Think you have nothing to hide from surveillance? Think again.
People often say that they don’t think government surveillance is such a big deal because they have nothing to hide. They post on Facebook or Twitter, their life is an open book.
What they don’t realize, as this excellent article points out (h/t Chase Madar), is that they might very well have something to hide. And the reason they don’t realize that is that they—like all of us—have no clue as to just how extensive the federal criminal code is.
The US criminal code is scattered across 27,000 pages. And that doesn’t include the roughly 10,000 additional administration regulations the government has promulgated. So extensive and sprawling are these laws and regulations that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count how many federal crimes there are.
This can have grave consequences: not for your privacy but for your immunity from government harassment and coercion.
As Justice Breyer puts it:
The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
And as the author of the piece goes onto comment:
For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.
If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.
The selective invocation and application of criminal prosecutions and penalties is one of the oldest tools of repressive government. (Anyone wanting a refresher should consult Otto Kirchheimer’s classic discussion of “patterns of prosecution” in his Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedures for Political Ends. As Kirchheimer writes, “Modern administrative practices create infinite ways to become liable to criminal prosecution.”) The sheer sprawl of federal (and don’t forget state and local) law—and the surveillance of men and women that now accompanies that sprawl—only enables this furhter.