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What Right to Privacy?

Via Wil Wheaton’s blog, Bruce Schneier writes a thought-provoking essay on privacy at Wired.

The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

No, those “clever” answers will get you absolutely nowhere with those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining, etc. Right now, believe it or not, there are people around the nation doing things to endanger the lives of others. That’s not even debatable. And to the vast majority of people, it is reasonable to place some safeguards and restrictions on everybody in order to figure out who those bad guys are. The government would be negligent not to violate the absolute privacy of citizens in an effort to mitigate those dangers to the rest of us. If the government can violate your privacy without you even being aware of it, so much the better, some would say. Others would argue that no, it needs to be explicit and obvious or else it isn’t an effective deterrent. To anybody making either of those arguments, Mr. Schneier’s “clever” retorts are just silly. Privacy advocates need to step up the game well past that type of thing if they expect to make any headway.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Here Schneier is correct. The issue is all about who can be trusted to violate the privacy I construct for myself. The issue is about who would have the right to circumvent the privacy I take the time to build. It’s not a matter of an inherent right to privacy, because such a right does not actually exist.

Now let’s get this next part out on the table and out of the way: I am well aware of the fact that the Constitution does not specifically enshrine a right to privacy, but that’s definitely not what I am talking about. Please have the Ninth Amendment tattooed to your forearm.

Okay, what I do mean is that your right to privacy can only exist to the degree that you have bothered to create privacy. You do not have a right to have privacy out of thin air, if you haven’t taken the time and effort to create it. It’s like an intellectual property issue.

As Murray Rothbard said when discussing property rights in The Ethics of Liberty (emphasis original):

Is there really such a right to privacy? How can there be?

…as in the case of the “human right” to free speech, there is no such thing as a right to privacy except the right to protect one’s property from invasion. The only right “to privacy” is the right to protect one’s property from being invaded by someone else. In brief, no one has the right to burgle someone else’s home, or to wiretap someone’s phone lines. Wiretapping is properly a crime not because of some vague and woolly “invasion of a ‘right to privacy’,” but because it is an invasion of the property right of the person being wiretapped.

Wil Wheaton says, “We deserve privacy, and we don't have to give it up to have security.” We don’t indeed--in fact, we need each to make the other. If a man is stripped entirely of either of privacy or security, he can have none of the other. But it is important to keep straight the reasons why we ever have privacy. As one Wheaton commenter so wonderfully notes, “I find it comedically ironic that those that rail for nationalized healthcare, carbon credits/taxes, forced morality of affirmative action and other altruistic nightmares, et al., are often times the very same folks railing against ‘privacy’ violations.”

If you create privacy for yourself, then you can have it. But if you destroy it or give it away, you will have none.