Privacy

Yes, continue to try to control all information and disguise it as protecting people. Praise privacy laws, for they are the future. And freedom to access information is doomed.

I wrote a big, huge rant (larger than this) about the topic. I threw it away. Too much rambling and no one would have read it anyway. Try this, though.

1. People who feel weak and threatened want someone to protect them, no matter what the cost. No exceptions. Remove either one (weak, threatened) from equation and it changes.
2. Information is a weapon. If you don’t know about something, you can’t act against it or for it (deliberately). No plotting is possible without information. You can’t target someone if you don’t know that they exist or the specifics of their lives.
3. Criminals who use information as a weapon usually target the weakest people that they can find, usually women, children, and the elderly. These are the people any society most needs to protect, or it is doomed to failure by extinction.
4. Anyone who feels weak and threatened wants to be protected from these criminals. This is why there are laws concerning what information can be in your possession. The best way most people see to do this is to disarm criminals – to take away the weapons. Thus, privacy laws.
5. Pay attention, this is the big one. If you are strong (in resources and personally) and present a confident face to the world, you have no need of privacy. If you are able to deal with any weapon of information wielded by any criminal, you need not fear either. Even if you can not (or will not) strengthen yourself for this threat, you can still not be a victim by not feeling like a victim. If someone commits a crime against you, go get that son of a bitch, but do NOT worry about something that hasn’t even happened yet. Guard yourself, prepare yourself, but don’t even think about stepping on the freedoms to gather information to do it.

This is not to say that I would give anyone on the street my ATM pin and card. I’m not that strong or I wouldn’t have to use them. But when it comes to the what, where, and who of me, my environment and my person, I say go ahead and look. If you want to know my daily activities, just ask. If you want to know my deepest thoughts, again, just ask. If you want to take naked pictures of me without my knowledge, I hope you get a good exposure! Har, har, little bit of photography humor there. Yeah.

Oh, and there is also privacy in a social-space sense. Such as, don’t disturb my privacy by knocking on my door at 3:00 in the morning, don’t disturb my privacy by stopping me in the street and asking for donations to your community paper, that sort of thing. Different creature, different rant.

Solution: Arm yourself against the world, but do it personally. Don’t get me and my slice of the government to do it for you.