The Value of Privacy

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The Value of Privacy

Last month, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against
the American people rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of
these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear
every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive
databases, data mining, and other wholesale surveillance measures: "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 ipsos custodes?" ("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 -- him 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 conversations in the past
four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped 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 was life in the 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.

A version of this essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70886-0.html