The nazi loved the "nothing to hide". What better than all your information, like religion, nicely written down in official records if you want to suddenly round up one specific group of people. Or DEI wanting to deport a certain group, and DOGE doing their best to suck up all information on everybody. You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who's going to be in office soon.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Privacy
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You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.
The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don't care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who's pushing for it.
It's like due process - you don't want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don't understand why then it's time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.
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ok ill be the one to say it then: the NSA are fascists. the NSA is evil.
What is your definition of Fascist, here?
It seems to get tossed around at everything, these days. Not a fan if the NSA either, nor the Patriot Act, either.
fascism is capitalism showing its teeth, like what trump is doing more overtly now. one part of it involves enforcing a bolder and more baldfaced surveillance/police state.
the NSA is literally one of the intelligence arms of said surveillance state. they help manipulate people, find and disappear dissidents, suppress resistance and such. not unlike a few other 3 letter agencies.
they've been quacking like fascists way before trump, they have feathers like fascists and swim like fascists. hence why i call it fascist.
fascism is capitalism showing its teeth, like what trump is doing more overtly now
AFAIK that is not the definition of fascism
But I've seen a TikTok of someone who is studying politcal doctrines (IDR if their level was Major or PHD) and what is currently going on was ticking off all the boxes
there are many, sometimes conflicting definitions. this one sums it up.
i focus on the police state and militarism part of it because thats what the NSA is for.
and if it ticks all the damn boxes, thats wtf it is. your phd person on tiktok is probably referring to the 12 early signs. its been ticking them for decades now.
but please don't rely on tiktok to get informed and read up on it, regardless of what qualifications tiktokers claim to have. its slop that barely clears the basics at best.
Lol i really cringed at that phrasing about "good people doing bad things". Theyre literally fascists doing fascism to advance their interests, it really doesn't matter if they are vegan and have dogs.
the quote in question is over a decade old...
So? The US was still spying on it's citizens and murdering people abroad at that time.
i assumed you were making a comment on the modern (fascist) administration. there's a difference between shitty politics and fascism. :P
covert fascism. its more than shitty politics when they are murdering millions abroad, starving tens of millions more (including their own citizens) suppressing protesters violently.. this sort of thing.
Je was a contractor for the NSA, sis you think he was going to say anything different?
Let me check your Attic why not, you're not hiding any jews are you?
Yeah, so what if I want to hide a bunch of Jews in my attic?
One of the things I warn people about privacy is that it's not about what they might find, it's about what they might pretend to find.
Plenty of dirty cops plant evidence. Who's to say they don't like someone and keep a flash drive full of Cheese Pizza to plant on their computer. Usually that kind of logic gets people on board more easily.
"The early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom." ~ Permanent Record, Snowden.
He misattributes that quote
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1558
You will find the quote in this book that predates Nazi Germany
Not merely was my own mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friends—people residing in places as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about this matter: "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."
So the quote was about the American secret service?
Yes
My response to this is usually "Do you have curtains?"
Very late edit: I have found it very effective. It causes pause for thought because everyone values privacy, they just find it hard to picture themselves needing it. Curtains.
My response is similar, usually the good old 'Do you shut the door when you shit?'.
When we start getting specific, I'll often try and frame data harvesting in a much more visceral way. If they say they don't care that xyz keeps track of everyone they talk to, I ask them to imagine an actual person standing behind them, making notes on a clipboard about every interaction they have with someone, and how that would make them feel.
If you really got nothing to hide then why do you close the door when you use the public toilet?
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Nah the NSA are nazis
Yeah famously no nazis were ever nice to their friends and families ("good people") while doing bad things for what they thought were good reasons. Like... Snowden, bro, what the fuck are you talking about
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Snowden is a brave guy in some ways, but even in spite of his leaks, he's remained a naive US-supremacist libertarian, who evangangelizes tech over political action, defends the OTF, silicon valley, and US-DoD funded crypto tools and privacy apps.
The lesson of 2013 is not that the NSA is evil. It’s that the path is dangerous. The network path is something that we need to help users get across safely. Our job as technologists, our job as engineers, our job as anybody who cares about the internet in any way, who has any kind of personal or commercial involvement is literally to armor the user, to protect the user and to make it that they can get from one end of the path to the other safely without interference,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague. He reaffirmed his view a year later at Fusion’s 2016 Real Future Fair in Oakland, California. “If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change.… They’re not gonna jump up and protect your rights,” he said. “Technology works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.”
Once a fed, always a fed..
Here’s a scientific dissertation on how and why that phrase sucks: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
It’s so easy to use but very hard to fights against. Worst case of bullshit.
Feels like out of all the amendements, the 4th is the most violated one in US history.
Goebbels certainly didn't believe in the right to privacy but there is nothing connecting him to the "if you have nothing to hide..." quote. He certainly wasn't the first to come up with it, as it can be found in a 1917 piece by Upton Sinclair.
It seems like Goebbels' connection to the quote is one of these "it feels so true that it has to be true" misattributions that floats around on the internet and in popular culture.
And by the way, the NSA are Nazis, they are bad people doing bad things for evil reasons.
Snowden doesn't even think the NSA is evil:
The lesson of 2013 is not that the NSA is evil. It’s that the path is dangerous. The network path is something that we need to help users get across safely. Our job as technologists, our job as engineers, our job as anybody who cares about the internet in any way, who has any kind of personal or commercial involvement is literally to armor the user, to protect the user and to make it that they can get from one end of the path to the other safely without interference,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague.
He reaffirmed his view a year later at Fusion’s 2016 Real Future Fair in Oakland, California. “If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change.… They’re not gonna jump up and protect your rights,” he said. “Technology works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.”
I really hope that, within my lifetime, the CIA, FBI and any other state spy apparatus will be correctly seen as the evil, irredeemable orgs they are.
Capitalism's Invisible Army often acts as the propaganda arm of the US hegemony, so it is in a very real sense a part of their job to make sure this doesn't come to pass. Sadly they seem pretty good at it.
Fuck me, the last part hit me HARD. I won't get into the details why because it is painful for me to talk about it.
We desperately need a constitutional right to privacy, but I doubt that will happen in my or our country's lifetime.
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The answer to that Reddit post is to delete your account on Reddit.
I also have plenty to hide (crimes)
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