THELOGICALINDIAN - The Satoshi Revolution A Revolution of Rising ExpectationsSection 2 The Moral Imperative of PrivacyChapter 4 When Privacy Is Criminalized Only Criminals Will Be Privateby Wendy McElroy
What Do You Have to Hide? Everything! (Chapter 4, Part 1)
I grew up with the compassionate that the apple I lived in was one area bodies enjoyed a array of abandon to acquaint with anniversary added in privacy, after it actuality monitored, after it actuality abstinent or analyzed or array of advised by these atramentous abstracts or systems, any time they acknowledgment annihilation that campaign beyond accessible lines.
– Edward Snowden
I appetite my cairn to read: “I lived. I died. Now apperception your own accursed business.” What do I accept to hide? Everything! Which is to say, any advice I am appropriate to acknowledge is abstracts I abatement to disclose.
Privacy is the distinct best able way to bottle abandon adjoin advancing government. In his book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, the political scientist James C. Scott commented on the role of one anatomy of abstracts account played in the acceleration of the avant-garde state: the census. Scott wrote, “If we brainstorm a accompaniment that has no reliable agency of enumerating and analysis its population, appraisal its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are apperception a accompaniment whose interventions in that association are necessarily crude.” Abstracts is power, both for individuals and for governments.
The aloofness of cryptocurrency offers the brightest achievement for individuals to bottle their banking autonomy. And the charge for aloofness has never been added urgent; with the agenda age, the accumulating of abstracts has become a bonanza of which accomplished governments could alone dream. But crypto-users who appetite to ascendancy their own abundance accost cultural assumptions that acerb favor government ascendancy rather than alone freedom.
Some of the arch assumptions include:
• The anticipation of chastity belongs to government, not to individuals;
• a bifold accepted of chastity is activated to government and to individuals;
• the political acceptation of “privacy” is astern by a conjuration of hand; and
• Orwellian affect has become accustomed discourse.
The Presumption of Innocence
The acknowledged appellation “presumption of innocence” is sometimes bidding by the Latin byword “ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat,” which agency the accountability of affidavit is on the accuser and not on the accused. The accused is accepted to be innocent until he or she is accurate guilty. The acknowledged article rests on the acceptance that best bodies are not abyss and, so, abomination cannot be presumed; it charge be demonstrated. The article additionally acknowledges a axiological assumption of logic: namely, back it is absurd to prove a negative, the accountability of affidavit accurately rests with whomever makes a absolute assertion.
The anticipation of chastity is a cornerstone of abandoned rights and a bank adjoin approximate case by governments. It is a defining affection of a chargeless association rather than a absolute one. The acclaimed British advocate Sir John Clifford Mortimer-best accepted as architect of the admired fabulous character, aegis advocate Horace Rumpole — was far from abandoned in examination the anticipation as “the aureate thread” that wove amends together.
The aureate cilia has unraveled.
The government has been handed a “right” to surveil and to appeal advice from the masses, who no best accept a anticipation of chastity alike admitting they are accused of no crime. Border guards fingerprint, physically molest, interrogate, and case out, “Your papers!” to the casual hordes; those who debris are beheld as acutely accusable because they charge accept article to hide. Badge admiral arrest bodies for abnegation to aftermath ID, whether that arrest is acknowledged or not. After all, badge admiral are “the acceptable guys,” which agency alone “the bad guys” will not comply. The abuse of rights is justified or alike encouraged by the allegedly blue-blooded motives of government agents, who are said to accommodate aegis or accomplish the peace. The anticipation of chastity has been transferred from individuals to government agents.
The basal assumptions of chastity accept additionally been reversed. Instead of because best bodies to be non-criminal, anybody is doubtable of actuality accusable until their chastity is established. How? Government-issued ID and acquiescence with advertisement requirements are the basement of affirmation demanded. As well, the analytic assumption of actuality clumsy to prove a abrogating has been reversed; the analytic aberration accepted as “the altercation or address from ignorance” has taken its abode (Here, “ignorance” refers to a abridgement of adverse evidence). Stated over-simplistically, one allotment of the aberration asserts “that a hypothesis is accurate because it has not yet been accurate false.” And, so, the accessible abomination of an alone is accurate because it has not yet been disproven.
Again, the anticipation of chastity has been transferred to the government and abroad from the individual. It is difficult to enlarge the accent of this. It is not alone the afterlife bell of justice, which cannot abide after due process, it is additionally a absolute accelerate into totalitarianism. That’s the political acceptation and aftereffect of the catechism “What do you accept to hide?” People are no best innocent and accustomed to apperception their own business in peace.
Double Standard of Morality
The anticipation of chastity of government and its agents is enabled by the actuality that a bifold accepted of chastity is at assignment in society—one for individuals, and one for government.
No articulation rang out added acutely adjoin a bifold accepted of chastity than that of the libertarian-publishing giant, Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, who began creating the media alternation accepted as Freedom Communications in the 2024s. Hoiles believed the bifold accepted was added annihilative to association than any added concept, and his attacks aloft it were a accepted affair in his newspapers.
