Captain Easychord

Responding to a popular reaction to news of the National Security Agency’s massive data collection program, blogger Daniel Sieradski started a Twitter feed called “Nothing to Hide.” He has retweeted hundreds of people who have declared in one form or another that they are not concerned that the federal government may spy on them. They say they have done nothing wrong, so they have nothing to hide. If it helps the government fight terrorists, go ahead, take their civil liberties away.

In his blog, a frustrated Sieradski listed many of the abuses of power our federal government is known for; he is not happy with the "nothing to hide" crowd.

There are many, many reasons to be concerned about the rise of the surveillance state, even if you have nothing to hide. Or rather, even if you think you have nothing to hide. For those confronted by such simplistic arguments, here are a three counterarguments that perhaps might get these people thinking about what they’re actually giving up.

1. Every American Is Probably a Criminal, Really

That Americans think they have nothing to hide in the first place is a sign of how little attention they're paying to the behavior of our Department of Justice. Many Americans have run afoul of federal laws without even knowing it. Tim Carney noted at the Washington Examiner:

Copy a song to your laptop from a friend's Beyonce CD? You just violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Did you buy some clothes in Delaware because they were tax free? You're probably evading taxes. Did you give your 20-year-old nephew a glass of wine at dinner? Illegal in many states.

Citizens that the federal government wants to indict, the federal government can indict if it monitors them closely enough. That's why it's so disturbing to learn that the federal government doesn't need to obtain a warrant on us in order to get our emails and phone records.

Attorney Harvey Silverglate even wrote a book about it, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. The Department of Justice has been notably and egregiously using federal laws to destroy lives. Former Tribune employee Matthew Keys is facing federal charges and possibly prison time because he gave his old password to a member of Anonymous, who changed a headline at the website for the Los Angeles Times. The vagueness of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes violating a website’s terms of service a possible felony. We’re not just referring to government websites. All websites. Given the digital focus of the PRISM program, everybody should be concerned about what could potentially happen should that data end up in the hands of federal prosecutors.

The “nothing to hide” crowd's involvement in political activism is likely limited. That’s perfectly fine. Nobody should feel obligated to join the Occupy movement or a Tea Party organization or be the kind of person who might end up on a politician’s enemies list. But to say “I have nothing to hide” is a fundamentally selfish declaration. What about parents, sisters, brothers, partners, and other loved ones? Can we say the same for them? You don’t have to have an illness whose suffering can be eased with the use of medical marijuana to be concerned about the way the federal government treats this industry. Would you say, “I don’t need medical marijuana so I don’t care if they imprison those who do”? Sadly, some people do. Fundamentally, saying “I have nothing to hide,” is similar to saying “I don’t care about those who do.”

Next: The problem with trusting the government.

2. The Federal Government Has Abused its Surveillance Powers Before

While most Gen Xers were still very young and before any Millennials were born America went through similar controversies in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate Scandal. In 1975, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) put together a committee (which would eventually be known as the Church Committee) to investigate abuses of the law by intelligence agencies. Abuses included spying on leftist activists, opening and reading private mail, and using the IRS as a weapon. Sound familiar? There’s a reason why Baby Boomers have started comparing Barack Obama to Richard Nixon. The value of doing so has been lost to the ages; everything politically awful that happens in America is compared to Tricky Dick.

The defense that the current secret NSA/PRISM data collection plan can only target foreigners in foreign territory shouldn’t settle anything, even if it’s actually true, because that’s just a description of how the plan is currently being used, not how it might be used tomorrow or under the next presidential administration. And we have absolutely no way of knowing that the description of how the program operates is true anyway, because the oversight has been hidden from public view. We do know that a court ruling in 2011 determined that the U.S. government had engaged in unconstitutional behavior in its surveillance program, but the Department of Justice is trying to block Americans from seeing this court ruling and understanding what happened. We’re supposed to trust this oversight. We know they’ve broken the law once, but we don’t know what they did, what's stopping it from happening again, what harm was caused, and whether there was any sort of punishment or discipline.

Next: Not even the government can really control where data ends up.

3. Government Is Made of People, and Some People Are Creepy, Petty, Incompetent, or Dangerous

Gilberto Valle had an unusual sexual fetish. He fantasized about kidnapping, killing, and eating young women.

Valle was also a member of the New York Police Department, and was convicted in March of plotting to make his fantasies a reality. Whether he really meant to do so is up in the air (his defense was that this was all sexual roleplay), but he was also convicted of looking up his potential targets in a national crime database, accessible due to his position of authority.

While the federal government is arguing that all this massive metadata being collected by the National Security Agency is subject to significant oversight and not subject to abuse, it is at the same time trying to blame the IRS targeting political and conservative nonprofits for special questioning as the actions of rogue employees and poor management.

You don’t have to be a privacy purist to be concerned about bad or dangerous people getting information about you. Some of them work for the government, and they may be interested in you for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. Even if you have nothing to hide.

