Comment by AnthonyMouse
19 hours ago
> Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about',
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden
Locks on bathroom doors are for privacy, not security.
Meaning what?
The misguided who say they don’t need privacy suddenly have a dense memory of the thousands of times they’ve turned the lock on a bathroom door and consider the idea of deficating in full view as an alternative.
The meaning is to highlight the incredible silliness of the “nothing to hide” skawkers who sound like so many Soviet propagandists.
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You realize that without the door it would be even more obvious whether the stall is occupied?
3 replies →
Snowden is comparing two things that, in fact, are not alike. Surveillance gathers information, whereas censorship suppresses expression. It might sound like clever rhetoric to people of a lower intellectual capacity, but these are fundamentally distinct concepts.
Or he was not comparing those two things to say they are the same thing but rather making an analogy based on the common factor of people in the US often wanting legal protections for both speech and privacy to draw his point that one is giving up their rights by making the excuse about not wanting privacy which they would probably not do when it comes to speech.
Thinking comparisons of two similar things are always for the purpose of saying that they are the same thing is ridiculous, don’t you think? It might sound like clever reasoning to people of a mediocre intellectual capacity but it is not logically coherent.
> Surveillance gathers information, whereas censorship suppresses expression.
Surveillance suppresses expression through chilling effects.
He's comparing two rights and how giving up one right (to privacy) because you think you have nothing to hide is like giving up your right to speech, because you have nothing to say (and therefore don't have to worry that someone in power might find it offensive).