alt Hacker NewsI have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
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You should ask him if he's ever worked with someone who's pulled information on someone else for personal matters. Or if he'd be okay with personal information being pulled about himself. I'm usually surprised when people believe in the political process so much they can't fathom a government who will abuse their powers to undermine democracy.
> If you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?
Next time ask him if he'd be OK living in a glass house, since, as he's not a bad guy, he has nothing to hide.
I think the crucial bit you're missing is that the fundamental disagreement boils down to whether a properly-signed-and-executed warrant ought to be sufficient for the government to get its hands on evidence or otherwise do what it needs to do to deliver justice.
To you, he seems to believe Yes, and to him, I think you seem to believe No. Historically, the answer has been Yes, and crypto has fundamentally changed that. I think crystallizing exactly why you believe the right answer is No is essential, otherwise you're just not going to convince people on that side -- in their mind, I think, you're demanding more rights than you historically had, and at the cost of protecting the rest of the population.
What does he think if "government's ability to catch criminals" becomes "government's ability to attack political opponents"? I suppose he has a privileged position, as part of the incorruptible rule-of-law democratic land of the free, but people in other countries may not be so well off.
No offense to your father but I've always felt like the "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy is expansive and fundamental privacy rights are part of that principle. That is, the underlying principle isn't "innocent until proven guilty" but something more akin to "your complete autonomy should be assumed by default, and the government should have to clear an extremely high threshold to constrain it".
I also really believe that this raises the bar for everyone. If the government has to work harder to prove your guilt, the case is all that much stronger when the threshold is met.
I'm probably preaching to the choir but I increasingly see arguments to the contrary as boiling down to "make things so the executive branch of the government doesn't have to work as hard" which I don't find compelling as a societal value.
"if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
Your father is subject to a simple but pervasive error: Not every justification who is a good or a bad guy is ethical right in every aspect of life.
>"if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
everybody is a bad guy in the eyes of their political opponents.
Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
The typical HN person works as a software engineer, and the typical software company makes money, either directly or indirectly, via targeted ads. And these ads are served via a surveillance infrastructure that would not be out of place in a dystopian science fiction novel.
Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.
> the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview
It's more that the privacy-first folk are the ones that bother expressing opinions in threads like this. I think these days, a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.