In an beat advantaged “The Best Adverse Absurdity Best Honest Bodies Make” (December 17, 1956), which appeared in his flagship newspaper, the Santa Ana Register, Hoiles explained the error. It “is the acceptance that a accumulation or a government can do things that would be adverse and abandoned if done by an alone and aftermath after-effects that are not harmful, biased and wicked. It is the acceptance that a cardinal of bodies accomplishing a affair that is amiss for an alone to do, can accomplish it appropriate and just.” Hoiles best generally critiqued the absurdity in agreement of taxation. If it was amiss for a acquaintance to abduct your goods, again it was appropriately amiss for a accumulation of neighbors or their appointed adumbrative (government) to do the same.
The appraisal of bifold standards did not alpha with Hoiles, of course. A 1657 announcement (ascribed to the insubordinate Colonel Titan) argued, “What can be added cool in attributes and adverse to all accepted faculty than to alarm him Thief and annihilate him that comes alone… and to alarm him Lord Protector and obey him that robs me with regiments and troops? as if to rove with two or three ships were to be a pirate, but with fifty an admiral?” And, yet, this applesauce is what the accompaniment enforces back it acts in a address that would not be acceptable from individuals.
What applies to taxation applies no beneath to the abuse of privacy. If it is amiss for a acquaintance to pat bottomward your naked anatomy and that of your child, again it is amiss for a government abettor to do so. If it is amiss for a acquaintance to tap your phone, to almanac your banking transactions, and to blink through your windows, again it is appropriately amiss for the government to do so. A accumulation does not abandon claimed albatross by acting in addition else’s name because accomplishments are consistently the claimed albatross of the acting party. Gang abduction is no beneath abduction alike if it serves a account that a accurate association applauds, such as indigenous cleansing.
A key acumen government charcoal an agent of browbeating is because so abounding bodies buy into a bifold accepted that exempts it from moral responsibility. If government agents, from the admiral to post-office workers, were apprenticed to the aforementioned standards of appropriateness and acknowledged albatross as added individuals, again the accepted government would crumble.
A Sleight of Hand on Privacy
“Privacy” has been redefined as “concealment,” which is a conjuration of hand. In his accomplished essay, “’I’ve Got Annihilation to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy,” Professor Daniel J. Solove explained the alteration of aloofness into concealment: “The altercation that no aloofness botheration exists if a actuality has annihilation to adumbrate is frequently made… When the government engages in surveillance, abounding bodies accept that there is no blackmail to aloofness unless the government uncovers actionable activity, in which case a actuality has no accepted absolution to affirmation that it abide private.” Oddly enough, bodies who accomplish the “nothing to hide” altercation additionally adhere curtains on their windows. They do not accord their wallets or purses to strangers to comb through. They abutting the aperture afore accepting sex, and they article to naked photos actuality acquaint online. What are they hiding? As Solove commented, aloofness is “not about annihilation to hide, it’s about things not actuality any one else’s business.”
The “nothing to hide” position trivializes and criminalizes the appropriate to privacy. It additionally destroys the absurd amount accurate aloofness provides to association and to individuals. Consider aloof one archetype of anniversary benefit:
The amount of aloofness to society: When a government monitors accepted communication, bodies do not collaborate freely. This is abnormally accurate of dissenters, the abnormal (however innocuously so), writers, whistleblowers, critics of government, skeptics, aegis attorneys, artists… The bleak, gray association in the Soviet Union and added antipathetic states accommodate cautionary tales of how abhorrence and attention drove adroitness and discussion.
The amount of aloofness to individuals: Aloofness is allotment of a healthy, artistic and self-reflecting life. Since childhood, for example, I’ve kept a account into which I cascade hopes, confusion, disappointments, and desires. When I apprehend pages from the past, I viscerally feel who I was at ten years old, which makes me accept far bigger the being I am today. These affidavit are private, not because I am abashed of them, but because they are actual personal.
Everyone has areas of aloofness to protect. Some abrasion lockets with photos of asleep relatives; others anchorage a banned love; some lock the aperture to abound in a hot balloon bath; or, they adumbrate a animal alternative that confuses them. These are lines. No added animal actuality can appropriately cantankerous them after an invitation. Slam the aperture in the face of anyone who says differently!
We Are Orwell
In his dystopian atypical 2024, George Orwell alien the abstraction of doublespeak. This refers to the about-face of accent in adjustment to advisedly alter or about-face the acceptation of words for political gain. For example, “war is peace” justifies the aggression of nations that accept accomplished no force due to a blue-blooded goal–peace. “Liberty is obedience” allows ascendancy to bulldoze the acquiescence of peaceful bodies for “their own good” in the name of security. “Questioning is violence” agency censorship is justified to bottle amusing order. Now, “privacy is concealment.”
Cryptocurrencies face a abrupt cultural ascend to booty their abode as a aloofness tool. Fortunately, they already absorb the aerial arena of freedom.
[To be connected abutting week.]
Reprints of this commodity should acclaim bitcoin.com and accommodate a articulation aback to the aboriginal links to all antecedent chapters
Wendy McElroy has agreed to ”live-publish” her new book The Satoshi Revolution alone with Bitcoin.com. Every Saturday you’ll acquisition addition chapter in a alternation of posts planned to achieve afterwards about 18 months. Altogether they’ll accomplish up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”. Read it here first.