I was reading up on the National Security Agency's data-mining program when I came across this tweet by Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press:

If the programs needed secrecy to succeed, will NSA shut them down now? If not, did they ever need be secret? Or did I just blow your mind?

— Matt Apuzzo (@mattapuzzo) June 7, 2013

Why does this program have to be kept secret? It's not like American consumers will just stop using cell phones, or wireless networks, or social networks. (A person could do that, but who's actually willing to? Much as I loathe government surveillance, I'm not giving up Facebook or Gmail or my account with Verizon. I doubt many people are.) It's also not like Americans didn't know something like this was going on. So why keep it secret that the government is mining data when Americans will continue to provide data regardless?

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent raised the same point this morning. The administration's many defenses of these invasive tactics, he argued, do not "explain the need for the program — and its legal rationale — to remain shrouded in secrecy."

But there actually is an explanation, and it's laid out really well by Jennifer Hoelzer, former communications director for Patriot Act critic Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Here's Hoelzer in the Huffington Post explaining how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) decides when to grant data-mining authority to the NSA:

[E]ven if one of these [FISC] judges issued a controversial ruling the decision can be appealed right?

Technically, yes. But who's going to appeal it?

Let me give you an example. Let's say a police officer wants to strip search you. You've done nothing wrong, but the police officer disagrees and says he needs to strip you to prove it. Under the criminal justice system, you get to bring that argument to a judge, who will issue a ruling only after listening to the government's reasons for wanting to strip search you and your reasons for why they shouldn't be allowed to do that. In the event that the judge rules against you and finds that the police officer has probable cause to search you, not only do you have a right to appeal that judge's decision all the way to the Supreme Court, you are welcome to talk to as many reporters, friends, relatives and elected officials as you want to along the way. And, if the public doesn't agree with the police force's policy on strip-searching, they can pressure lawmakers to change the law or -- if in California -- push for a ballot measure.

However, let's say the government wants Verizon to hand over all of your phone records (not just who you call, but who calls you, how long your conversations were and where you were when you had the conversation). You're never going to know about it, much less get a chance to argue against it. The FISC judge who signs off on the government's data collection will only hear the government's argument for why it should be lawfully allowed to collect data on you. If the judge rules against the government, the government can appeal the decision, but if/when the judge agrees with the government there is no other side to appeal the decision. Moreover, the judge's ruling is classified, so even if the ruling is outlandish, it can't be reported or even debated on the Senate floor.

So, the Administration could be relying on some crazy/twisted interpretations of the Patriot Act and we'd never know about it?

That is what Senator Wyden has been warning, starting as far back as July 2008 when he first argued for the declassification of FISA court opinions. I think he put it best when he said "reading the text of the Patriot Act without the secret court opinions is like being able to read McCain-Feingold without being allowed to know about Citizens United." Congress passed the Patriot Act, but Congress can't debate whether or not the Administration is interpreting the Patriot Act the way it intended the Patriot Act to be interpreted. Moreover, the American People aren't being given an opportunity to weigh in.

But the Justice Department says this authority is essential to national security. Wouldn't telling the American people undermine that?

By that logic it could be argued that all surveillance laws should be kept secret in order to make it harder for adversaries to guess how we collect intelligence, but that's not how a democracy works. American citizens are supposed to have a say in the laws that govern them and no matter how noble the Justice Department's intentions are, its officials don't have the right to substitute their judgment for the judgment of the American people. In the event that they have doubts that the American people will support a program they believe is necessary to national security, they are obligated to bring that program up for debate, not classify it and hope no one finds out.

In other words, they want to keep it secret because that's the only way to prevent any sort of meaningful check or balance on executive power. 

Submitted by: Unknown

Submitted by: Unknown (via Colossal)

Bell Labs shut down in 2006. Today, Alcatel-Lucent uses patents that originated at the labs to file lawsuits.

Lawrence Aberle / Wikipedia

In 2011, Alcatel-Lucent had American e-commerce on the ropes. The French telecom had sued eight big retailers and Intuit saying that their e-commerce operations infringed Alcatel patents; one by one they were folding. Kmart, QVC, Lands' End, and Intuit paid up at various stages of the litigation. Just before trial began Zappos, Sears, and Amazon also settled. That left two companies holding the bag: Overstock.com and Newegg, a company whose top lawyer had vowed not to ever settle with patent trolls. 

Then things started going badly for the plaintiff. Very badly. Instead of convincing the East Texas jury to hand Alcatel the tens of millions it was asking for—$12 million from Newegg alone—the company got a verdict of non-infringement. And as for the one patent Alcatel had argued throughout trial was so key to modern e-commerce—US Patent No. 5,649,131—the jury invalidated its claims.

Alcatel-Lucent was scrambling. The company's patent-licensing operations were contentious but lucrative and Alcatel surely had plans to move on from those eight heavyweights to sue many more retailers. The '131 patent, titled simply "Communications Protocol" and related to "object identifiers," was its crown jewel.