Nothing to Hide

I have watched with interest the twitter feed of Nothing to Hide. This feed, created by Daniel Sieradski retweets messages by people that welcome having the NSA read their email, listen to their phone calls, and track their behavior online. He wrote a brief essay to explain why he created the feed which summarizes the underlying issues as well as I could. But he was surprised by how widespread the attitudes are among people that being spied on is OK.

I hope they read what Edward Snowden actually said.

Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA's surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. "What they're doing" poses "an existential threat to democracy", he said.

The United States has functioned, to the extent that it has, due to distributing strictly limited powers among various different players so that they can act as checks and balances to each other. The balance among these powers is crucial for the structure to not collapse. Terrorism is not an existential threat to democracy, but the tools to run a police state clearly are. If you think you have nothing to hide, you just aren't thinking very hard.