I am not willing to grant this. The government, any government is made up of people. I don’t care how dedicated, professional, and well-monitored it might be, there will always be room for screw-ups, and personal grudges.
I’m not doing anything illegal, but I don’t see any reason why the government needs to know when I do my “daily maintenance.”
Besides, let’s say you allow that kind of monitoring - how long will it be before things that aren’t illegal but aren’t good are controlled?
“Excuse me, Mr. Jones, you’re overweight and were seen on you homemonitor[sup]tm[/sup] eating potato chips last night. We can’t have that.”
Q: If you’re not hiding something, you won’t mind if we search your car, will you?
A: Hell yes I mind. Life is short, time is precious, and I don’t want to spend any time standing around while you guys tear part my car finding old McDonalds’ wrappers.
Let me clarify that I am absolutely against the scenario I posed. I asked the question in order to try to find a logical reason why I would be opposed to it. Let me respond to Der Trihs, since he seems to cover most of the responses so far:
But this is a circular argument. “Privacy is good because I like it”; “Privacy is good because it is.”
True, but I suspect that once everybody gets prosecuted for minor or arbitrary infractions (assuming the government prosecutes every case it can find), there will be a major backlash against these excess laws, so a new equilibrium will be established.
Seems to be a common response, but note that the scenario that I proposed explicitly states that no rumors would be spread; one may be prosecuted but not targeted as you propose. Even given those circumstances, with assurance of privacy except for crimes, the thought of invisible suits watching one would still be unsettling to most.
This I can certainly buy, but it is not really part of the scenario. Again, even with a guarantee that nobody would be prosecuted except for crimes, most people would still be uneasy.
Its only a matter of time before a law like that is abused. So it doesn’t matter if you aren’t doing anything illegal, chances are it is a slipperly slope that will lead to civil rights abuses.
peri 's example is a good one. I’m no lawyer, and I could be violating a dozen laws right now I’ve never heard of.
No, it’s not an argument of any kind, it’s an assertion. I want privacy, and I require a damned good reason for me to give it up.
The opposition to such laws will have a tough time organizing, given their opponents will have them under 24 hour survellience, and likely blackmail.
Never happen that way. You’ll see it used to ferret out closeted gays, to aquire homemade porn, to aquire blackmail material, and who knows what other nastiness.
How’s this for an answer: “If you don’t think a right to privacy is important, then why do you have a door on your bathroom?”
Seriously, the government is not perfect, and you can’t trust them to not let your information be used for nefarious purposes. Even if there’s no official malfeasance, information will invariably be leaked by individual peons for their own personal gain. (“Wow, that chick is hot! I wonder if that Russian porn sight will pay me a few bucks for a surveilance video of her showering.” Or how about, “Hey, you can see that guy’s credit card numbers in this video…”)
Knowledge about the day to day activities of a populace is a valuable commodity which many companies spend billions of dollars gathering and analyzing. To seize such a commodity without any compensation or law stuff (that’s a technical term) would violate the constitution.
Because the next step after a loss of privacy is profiling based on your personal habits and interests. Maybe you don’t get Federal education loans because your personal habits identifies you as “high risk” whatever that means?
My sinuses are acting up; kindly remove your straw man.
The claim is that the law contains enough arbitrary traps for the unwary to catch most people in one or another of them, not that it is primarily composed of such traps.
Worse, what if they decide that you showed risk factors for becoming a sexual preditor? Maybe it would be prudent to lock you up now, before you commit any crimes.
That wouldn’t even be a new idea. In the 19th Century, phrenologists thought that they could predict a person’s personality based on the bumps on their head, and there were people who advocated using it to identify criminally-inclined people and pre-emptively imprison them. Modern-day psychological profiling is only marginally more accurate.
Yep. And, just to point out, if a person has to create a hypothetical assumptions of perfection—ones which we know will not hold up in reality—in order to make a case, then it’s likely not a very good case.
Well, and now we know, because we’ve been told. Previously, I would not have imagined that possessing six back issues of Playboy was a crime in Texas. Frankly, the use of the word “presumed” in a law not describing the innocence of a defendant strikes me as alien and weird, as does much about Texas.
My main counter to the “If you aren’t doing anything illegal” premise is that it contains no self-correcting mechanism. Let’s assume the reason to put everyone under surveillance is to prevent crime and create some kind of utopia. Let’s also assume that endlessly creative human beings will find ways around the surveillance and crime will still occur. Since the “If you aren’t doing anything illegal” premise has already been accepted, there is no reason to increase the surveillance, in hopes of achieving the elusive utopia, then increasing it further, then increasing it further still until it becomes so intrusive and so controlling that life becomes near-impossible, and long before the problem of crime is “solved”.
We’ve been lucky to live in a safe and stable government for as long as anyone can remember. But there is no promise that it will stay that way. It may seem far fetched, but everything seems far fetched until it happens.
Having the infrastructure and data to conduct surviellence on many people can be dangerous in the wrong hands. And we can’t ever assume the wrong hands won’t get it.
I only knew that law existed because of this thread. I am now aware of several states with similar laws. Prior to reading that thread I had no idea such things existed.
My contention is that we should not be so willing to blindly trust our governing authorities. If you give up too much of your freedom, then it will only make it that much easier to take more and more of it away. Furthermore, if our government were to become tyranical, then it would make a revolution against the government far more difficult were they already granted access to see all that we do.
Oh, and if you need a good reason to truly fear our government, go look up the good ole MK Ultra tests… scaaaaarrrrrryyyyyy.
“If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.”
No. If you (the person seeking information about my private life) have done nothing wrong, have never abused your authority, have never acted illegally, have never used personal information to harass, intimidate or settle personal scores, and have never prevented me from overseeing your actions, then, and only then, do I have nothing to worry about.
Why wouldn’t I approve of the government having access to my private life? For the same reason I wouldn’t approve of my credit card number being handed out to random people on the street. Whether or not I’ve done anything wrong is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that I can’t trust the people who are receiving that information.
The best argument I can think of is that constant surveillance would make us emotional prisoners. #2 in your list sounds like a perfectly cogent reason to me–being monitored is stressful for most people and constant monitoring would drive many people insane, and would definitely lead to reduced productivity. It may not be Spock-logical but that’s the set of emotional responses we have: people function better without a predator (in this case the government) shadowing them all the time, provoking their fight or flight response. Even if we lived in a perfect society with no chance of governmental corruption, and the beings watching over me were intelligent robots instead of humans, I would still oppose this.
Besides, if the world is a prison, what incentive do people have to not commit crimes (other than natural distaste for crime)?
For me, Oy! nailed it in post 5, followed by Diceman’s more humorous interpretation concerning the bathroom door.
Which do you prefer: a society where the baseline is personal privacy which can be intruded upon in specific situations, or an assumption that you have no privacy of your person or home, unless exceptions are specifically carved out? Goes to one’s basic perception of the function and role of government, and is largely independent of one’s personal activities or trust in any particualr government.
