[tslug]

Could you offer up a specific example of privacy and transparency not being opposites? My imagination is failing me.

I find when "transparency" is used in conversation these days, it tends to mean, "These guys over here shouldn't be allowed privacy, but I want to keep mine."

[terrestrial]

What I really meant was "inversely proportional", rather than opposite, although I do abide by that (if only because the words have such different meanings).

Increasing one will not reduce the other, or vice versa. As an example, imagine a scenario where everything the government does is in the open, and all systems can be publicly audited and verified. This is transparency, at no cost to privacy.

Conversely, if encryption, Tor, and leaving your house without a tracking device is outlawed, that would not increase transparency. It would merely make it more difficult to reduce the opacity of the receiving end of the tracking device.

[tslug]

What you're describing removes the ability of government employees to use privacy. This just incentivizes them when privacy is helpful (like in sensitive negotiations) to do that private work away from the office in their private lives.

Likewise, if you expect privacy in your personal life, but you work for the government and are forced to be transparent there, then using big data techniques and the many services tracking private individuals (uber, facebook, google, twitter, HN posts, others' cell phone captures, etc), you can suss out just about everything you need to know about their supposedly private lives, whether or not you know how to use Tor, can tolerate the dogshit Tor bandwidth and latencies, and assuming your Tor exit relays haven't been compromised.

When you create zones of privacy and transparency, what you're doing is making the private zone more powerful than the transparent zone, and you're making the transparent zone a liability to the private zone.

This is exactly the opposite of what you want to motivate. You want to generally motivate people to be transparent and to protect them for being transparent. Broadly speaking, that's the only way we're going to get more transparency. Right now in the US, transparency is generally equivalent to liability. It's all punishment, little reward.