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+++ title = "You have something to hide" date = 2025-06-01 description = "Surveillance, and so what? Why we should worry about the dangers of generalized surveillance." insert_anchor_links = "left" draft = false [taxonomies] tags = ["politics"] +++
Even if you have nothing to hide, here are some reasons to worry about general surveillance.
This article has been translated from French using Firefox 128's offline AI translator, and manually corrected by myself. It refers to events and structures known to a French audience but instances of such phenomena should be found in other countries as well.
Illegal police experimentation is future law
It is common for illegal or derogatory security experiments, often alleged to be temporary, becoming the rule. Surveillance cameras are being installed everywhere, the police are using drones, etc. and as should not be backtracked and spoiled an investment, these temporary experiences are permanent or even legalized, even when their results (or independent studies) show their ineffectiveness.
Give the police the hand, they pull your arms out
When the police receive a new toy with a certain legal framework, they allow themselves to extend it excessively. For example, the French FNAEG (national automated genetic file) was intended to identify sexual offenders and murderers who could reoffend, but in 2021 contained the DNA profiles of more than 7.5% of the French population.
Incompetent decision-makers
The incompetence of judges in computer science is easily exploited by the police and computer giants to institute unfounded political trials. The 8 december 2022 case, with the prolonged and illegal detention of militants accused of terrorism on the sole ground that they were using secure software and messaging, which were completely legal and widespread.
Politicians, too, are victims of a dangerous inculture of computer science, which would be forgivable if they refrained from making decisions about it or being guided blindly (or interested) by lobbies. There is a lack of awareness of the principles of the Internet, both technical and philosophical, as well as a confusion between the information that can circulate, and the "rival" material goods that can be possessed.
It's for our safety
Every opportunity is good to add cameras and artificial intelligence. The executive generally justifies itself in a very confused manner, claiming that these measures would have avoided a particular accident. This response is mostly disproportionate, inadequate and ineffective, while simpler solutions exist. See the 2022 French Stadium fiasco which is an example of crowd mismanagement, instrumentalized to promote algorithmic video surveillance. See also how this type of problem can be avoided (videos by Fouloscopie, French) (spoiler: without AI or video surveillance).
Child molesters and terrorists as a scarecrow
The reasons given by politicians for increasing surveillance and censorship are usually the struggle against child abuse and terrorism. Since a majority of sexual assaults are committed by relatives (spouse, parent, classmate, sports coach, etc.), especially when the victim is a child, they are not usually unknowns hunting on social networks. Moreover, these criminals are more motivated than average to finding safe communication systems: surveillance will disproportionately affect the entire population, for a very low benefit.
Security of communications
Governments would like to require software manufacturers and publishers to provide them with a means of bypassing all the security systems available to users. The existence of these backdoors, supposedly known only to the authorities, would be used by the police and the secret services. This would allow for abuse by denying all privacy and criminalizing information protection: if the police cannot read your secure messages, then you are necessarily a terrorist. Even assuming honest and competent authorities, the backdoor plan can very well leak and end up in the wrong hands, sold to ill-intentioned pirates. Computer security experts can also find out how to exploit it directly.
A backdoor is a security flaw held secret. But an uncorrected security flaw, even a secret one, is literally lives at stake. Computer attacks, such as the ones that paralysed factories and hospitals, exploit Windows flaws that the NSA had discovered and kept for itself, without asking Microsoft to correct them. There has been a leak, and since then many viruses have been using them.
Some would say that some manufacturers are honest and do not give a backdoor to the government, like Apple. However, there is nothing to prevent them from changing their minds one day, without your consent. They can also use the backdoors for their exclusive benefit, and be victims of piracy.
Fundamental individual freedom
How can there be a rule of law if one is suspected of all, presumed guilty until proven otherwise?
In the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789:
Article X: No one shall be disturbed for their opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
Article XI: The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of Man: every citizen can therefore speak, write, print freely, except to be held accountable for the abuse of this freedom, in cases determined by the law.
Privacy must be a fundamental individual right, and is necessary for freedom of thought. The French government claims that "democracy is lived with the face uncovered", but this is an unfortunate conflation between private and public life: absolute transparency is required for state affairs, but individuals must enjoy sufficient confidentiality. We observe the opposite situation, with a state that wants to know everything about its people, without revealing anything to it.
Corruption and lobbying
Many decisions leading directly to more surveillance (through investment in surveillance solutions), or indirectly (through the choice of non-privacy-friendly computer solutions), are the result of huge lobbyism from the Big Tech with decision-makers at all levels, from schools to parliamentarians.
In particular, the "open-bar" contract between Microsoft and the French Éducation Nationale makes it possible to engrave the Windows monopoly in the brains of schoolchildren. If all your interactions with computers are through Microsoft tools (at school, at home, at work), these tools will be familiar to you and so you'll probably go and look for them specifically, even if there are alternatives. Is that your choice? Not really, since Windows is installed in schools without consultation and without presentation of alternatives.
Capitalism
Monitoring generates a lot of data that is resold for advertising purposes, which represents a significant part of the Big Tech's turnover, in addition to feeding a morbid finance based on auctions on the probability that this or that advertiser is driving you to buy sooner or later. To participate in this is to encourage a gigantic economy that is perfectly unproductive.
