ACLU story: "You May Have 'Nothing to Hide' But You Still Have Something to Fear" [View all]
You May Have 'Nothing to Hide' But You Still Have Something to Fear
By Alex Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project
In the wake of recent news that the NSA is spying on Americans, I have been particularly struck by the argument that "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
At first blush, this argument might seem sound after all, if the government is merely conducting anti-terrorism surveillance, non-terrorists shouldn't be affected, right? But if you look more closely, you'll see this idea is full of holes.
(snip)
When the government operates in secret, it is hard to know anything with confidence. There is, however, one thing you can say with 100% confidence: we need to know more.
We need to know more about what information the government is collecting about millions of innocent Americans. We need to know more about the secret legal interpretations that the government is relying on to monitor our communications. And we need to know more about what the government does with the trillions of bits of electronic data it is amassing in its files. We need these answers because, even if we have nothing to hide, that does not mean we want to live in a society where nothing is private.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/you-may-have-nothing-hide-you-still-have-something-fear