It begins and ends with the public’s gaze blurred into catatonic apathy, like sitting on the train and watching the blur of a nondescript city fill your window forever. What we see is more war and more bad news and somewhere in the world someone’s throwing a molotov cocktail and kicking in a helmet—and for every one of these, there’s another yet kneeling in broken glass, reverently handing up a QR code to comply… and the shadow of a raised baton envelops and then stretches beyond them, a sun dial counting down the minutes of the rest of our lives.
But can anything be done to reverse the course of what feels like a rapid descent into this tyrannical dystopia? The first step would be to create immutable frameworks from within which we can question our realities, organize, and express dissent when dissent is necessary. For that to take place, access to uncompromisable privacy tools for each and every individual is necessary.
“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” - Edward Snowden
There will always be those who might say, “I’ve done nothing wrong! I conform to the latest expectations and affirmatively support whatever is communicated to me by the current regime! I don’t have a single original thought that could be misinterpreted—or even correctly construed—to put me in a difficult position in the future.”
In response, I’ll quote Sacha in the essay “Privacy: the metaphors we live by”:
“If history teaches us anything, it's that almost every societal value we take as obviously true in liberal democracies today -- the right to vote, the equal rights of men and women, the right to a fair and public hearing, the right not to be held in slavery or servitude, the right to freedom of opinion and expression ... -- was once deemed eccentric and a threat to the powers that be.”
What’s more, we in the west rank (relatively) high on the human freedom index, but billions of people around the world don’t enjoy the same luxury.
Even if what you deem an inalienable right were to be preserved and protected as such until the end of time—and, surprise, there’s no such guarantee!—that very same right may be grounds for political persecution in one of the jurisdictions highlighted in the map above.
The framing of surveillance and censorship as stalwart defenders of liberal values is not only misleading and incorrect: it is an excellent example of failing to “check your privilege” by the very same advocates of such tired virtue-signaling.
In furthering the attack on privacy tools and technology while justifying it under the guise of “getting the bad guys,” such advocates are facilitating the persecution of others around the world who may be getting stoned to death or placed in internment camps for something they themselves routinely engage in or identify with—safe and sound, of course, under the ephemeral shield of liberal democracy.
In the collective consciousness, the notion of privacy as an evil and selfish thing has been echoed with a belligerent fervor for decades. It is no wonder, then, that those who have already been convinced that history does not repeat itself would be willing participants in further jeopardizing those who are most vulnerable, those whose interests they claim to have close at heart.
Because for advocates of surveillance and censorship, it’s never been about “making it a better, safer world.” It’s always been about making sure nothing happens they don’t first approve of, at least for as long as it’s their team that wields the axe.
If you were to stop somebody in the street and ask them for their thoughts on privacy, would the response be ambivalent, antagonistic, or a fervent defense? And, if it was a defense, would they self-censor—regardless of whether their deep-rooted concern existed at a conscious or subconscious level—because their opinion could later be weaponized against them?
The response might be something like, “Sure, I don’t really care about privacy as long as it’s not a camera filming me in the bedroom or in the shower… because, after all, I have nothing to hide.” Or so the saying goes.
But, as Sacha eloquently puts it, “Whether we realise it or not, privacy is being framed by authority to influence our thoughts in a particular direction, even if we instinctively know there’s something not quite right about it.”
The erosion of privacy, then, is about establishing absolute and unquestionable power. It goes much further than merely crossing the imaginary boundary we believe defends our right to sit around unseen and naked in our own homes.
Something’s got to give. But how?
Even those who aren’t thrilled at the notion of this development—people worn down by the constant flood of data breaches, password leaks, and political persecution on the news—accept the eradication of privacy as predestined fate, treating it with the same implicit acceptance they’d show the possibility of rain on a cloudy day.
A good starting point might be reframing what privacy is.
In 1993, Eric Hughes wrote “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.” In it he wrote, “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”
Even for those who live in high “human freedom index” jurisdictions and who aren’t particularly philanthropically inclined: how certain are you that a future regime will favor your particular outlook on the world, that it will respect your religious or political affiliations, or that it’ll respect your stance on what you choose to do with your own body (whether that’s related to a vaccine, birth control, or another contentious topic that hasn’t even arrived yet)?
In a previous essay, I argued that life in the panopticon of absolute digital surveillance forces humans to become shells of themselves, subjects who self-censor their own thoughts, behaviors, and expressions even in private interactions.
“Am I allowed to have that thought, or is that a bad thought that I should stop thinking? I haven’t seen anything on the news that clarifies whether this particular opinion is allowed or if it is career-ending or controversial. What if I slip up and utter it in a public setting? It’s best if I just quash the inclination while I can.”
It is undeniable that privacy tech will open doors many of us wish never to be opened. Bad people will utilize it for bad things, in the same way bad people routinely use technologies like email and the internet to perpetrate their crimes. In fact, criminals will likely be the first to harness this technology to their advantage.
So, where does that leave us?
The book “Cypherpunks" describes when Jacob Appelbaum, a core member of the Tor project, went to Tunisia after Ben Ali’s regime fell. In a computer science class they were talking about Tor, which is a “free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication… to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis.” A student asked what he thought of Tor’s technology potentially being used to propagate “the Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse,” crimes like money laundering and terrorism.
In turn, Appelbaum asked the class how many people had seen the Ammar 404 page, which was the “error message” Tunisians would see whenever they attempted to access “illegal” content on the internet—content the regime deemed to “threaten public order.” Every single person in the class raised their hand.
What may have once seemed the plot of a sci-fi dystopia novel, or something that might happen only in faraway lands devoid of law and order, is now happening here in the West.
After all, “If you look at the internet from the perspective of people in power then the last twenty years have been frightening. They see the internet like an illness that affects their ability to define reality, to define what is going on, which is then used to define what the people know of what is going on and their ability to interact with it.” - Andy Müller-Maguhn