Comment by riedel
11 hours ago
I cannot speak for the US but in Germany there is certainly some amount of violence towards local politicians but also other parts of administration (job centers, etc) Traditionally there was maximum transparency (names of every single reponsible person for each minor municipal job) with little choice for employees to opt out. This is changing not under special rules but mostly under GDPR adoption. However, particularly elected officials (even for very minor local roles) even have to expose their street address to get elected (such legal requirements can provide GDPR exception). This generates real risk. If less and less or the "wrong" people go into administration we are in trouble, IMHO. I know there is a lot of governments vs the people sentiment popping up. But we need to just make sure that we treat our administration also as people in certain situations. (Disclaimer: as a university lecturer I am officially a public servant, but I do not think any of this would apply to me: I hardly have to fear the wrath of the students)
Perhaps a uniquely American opinion, but employees can opt out quickly and easily by not getting paid by public funds. Most public sector jobs have private sector equivalents. If you want to help people find jobs and your privacy is important enough to make public sector work untenable, get a job with one of the private sector organizations that does that.
> elected officials...have to expose their street address to get elected. This generates real risk.
Is there an epidemic of local German politicians being harassed and assaulted at their homes?
I can think of no reason why constituents should not know where the people in power over them live. Elected officials should not be able to hide from their constituents.
> I can think of no reason why constituents should not know where the people in power over them live.
I can think of plenty of reasons. Political violence in democracies is on the rise globally, and not the sort of organized political violence that people might use to liberate themselves from the chains of oppressors, but rather the kind of lunatic political violence that is committed by irrational lone actors who are fundamentally mentally unwell.
I believe you can have political transparency without involving people's homes and families.
When an overworked air traffic controller in Germany gave a plane an instruction that happened to be the opposite of TCAS automatic collision avoidance system, and one pilot followed TCAS to avoid a collision and one followed the controller, the planes crashed and everybody died. A family member of one of the passengers looked up, hunted down, and murdered in cold blood the air traffic controller.
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Government employees, including and especially elected officials, are employees of the people and the people have a right to the same information any employer has about their employees.
> Political violence in democracies is on the rise globally
Citation needed, but even if we say for the sake of argument this is accurate, that doesn't naturally lead to this outcome.
What makes violence political?
Is political violence inherently worse? I think it is, but there's at least an argument to be made that it isn't.
Is stopping that political violence worth the worst case scenario where we make it harder for the public to get this type of information?
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Its literally the last check of power... rich people will find out exactly where the power people live. The masses also need to know
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Making it slightly more involved for randos to show up at your literal doorstep hardly seems like hiding from one's constituency.
I really think the entire concept of privacy has really changed in my lifetime, especially around what needs to be kept private and what we don’t mind sharing.
When I was a youth in the 80s and 90s, it seems like our desire for privacy was focused on what we were doing and talking about; we didn’t want people to know our activities or what our conversations were about. Someone listening in while you talked to someone else was considered an invasion of privacy. However, we freely shared identifying information and didn’t think that was something that needed to be protected. In my town, our phone book white pages had everyone in town’s name, phone number, and address. Those details weren’t things we thought needed to be kept hidden from the public. Every now and then you would hear about someone who was “unlisted”, but that was considered odd.
Now, people will freely post pictures about their activities in public places, have public conversations, and share all sorts of details about how they live their lives that we would never have shared with strangers 40 years ago. At the same time, the idea of publishing our name, address, and phone number for everyone to see is horrifying. We even have a term for it, “doxing”, which many people want to make a crime, and we would never have even thought about it 40 years ago.
I think there are a ton of valid reasons for this shift, but it does make me think. A major part of why we want to keep those details private is because we have created so many systems that allow you to commit fraud or take advantage of people with only those details. While I think we should maintain and extend our ability to keep those details about us secret, I also think we need to do something about the systems we have in place that allow you to do so much damage to a person with only knowing these basic details about them.
The report linked in the article doesn't mention existing laws mandating disclosure of public servant details or anything of that nature. It primarily focuses on private data brokers collecting and selling data, a threat model which applies to all people equally. Rather than addressing the problem at its root, which is the data brokers blatantly violating the privacy of everyone, by all appearances they are perfectly fine with what data brokers do as long as they are able to exempt themselves from it.
I think that posting street addresses for "maximum transparency" is a bit silly, and it would probably make sense to repeal legislation that makes government employee's sensitive private information public. That principle should also apply equally to all citizens, though. If I'm not mistaken, I believe anyone who hosts a website in Germany is mandated by law to post their address on the website, which is completely unfathomable to me.
We do also see the two-tier surveillance hierarchy attempting to be established across the EU, in general. Chat Control in all its forms is always proposed with an exemption for government employees.