Thoughts on Privacy, Anti-Privacy, and the Lack of Privacy

Nowadays, it is fashionable for some web sites to have statements regarding their privacy policies. Instead, here are some thoughts on why privacy is not necessarily available to you, on web sites or anywhere else.

The most important thing to remember is that no document will protect you. A constitution, bill or rights, law, or policy will not protect you any more than a blueprint for a house will give you a place to live.

In the United States, the choice of which laws to enforce, and the choice of against whom to enforce them, is in the hands of the government. There are enough laws of all kinds that almost anyone is in violation of some law or another. Therefore, if the government decides to do so, it can find almost anyone in violation of a law, even if the law has nothing to do with why the government doesn't like them. Just as important, the government can decide not to prosecute someone who has broken a law, but is politically powerful. Thus the government, using its police power, and its practically unlimited resources, can act almost with impunity to harass whom it chooses, and to allow whom it chooses to break almost any law. This defines a police state. Moreover, with increasing use of secret laws and secrecy laws, this defines a secret police state.

(Under Hitler's Third Reich — Nazi Germany — the secret police were known by their German acronym, Gestapo, short for "Geheime Staats Polizei", which means "Secret State Police". Like our secret police today, people knew who the Gestapo were: they wore uniforms and did not hide from the public. It was what they did, not who they were, that was secret. Today's American Gestapo, known as the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and other names, and include State and local agencies and police departments, are much the same.)

With the increasing "privatization" of government, including of "security" functions such as intelligence, torture, and police operations, you also are vulnerable to the whims of people working within faceless corporations, whose identity will never be known to you because of "national security" considerations. Members of Congress exercise no meaningful oversight, they themselves being vulnerable, and too busy "fundraising" to care.

Nevertheless, the United States previously had a Constitution, Bill of Rights, and other laws in place, which acted as such a blueprint, for those who were willing to take the next steps to make the plan a reality. However, in the wake of the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the United States Congress (the Best Congress Money Can Buy!) handed Osama bin Laden and others the victory they wanted, and it was given to them on a silver platter: almost unanimously, the Congress repealed large sections of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In this way, after being frightened by far fewer deaths than are caused by drunk driving or poor medical care or toxins at the workplace or in the environment, the representatives of the people of the United States sold the freedom of the American people for a song, and — along with it — the freedom of many others in the world who might otherwise have looked to the United States for leadership.

Here is what you might expect under this new United States privacy policy:

1. If the government wants to listen in on your conversations, or eavesdrop on your computer, then they no longer have to tell you or anyone else, as long as they claim you might be a terrorist.
   The government also can conduct secret searches, and not have to explain to anyone why they want to do them, except to claim that they are for "national security".
   The government can use tracking devices to follow all your movements, and does not have to get approval from the courts or show that you are any sort of threat whatsoever.
2. Only the government gets to decide what it these terms "terrorist" and "national security" mean. The meaning of these terms can change for political convenience.
3. If you question the decisions of the government in these matters, then you no longer get a trial by a jury of your peers, because these are now "national security matters", and cannot be revealed.
4. Your right to trial in general has been suspended if you are not a real "person". The government gets to decide if you are a real person, or if you are a "enemy combatant", "terrorist", or other kind of non-person. (See "History of Being Human in the United States", below.)
   If you do get a trial, neither you nor your attorney — if you have one — may not be allowed to know the details of the evidence against you. Maybe your attorney also is a terrorist.
5. If someone knows that your privacy has been violated because the government has conducted a secret search or wiretap, that person cannot tell you or anyone else.
6. The government is "privatizing" many military and other security activities, which further denies you privacy. For example, the private security firms can openly keep dossiers on your activities, which formerly were theoretically forbidden to the goverment itself. Therefore, private industry can violate your former rights in the same way the government can.
7. At its convenience, the government can use torture to obtain your private information. Also, the government sometimes contracts out this torture to private industry, or to other governments. The Attorney General has declared that laws against torture are "quaint", and the government is no longer bound by them.
8. You may be asked to surrender your privacy voluntarily in order to travel or do other everyday things, so you cannot have any privacy if you want an "ordinary" existence.
9. Your privacy may be further restricted by other laws which are secret and which you cannot know, but you are nonetheless responsible for compliance.
10. The government is not liable to you or to anyone else for damages resulting from violations of your privacy rights or from violations of any other rights. Laws protect the goverment and its officials. Furthermore, it is against the law to lie to the government, but it's not against the law for them to lie to you.
    Also, the United States has paid money to other countries for the benefit of the powerful people in their governments, and those governments and powerful people have reciprocated by agreeing to grant immunity in their jurisdictions from prosecution for human rights and war crimes violations to U.S. officials. (If you are not a U.S. citizen, then your government may also be for sale.) As a consequence, torture now has been partly privatized, and you may be sent to a foreign concentration camp or country to be tortured. Of course, torture victims have no right to privacy, either.

Since the blueprints (Constitution, Bill of Rights, and other laws) are now declared relics of an earlier time, the only way you will get privacy is if you hide out in a cave and do not let anyone know you exist. If you must reveal your existence, and if you insist on communicating with others or making any sort of records, then you are advised to use strong encryption and only open-source, peer-reviewed software for those purposes, at least until encryption is also declared illegal.

Footnote: History of Being Human in the United States

For those of you outside the United States, who did not have so much U.S. history taught in your schools, here is the outline:

• When the Colonies were ruled by the British, then almost no one was a whole human being with full rights.
• Later, when the United States was founded, only male landholders were whole humans with full rights.
• Then, the Congress decided that slaves were only three-fifths of a person, but that was for the benefit of their owners, and not for the slaves themselves.
• Then the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were passed, and former slaves were whole persons, but Indians (now sometimes called "Native Americans") were not persons at all.
• With the 19th Amendment, women became whole persons. Indians remain in limbo, kind of a political purgatory, in spite of having died by the millions for their freedom and in large numbers for the freedom of whole U.S. citizens. (Sovereign Indian tribes are similar to sovereign colonies such as Iraq.)
• United States assent to treaties such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, made everyone human, though not necessarily citizens of the United States.
• Now, in the New American Empire, "terrorists", "non-combatants", and similar people — defined on an ad hoc basis at the convenience and pleasure of the government — are no longer human, even if they are innocent women or children who wouldn't know a bomb from a bag of fertilizer.
• The current situation may continue indefinitely, because we at war with an enemy whose definition changes again and again. Such a war will never end. (There have always been "terrorists", since the days of the Boston Tea Party and before, so we are now in a perpetual state of war.)

Anti-copyright 2005. Free thoughts in hope of free people.