This is in India, but coming soon to a country near you (or the one you are in already).
I don’t get why they never suggest making it completely public every email, phone call and bank transaction of politicians and judges then… also, please, force them to wear a chip so we can always know their location… it’s ok to give it some hours of delay for security reasons, we just need to know where you have been to, no need to worry if you have nothing to hide.
Of all the people in the world that need or should have it mandatory to have round the clock public surveillance … it should be our political leaders
They claim to be working for the people … yet the people never really know what the fuck these leaders are doing
Blowing Bubba not good enough for you?
“I have nothing to hide” is such a dumb argument.
Are you always going to have nothing to hide?
Because it’ll be too late to start caring about privacy when you do.
The problem is this: You don’t know what you need to hide or that you even needed to hide it until it is too late.
Look at what is going on in the United States right now, LGBTQ rights are taking a massive beating. While hate crime laws are still in place, that is not a guarantee. Transpeople who revealed they are trans under safer conditions can’t take that shit back when someone like Trump and his cronies are in power and abso-fucking-lutely will put transpeople in extermination camps.
I, like many people on many Lemmy platforms, have been anti-Trump for a very long time. I thought Trump was an absolute fool well before his 2015 bid for presidency and I was honest to god shocked that he was taken seriously and actually won! Now basically any criticism of Trump is being prosecuted and Trump critics can and have been violently attacked.
I made numerous posts all over the internet criticizing and mocking Trump. Many have been made using temporary email, but my OPSEC online was eased into, meaning there was a lot of stuff from the past that I used under ‘real’ emails. My facebook page, which I never wanted (my family made it for me without any concern of what I wanted many years ago) is still active even though I cannot remember the last time I logged in and posted, and it does contain anti-fascist, anti-Trump comments and posts. Deleting the FB page might make denial a little easier, but if they decide to demand any information from FB (who will comply without a warrant) they will see it.
Given that the United States WILL NOT ‘go back to normal’ once Trump kicks the bucket, there is no telling how the regime would use this data against its opponents.
I heard a lawyer argue something like this once in court, regarding the the fourth and fifth amendments:
These laws are not meant to protect the innocent, they are meant to protect criminals. The founding fathers who penned it were traitors and seditionists who fought a war against their own country. They wrote these laws so that guilty people would be able to avoid punishment if proper procedures aren’t followed, and certain rights aren’t upheld.
I’m not sure how much I agree with that, but it was definitely an interesting take.
‘Don’t Talk to the Police’ is about exactly that.
Everyone should watch that lecture, but TL;DW is ANYTHING you say to the police will be used against you and NOTHING you say to the police will ever help you.
If you’re not convinced, you really need to watch that lecture.
Whoever said that is full of shit. The right to silence was born out of the religious persecution that was rife in Europe in the 16th and 17th century, where coerce confessions and forcing people to incriminate themselves, even if it was bullshit, was commonplace. Also religion played a role. Lying in some circumstances was a mortal sin, but at the same time people acknowledged that people would naturally lie in order to protect themselves. So in order to make it possible for people to not commit mortal sins and not lie to authorities, the simple right to not answer questions and not have their silence used against them was eventually mandated.
If people did not have the right to silence, all the authorities have to do is just coerce a confession out of a suspect and not investigate anything else. This happens all the time in China and Japan. Japan technically does have the right to silence in their constitution, but in practice it does not exist. If you refuse to answer questions and clam up during interrogations, they will take it as an admission of guilt and as far as I know, no judge refused that.
In China you are required to answer any ‘relevant’ question posed by police, you only have the right to deny irrelevant questions. So basically if they accuse you of robbing and murdering some shopkeeper, you have to give an account of yourself, but if they ask you what you had for lunch today, you can decline to answer that question. Stupid, but it is what it is.
The right to silence was born out of the religious persecution that was rife in Europe in the 16th and 17th century, where coerce confessions and forcing people to incriminate themselves, even if it was bullshit, was commonplace
I think that’s what he was talking about. His argument is that the Founders did things that could incriminate themselves to their old government, and there were no protections in place to shield them from, for instance, self incrimination. The ‘validity’ of the law, I think, isn’t particularly germane.
I presume they’re okay with the first surveillance cameras being in their bedrooms then.
