[hobs]

While I am doing some of these things, the Luddites didn't have much of an influence over the industrial revolution, they were discarded in the dustbin of history along with anyone who stood in the way of increased profits and globalization.

What I often see is that most individuals see that the benefits outweigh the negatives (all the people that say "I have nothing to hide." over and over) of safety over privacy, and specters can be brought up to increase this fear of the unknown until you are going to have to fight against your friends and neighbors instead of the government to get any change in place.

[ZenoArrow]

I find people that say "I have nothing to hide" often haven't thought it through. Easiest example is porn habits, it's not necessarily something people keep private, but many people want to, yet it can skip their mind when they say "I have nothing to hide". IIRC the Snowden leaks included stories of political dissidents being kept in their place by threatening to expose their porn habits (not necessarily anything illegal, just potentially embarrassing).

[csandreasen]

When someone says they have nothing to hide, I've found there's usually an implied "from the specific person or group that I'm thinking about right now." It's not that I have nothing, but the set information that'd I don't want the cops to know about is different from the set that I don't want my spouse to know about, which is further different from the set I don't want Google or Facebook to know about.

The cops won't care about my porn browsing, but I might not want my spouse to know about all of it. I wouldn't want the cops knowing if I was buying drugs, but I trust that my spouse wouldn't go walking down to the station to turn me in. Similarly, I trust that Facebook wouldn't hand over my info to the feds without a court order, but I don't trust them to hand all of my info over to marketing firm without my permission for a small fee.

As a side note, the leak you're referring to stated that several jihadis' devotion to their cause would be called into question and their authority undermined if it was shown that their public and private lives were inconsistent, with several examples[1]. There were no indications that any threats were made, and, in fact, Greenwald later stated in an interview[2] that he had no evidence that there was any intention to threaten them. I like to point out whenever that article comes up that one of the sources for that article later complained that Greenwald selectively quoted him so as not to undermine the article's core argument[3] and that Greenwald had himself written a book back in 2008 which tried to discredit Republicans by publishing information about their private lives[4]. Sorry, I just can't stand Greenwald...

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_...

[2] http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

[3] http://volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/

[4] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307408663/thevolocon...