You May Have Nothing To Hide, But There Is Much To Fear

These tools and programs were touted as protection from “terrorist threats across the globe”, and after 9/11 this was deemed all the excuse needed to sacrifice privacy in the name of safety and security. This acceptance of mass surveillance has given rise to the most common refrain in discussions of privacy, especially digital:

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”

This manner of think necessitates a trade-off: if you want the security supposedly offered by mass surveillance, you must be willing to give up your privacy. The issue is that there are two critical flaws in this logic:
The first is that it implies guilt. This line of reasoning is accusatory in nature, and assumes that by exercising your right to privacy, you are ‘guilty’ of committing some offense that would revoke your right to privacy, such as breaking the law. This logic makes an overt association between exercising your right to privacy and criminality. It operates on the fundamental idea that breaking the law revokes the right to privacy, and effectively implies that if you are worried about surveillance than you must be breaking the law. This is no different than assuming that exercising the right to freedom of speech implies the intent to commit slander.

The second and most critical flaw in this refrain is that trading privacy for security is a losing trade. Mass surveillance programs in America have been notoriously ineffective. The NSA has claimed that its surveillance has prevented 54 terrorist attacks, but there is scant and conflicting evidence for this claim. During a White House panel on the NSA’s bulk collection program, Judge Richard Leon had this to say of the surveillance system's effectiveness:

Despite this lack of effectiveness, supporters of the program and of “nothing to hide” mentality desperately cling onto the programs. A US Senator, Dianne Feinstein, admitted that she did “not know to what extent metadata was used or if it was used”, but avowed by the program because “terrorists will come after us if they can”.