Cool. Let me install these cameras in your house, including your bedroom and bathrooms. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear
Everyone should be bothered by surveillance, it ain’t about wrongdoing, it’s about further empowering the people who think us suffering and dying for their profits is perfectly acceptable.
But there are no such people with nothing to hide.
Ugh, so tired of this old argument. Nothing to hide doesn’t mean everything to show. There, now let’s get on with our lives.
Back in the late 90s when people started saying that to me, I’d just say ok, get naked RIGHT NOW. What, now you’ve got something to hide?
A few people took me seriously from that but it usually just fell short.
It isn’t the best way to say it. A better way is ‘show me all your electrical bills from the past . Months, also I want to know how much you weigh right now and I want you to tell me again in three months’.
It will be just as offensive but carry more weight. Also if they blow up in your face just calmly reply with ‘what? Is there something wrong? Maybe your health is declining and your job needs to be taken by a healthier person? Are you running a growing operation? Is that why your electric bill struck a nerve?’
Oh dear god, I thought this was the US Supreme Court, which is bound by the 4th Amendment. Turns out this is the Supreme Court from the State of Telangana in India.
It’s the Supreme Court of India not Telangana which is a state in India.
Posts like this are a great test for whether people read the article (or even the first paragraph) before commenting.
The first paragraph:

it appears decision upheld the right to privacy, even though some, perhaps dissenting, judges and prosecutor made the headline’s argument.
Hell, even the URL.
Yeah I just figure UI can factor into that a bit more, like some apps don’t show it.
Being private as obidient protects being private as disobidient.

This was posted in another thread yesterday, and I found it particularly persuasive: https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/
There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.
…
On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.
When powerful people (government or not) have a record of every little thing a person does for decades retrospectively, just watch inconvenient people you like suddenly start disappearing from public discourse.
People aren’t being “disappeared” for nebulous and secret reasons. They’re being disappeared because they’re brown, they speak a non-English language, or they have some minor criminal citation in the public record.
We’re making up hypotheticals to be afraid of surveillance when the modern state is already snatching people up for very superficial and arbitrary reasons
That scope will narrow as time passes.
Now it’s brown poor people. Soon it will be trans people. Maybe next brown rich people, or Muslims, or Socialists. Y’all know the poem.
They’ve already “declared” Antifa a terrorist group and fentanyl as a WMD, that’s all the justification previous republican presidents have needed for starting wars and civil terror campaigns.
You don’t think they are already using the surveillance state/surveillance capitalism in this process? Its not hypothetical, its just that the scope is narrow this moment.
You don’t think they are already using the surveillance state/surveillance capitalism in this process?
A lot of people are being picked up at their immigration hearings, at traffic stops, and at their jobs. This is all information already in the public record. You don’t need surveillance to be marked as a legal immigrant.
People with nothing to hide have the most to lose.
Saying ‘I have nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide’ is like saying ‘I don’t care for free speech because I have nothing to say’.
Always bad when the net policy is made by old people which confuse an remote control with an smartphone.
‘People with nothing to hide’ don’t exist. All of us have something that we’d like to keep private or even secret.
Sometimes it’s little silly things we do when nobody’s watching, like tasting our pets’ food. Other times it’s porn and what specific kind we read/watch/play. And in a tiny, miniscule minority of cases it’s crime. Even fewer of those cases are crimes that actually hurt anyone.
Depriving 99.99% of the population (the remaining 0.01% are politicians) of basic rights just to pretend you’re stopping crime that 0.001% of the population is comitting. Pretend, because we know it doesn’t even work anyway.
Nearly 25 years of mass, global surveillance by the NSA, CIA and FBI, and they failed to catch even a single terrorist or terrorist-to-be. Meanwhile there’s a public shooting almost every day.
It’s not just about basic human rights or fundamental principles of society. These programs simply don’t work. It’s a waste of resources. The only result is bulk data gathering on the citizens. I wonder what that could be used for…?
And when they did catch mass shooters or terrorists it was usually due to an informant or someone who knew the would-be criminal and reported on them.
Meaning a trick that dates literally to antiquity is still the main way they are thwarted.
Hmmm. Wonder how much they have to hide












