Why I Am a Privacy Purist

Privacy is Constantly Assaulted

People are surveilled on two fronts:

  1. Governmental
  2. Corporate

Both are pernicious and ubiquitous in all of our lives. People either goad themselves into believing it’s not as deleterious as it is or are oblivious to its existence or full extent. These two entities may ostensibly seem separate, but they’re interwoven. The capabilities of government agencies and profit-seeking firms have aligned to generate the malignant throng that is the surveillance state.

This has subjected the vast majority of digital activities to constant monitoring. Despite this being an unacceptable state of affairs, most are quiescent in the face of it. I, like some freedom minded folks, choose to accept the reality we live in and vociferously oppose transgressions against the fundamental human right of being left the hell alone. Merely owning a cell phone is granting your government and a myriad of corporations a conduit through which your sensitive information travels. The only serious approach, given the current lack of control people have over their data, is to adopt the Patrick Henry approach: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Hypernormalisation

Hypernormalisation is the notion that governments and those wielding power create an artificial edifice that serves as a simplified world to keep the masses docile; this engenders a stable environment for the powerful to maximize their yield, both pecuniary and social. Those exerting power in a particular domain advance changes incrementally such that people are not perturbed by the encroachment of things that they would oppose if the full set of changes were proposed to them initially.

A simple and more benign example of this is with video game DLC (Downloadable Content). Before the year 2000, it was almost unheard of to charge players for additional content. Microsoft was one of the first companies to roll it out in a significant way on the Xbox. It started out as low dollar addons and decent sized expansions for $20. It has since proliferated to a degree unfathomable for gamers 20 years ago. Most gamers may bemoan its existence, but contribute to its presence by begrudgingly purchasing it. If you tried to dump the game marketplace status quo of 2021 onto 2001 gamers, they’d vehemently oppose it in massive majorities.

Privacy is no different, but far more consequential. The apparatuses of the modern surveillance state kicked off in 1952 when Harry Truman created the NSA. We entrusted our politicians to uphold the Constitution and protect the right to privacy it enshrines, but the lust for power from government officials led them to abuse this apparatus. A senate committee led by Senator Frank Church found that the NSA and other alphabet soup agencies participated in a massive domestic spying program, targeting anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and political opponents. Rather than properly and fully acknowledging this egregious breach of civil liberties, our politicians lied and created flimsy “protections” in the form of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). On paper, it was a worthy piece of legislation. In practice, it did nothing to dismantle the ability for the US government to illegally surveil the people it’s supposed to serve.

On the corporate side, a great example is Google. In its nascent years, Google had a reasonable privacy policy. They slowly eroded users’ privacy over the last two decades to where their entire business model relies upon harvesting user data efficiently. Google knows you better than your parents do in many cases and will happily export all this data to the highest bidder as well as the government. Few are willing to admit that disconcerting reality and exit the tentacles of Google and other user hostile platforms. If you told people in 1960 that the government and corporations were going to collect data on most of their activities, they’d be beyond horrified.

Yield an Inch and They’ll Take a Mile

Even if you assume governments and corporations are relatively benign today, they may not be tomorrow. These surveillance apparatuses are about one thing: power. An easily controllable populace is one that satisfies the powerful the most. The absence of privacy is a gateway into societal oppression and control. We live in relatively free democracies, but most politicians consistently show their contempt for the full exercise of liberties.

An example of this is the desire to curtail freedom of expression. Australia has already gone as far as to completely ban encryption. Florida recently passed a bill violating the first amendment rights of Floridians. The Canadian “Liberal” government recently proposed legislation that would crack down on “hate speech”, a term not even clearly defined in the bill text. These examples and the countless more not mentioned all have one thing in common: they weaponize surveillance mechanisms in order to ensure compliance.

Meanwhile, corporations are benefiting from a dearth of privacy regulations and aloof consumer attitudes. They will stop at nothing to maximize their profit, even if that means eroding democracy or fueling a genocide. Our underfunded Congress and regulatory institutions as well as our technologically incompetent or grossly malevolent politicians won’t take any or at least adequate action against these transgressions.

If we give corporations and governments merely the mechanism to erode our privacy and freedoms, they can and will take as much as they can when avarice and lust eclipses duty to serve the public. A world with vibrant civil liberties protections requires a diligent and powerful populace willing to push back against governments and corporations with tenacity and strength too overwhelming for them to stymie.

What Can You Do?

You can support civil liberties and a right to privacy by taking any number of these steps:

  1. Donate to groups protecting privacy and freedom such as:
  2. Call and write to your state legislators and members of Congress on issues pertaining to privacy and civil liberties
  3. Follow my three-part Ultimate Security Guide
  4. Use Tor
  5. Use end-to-end encryption
  6. Use Free and Open source software over proprietary software that infringes on user freedom (I cover a lot of this in the Security Guide)
  7. Attending protests and events related to protecting privacy and civil liberties