Take a tour of Affordance (in French) or Pluralistic (in English) blogs to find out how mass surveillance plays a central role in capitalism today. The surveillance market is also profitable through government and communities.
Environment
Clearing your emails to save a few gigabytes is quite negligible compared to the amount of data that a large number of companies and institutions (the ones you know, but also their service providers, the intermediaries managing the communication media, and maybe the pirates who hacked them, etc.) keep on you, not to mention everything that is exchanged between who knows how many servers each time an advertisement is displayed using Real-Time Bidding.
Mr. Bidouille's video: Internet and climate, it goes wrong? (What is the environmental impact of the Internet, and where does it actually come from?) (in French)
Bias and discrimination
With mass surveillance generating huge amounts of data, algorithms are used to determine which events and individuals should be considered suspicious. These algorithms must be tuned, whether they are a score calculation performed by a social care system in order to decide who must undergo a check, or a "smart" video surveillance in a public place. They are always more or less biased, usually to the detriment of racial minorities and the poor. This only magnifies the prejudices already present among the authorities, and reinforces a social norm that is no longer discussed, since the algorithm is often misrepresented as neutral and objective. Yet it is only a tool, which always reflects in its use the ideology of its designers.
What if the far right came to power?
If a fascist leader came to power, it would be easy for them to determine who was too incompatible with the official ideology, using the data already accumulated by the state and by corporations (which would willingly collaborate). You once took part in a demonstration, you helped an undocumented migrant years ago, you said something heretical that you don't even remember? A datacenter, somewhere, remembers, and no one can guarantee the effectiveness of your right to be forgotten.
The Nazi occupation had a system of registration that served well in the repression of resistance and the organization of roundups, etc. At the time of liberation, the dangers of such a record system were obvious. The French CNIL (Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés, originally an independent and powerful public body, supposed to defend individual freedoms in the field of information technology) later recalled this and prevented the creation of particularly intrusive files. Today the CNIL is no more than consultative, and fascism seems so far away that we tend to forget the similarity between today's surveillance and that of the Gestapo, the KGB or the GDR.
Effects of monitoring on behaviour
Do we acts the same when we know we're being monitored? Maybe we'll prevent ourselves from doing things that may look a bit deviant, or even from thinking about them. Work surveillance is a source of anxiety among workers, and even reduces productivity.
Video surveillance is also used to train AI to detect "abnormal behaviours". The aim is for the automatic system to be able to alert the police, for example. Like racial profiling creates the crime of being the wrong color, this "normality profiling" may create a new kind of crime, making any thing that deviates a little too much from "normal" behavior or appearance suspicious.
Group effect
A communication system is of interest only if it is shared. If your entourage uses some centralized messaging platform, you are strongly encouraged or even forced to join it to avoid isolating yourself. Large platforms benefit from this group effect and its inertia, which limits the development of alternative platforms.
One way of fighting for the diversification of communication platforms is the obligation to interoperability. For example, a large social media should accept that its users interact with people who only have an account on any competing platform. Of course, the Big Tech prefer to keep their customers captive.
Direct victims
For most of us, these arguments may seem abstract and lack relevance at the individual level. However, there are cases where the effects of monitoring are not only systemic but actually visible and targeted.
Some people have an increased need to protect their privacy from the authorities. For example women seeking to abort in a country that prohibits it (some states in the USA), investigative journalists and whistleblowers, LGBTQ in Russia or Turkey... Even with great rigour in their personal use of information technology, they are unwittingly exposed by others and victims of the group effect. It is up to us to provide them with a safe environment, in the manner of vaccination coverage that protects not only the people who are vaccinated, but also a minority at risk.
Locking
Imagine a world like in Orwell's 1984, where everything would be done to limit dissenting thinking, stifle the slightest beginning of uprising, dilute responsibilities, maintain ideological confusionism, discourage "deviance", encourage denunciation... In such a world, could one imagine a revolution? How could workers acquire the necessary political culture, organize themselves into activists, unite thousands of comrades, etc. if the police scrutinize all the private communications?
It's not too late
The Internet is a great tool that enables the people to communicate and organize themselves in a decentralized manner. Everyone has free access to the largest encyclopedia (Wikipedia), the most complete map in the world (OpenStreetMap), scientific articles, international press, can instantly send messages to people around the world. It is a new situation in the history of civilization, and it can be assumed that the possession of these tools would have changed the course of all past revolutions.
What to do? The easiest way is to start by changing its individual use of computing, starting with a shift to free software (free as in freedom). The communities around these projects cover a wide range of interests and skills that can be discovered naturally by being a user.
Useful resources
Some cross-cutting resources and recurrent sources of this article:
- La Quadrature du Net, an association against surveillance and censorship.
- April, an association for freedoms in information technology.
- Affordance, the blog of a lecturer in information science.
- Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow's blog about capitalism's drifts.
- Next (formerly NextInpact), an independent journal about politics and information technology.
- Sebsauvage : technical, economic and political reasons (past and present) to no longer trust Microsoft.
- Nothing to Hide (song, French)
- Nothing to Hide (documentary, English)