NSA Snooping Matters, Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' | Cato Institute

NSA Snooping Matters, Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' | Cato Institute: "Almost everyone has “something to hide” — if by that we mean some intimate corners of our lives we don’t want exposed to strangers, even if we’re not doing anything wrong.

That’s why the same polls show people aren’t nearly as comfortable with the government reading their emails and online chats. What they really mean, then, is that they don’t think a list of phone numbers and IP addresses will expose any of those intimate areas.

Yet folks in the intelligence community who actually work with all that metadata will tell you it’s often just as revealing as the contents of a call — even more so, once any kind of moderately sophisticated analytic techniques are applied to the data set as a whole."

"Who has called a substance abuse counselor, a suicide hotline, a divorce lawyeror an abortion provider? What websites do you read daily? What porn turns you on? What religious and political groups are you a member of?"

"Because your cellphone’s “routing information” typically includes information about the nearest cell tower, those records are also a kind of virtual map showing where you spend your time — and, when aggregated with others, who you like to spend it with."

"The information often sticks around indefinitely, while the rules only stick around until someone decides to change them."

"You may not be interested in protesting, criticizing the government or debating fringe political views — but as a citizen of a democracy, subject to the laws the democratic process produces, you’re better off in a system where those things are allowed to happen."

"It’s slow and subtle, but surveillance societies inexorably train us for helplessness, anxiety and compliance. Maybe they’ll never look at your call logs, read your emails or listen in on your intimate conversations. You’ll just live with the knowledge that they always could — and if you ever had anything worth hiding, there would be nowhere left to hide it."