cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/twitterblueskymastodon/p/1368791/nothing-to-hide-is-how-free-countries-die
Stop saying stupid stuff like: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
Start saying: “A free country doesn’t track innocent citizens.”
Source: Mastodon.
“Nothing to hide” is also stupid on another way. For example, you may have some personal secrets which you want to keep to yourself. They are not in any way illegal, but that does not mean that you dont want to hide them.
“Nothing to hide” usually refers to sonething potentially illegal, like you dont need to hide your activity if its not criminal. But now think another way, would you like to tell random people on internet your real name, your address, your other personally indentifiable infornation? No? Then why have double standarts?
I would go further. I think an optimal society needs a little bit of crime. The boundary between legal and illegal shoudn’t be fully enforced, because the definitions of legal and illegal are somewhat arbitrary and should be subject to change. A functioning society needs to have some sort of margin of error to allow the laws to evolve over time.
What I mean is that there isn’t anything wrong with having things to hide. Laws aren’t perfect and not all change can happen fully in the open fron start to end.