Privacy

The recent Wikileaks controvercy had me thinking about privacy and how it is applied to certain groups.

When the accessibility of the internet grew, several phenomena grew with it. We have the explosion of social media and the ability of simple online searches to expose a lot of your personal information to anyone with an internet connection. Law enforcement agencies started putting cameras on police cars, and sometimes drove with camera crews - like the show Cops. They put surveillance cameras more and more in public places and then started thinking about putting them on roadways as speed traps or red light enforcers. When 9/11 hit, government officials started to devise ways to improve security. Some of these ways involved not just more intrusive searches on people at airports, but the possibility that your email might be read by someone in the government. Some people see no problem with this increased scrutiny. You will often hear proponents of increased government power of surveillance of individuals saying that we live in a different world and you shouldn't expect as much individual privacy today.

If this is such a good idea for individual people, why is it not a good idea for governments or large corporations? What's fair is fair, right? After all, if you're not doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide? That's what I'm being told as a justification for losing my privacy, so shouldn't that apply to government and industry too?

We are expected to vote for people and then re-evaluate their performance during the next election and decide whether to re-elect them or not. It's like a performance review for a job. If we don't know what they are doing or how they are doing it because they get to classify their actions and hide their activities behind a veil of security, then we really can't judge the job they are doing and cannot in good conscience decide whether to vote for them or not. I'm not talking about exposing CIA operatives, and endangering secret agents. I figure that the best kept secrets like that are already better protected and will be the last secrets to be exposed anyway. The exception was the Valerie Plame affair, and that was done from the inside. What I am talking about exposing is why we go to war, what corporations are pulling government strings, and why decisions are being made. I don't need to know the name of or get a picture of a field agent doing his job, but I want to know if the government sent him out to perform assassinations or subvert governments or abduct people for interrogations.

Secrecy allows you to torture people, imprison them without cause, assassinate inconvenient rivals, start wars, and ignore festering problems. Secrecy allows you to conspire to fix prices, put unsafe products into the public's hands, continue to practice unsafe procedures in the workplace, and pollute without any control. The worst an individual could do with secrecy might be to defraud someone, injure an individual, or do drugs. The harm anyone as an individual can do is so much less than governments and corporations can do, yet why are people arguing that my secrecy must be sacrificed to protect the rest of the public and they aren't arguing that the big players that have much more impact and can do much more harm need greater protections from public scrutiny?

Some have expressed disappointment in President Obama, feeling that he has not lived up to his campaign promises (obviously, his opponents express disappointment just that he's in office). I have heard a defense of Obama that speculated that if you knew what he knows, if you saw all the inside information that he now has access to since he went into office, you'd understand why he is acting the way he is. This justification is not acceptible. If every new elected official gets to go to Washington and disappear behind a veil of secrecy and ignore what they were sent to office to do, their campaign promises mean nothing. If we can't expect anyone we elect to do the things they say they are going to do, then it doesn't do any good to vote for anyone. We as voters are responsible for our leaders actions, and how can we evaluate how they make decisions if we can't even see what they see?

There were serious misuses of privacy in the previous administration, and the hope in electing Obama was that things would roll back and revert to times when government was more accessible. Vice President Cheney in particular used to claim executive privelige in order to do his job unencumbered, unquestioned, and without interference from the public. That started with his work with energy corporations in drafting policy in his energy task force. The particulars of those meetings never did see the light of day. In the absense of hard evidence, I assume that energy corporations were given the ability to effect legislation and enforcement in ways that circumvented restrictions and benefited the bottom line of the company at the expense of the general public. The result was an unneccesary war in Iraq and $4 per gallon gasoline. The other assertion that Cheney used to make was that our security measures had prevented many terrorist attacks. When asked for specifics, he couldn't tell us about them for "security" reasons. This supposedly justified torture, detainment, rendition, and the erosion of individual privacy. If you were able to rip away this veil of secrecy and found that there were no attacks repelled and the questionable actions made no difference in our security, you would have a clear case to remove the perpetrators from office. But since they got to say what it was we got to see, it was easy for them to simply restict this information, which gave them more freedom to do whatever they wanted.

I say we should open up the files and look at the information. People in government and industry should always act in a way that they will not be ashamed of when it comes to light in the public. What they do has a broader effect and they expect no less from us.