleanup:

WHY PRIVACY?

The last few years have been bad ones for privacy in America.  As of June
1st, 
1987 it became a crime to hire anyone, even your own child, who does not 
present identification cards.  The "drug" laws passed in recent years require 
ever more detailed reporting of smaller and smaller cash transactions.  Any 
children over the age of two who are to be claimed as dependents on their 
parent's tax returns now need Social Security numbers.  I suppose that with 
all this new prying there will be less illegal drug use and everyone will pay 
their fair share of taxes although past restrictions on privacy did not seem 
to reduce these problems.

We seem headed for a National Identity Card system.  According to government 
officials promoting ID cards, the main argument in favor of this radical step 
is that the law-abiding would have nothing to fear from it.  This seems a 
curious argument for the proponents of such a dramatic change in the 
relationship between the people of the U.S. and their government since it 
fails to state any benefit for the law-abiding either.

The fact is that the argument is false.  The law-abiding have a great deal to 
fear from all invasions of their privacy by the minions of the state.  If the 
history of this century has proved anything, it has proved that the innocent 
have far more to fear from government than the guilty.

Why guard the privacy of the innocent (the guilty can and will take care of 
themselves)?  After all the enforcers say, "If you have nothing to hide, you 
don't need privacy."  The answer should be obvious,  "The innocent won't know 
what they have to hide until it's too late."

The reason to value privacy is simply that we know from the most casual 
reading of the history of Europe that every sort of person has at certain 
times and in certain places been killed because of what others knew about 
them.  Over the last 400 years, within the confines of Europe, peasants, 
workers, aristocrats, bourgeois shopkeepers, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, 
Communists, Nazis, anarchists, monarchists, and others have faced death
simply 
because of what they were.  These people may have gone about their business
in 
seeming safety for years until a change in circumstance marked them for
death. 
 By then it was too late for them to hide their selves. 

This is why privacy must be valued.  It may be that every single one of the 
millions of current employees of the international, national, state, and
local 
governments who will make use of the information collected about us is a
noble 
human being without a tyrannical bone in his (or her) body but we cannot 
guarantee the future.  The average American has some forty years of life left 
and forty years is a long time in the life of today's nations.  There may
come 
a time within those forty years when innocent information surrendered to the 
state will mean death.  No nation is immune to domestic or foreign tyrrany, 
given the fluid nature of modern politics.

To make the abstract concrete, how was it that the Nazi government of Germany 
identified Jews for extermination?  It proved to be a simple matter of 
consulting local records.  Did the Jewish mother and father in 1880 or 1900
or 
1920 realize when they listed their child's religion on birth records in full 
compliance with the law that they were condemning that child to death?  Or 
what about the passport.  Promoted at the beginning of this century as a
means 
of easing international travel and safeguarding the passage rights of 
neutrals, it has become a major impediment to international travel and even a 
threat to life.  If one is on board an airliner with armed Palestinian 
terrorists, would one rather be carrying an American, Israeli, British,
Swiss, 
or Syrian passport?

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