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Posted by jacquesm 2 days ago

If you've got Nothing to Hide (2015)(jacquesmattheij.com)
104 points | 77 commentspage 2
deafpolygon 1 day ago|
One of my favorite bit about “if you have nothing to hide…” is asking folks if they’d be willing to take the door off their bathroom when they went to use it.
GuB-42 1 day ago||
An interesting example, because your body is literally something you have to hide. That is, it is illegal not to.

Personally, I hide it because that's what society is telling me, especially if children are around, and I have no real reason to go against that. I mean, who wants to see what I do in the bathroom? But should the government want to, I will gladly let them as it will nicely illustrate what I think of them.

There are many things I want to hide more than my body functions. It is a social taboo, not something that has to do with personal safety and security, which is what privacy advocates usually point to. Arguably, it is the opposite problem: something you have to hide, but for personal freedom, you shouldn't have to.

aeonik 1 day ago|||
I just all for their passwords and credit card information. They never share it with me for some reason.
defrost 1 day ago|||
DIY Home builders frequently leave that kind of trim to the end.

It's more a signifier of who grew up with Puritan roots.

utopiah 1 day ago||
"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" Eric Schmidt - Google CEO in 2009

193 files for Eric Schmidt according to https://www.wired.com/story/epstein-files-tech-elites-gates-...

314 files for Larry Page

294 files for Sergey Brin

Interesting rhetoric. It's always the people you suspect the most?

Joeboy 1 day ago||
In the context of the Epstein files, I think Schmidt's actual quote looks pretty good ("If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place").

The problem is that even if Schmidt didn't do anything wrong (I don't know but all the link says is he may have been invited to a dinner but probably didn't attend), he nevertheless had something to fear.

jacquesm 1 day ago||
> It's always the people you suspect the most?

And yet, there are always people willing to carry water for them.

Lapsa 1 day ago||
random book on privacy summarized counter argument to "nothing to hide - nothing to fear" like so: unnecessary decrease in privacy unnecessarily increases the surface of attack. effectively this leads to public shaming and targeted isolation of individuals. great for getting rid of business competition
treetalker 1 day ago||
(2015)
saaaaaam 1 day ago||
2015, but arguably more relevant today than ever before.
jacquesm 1 day ago||
Are you suggesting that the fact that I wrote it in 2015 somehow makes it 'dated'?

I could update it but I think the fact that it was written before Trump I actually makes it more powerful than less, and you're welcome to extrapolate from 2015 to 2026 and see where it's headed.

klez 1 day ago|||
Are you suggesting that they're suggesting anything beyond what date this was written on, since we usually point that out in almost every article that has not been written in the current year for a variety of reason, including "oh, yeah, I remember I already read this without even clicking, it's not new, I might as well go read the comments directly"?
jacquesm 1 day ago||
No, I'm not, hence the question.
klez 1 day ago|||
My apologies, I assumed that since you've been a user for a while you were aware of the reason for such a comment and the practice of indicating the post year in the submission titles.

No hard feelings, I hope.

jacquesm 1 day ago||
'For a while' indeed :)
defrost 1 day ago|||
Adding a date for older articles and posts is a very common HN convention

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896376

ideally it should be in the submitted title, if not often someone will post it as above .. and later a mod might add it.

No biggie, as they say.

jacquesm 1 day ago||
Of course I was completely unaware of that...
defrost 1 day ago||
Yeah, TBH, I figured you knew ... I'm juggling a few things and probably put this general note in where it wasn't needed. Pax.
jacquesm 1 day ago||
NP, I considered adding it but then again, I know HN tends to interpret that as 'old news' and in this case it is anything but. The rules are there for a reason, even so these are strange times and I figure the more people are aware of this the better.

I could have updated the post date but I would have considered that cheating so I purposefully posted it as it was but left out the date.

But don't worry, it'll get flagged off the homepage soon enough because way too many people find this sort of thing uncomfortable.

selfhoster11 1 day ago|||
FWIW, you aren't alone man. Stay strong.
elefanten 1 day ago||||
Isn’t it just an hn convention?

I agree with your comment I’m replying to completely, but the date tag doesn’t have to be an indictment (as you yourself suggest)

jacquesm 1 day ago||
That's why I'm asking a question. For me the difference between then and now is then, 2015 it was still a thing that I saw hanging in the future, the OPM hack is what prompted me to write this. But if I had not written this then I would probably be writing it today on account of the ICE article currently on the front page.

All of those big tech companies have willingly given in to Trump and his band of goons and are cooperating at a scale that dwarfs anything the Germans could have ever wished for. The article shows the damage that one single field in one single file could do. Now multiply that by a couple of 1000.

The potential for an epic disaster is definitely there and even HN is apparently not immune to having its share of bootlickers and bootwearers.

DoctorOetker 1 day ago|||
you reference an ICE article "currently" on the front page, I think this comment would benefit from an explicit link to that discussion since it is ephemeral and I am unable to make sure I find the right one.
Kim_Bruning 1 day ago||
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46895860
Kim_Bruning 1 day ago||||
(deleted)
defrost 1 day ago|||
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To cast the entire HN community as composed of {X} would be against the guidelines.

To deny that the HN community contains some {X} would be blinkered.

jacquesm 1 day ago|||
No, I'm perfectly fine with writing what I wrote.

It's an observed fact and I honestly don't care what anybody thinks of that. It should be pretty clear that I think that seeing such excesses requires one to take a stance rather than just to pretend it isn't happening.

Kim_Bruning 1 day ago||
As you wish.
frumplestlatz 1 day ago|||
> All of those big tech companies have willingly given in to Trump and his band of goons and are cooperating at a scale that dwarfs anything the Germans could have ever wished for.

This is dangerously ahistorical and an offensive trivialization of the scale of human suffering inflicted by the Nazi regime. Fascism as practiced by the NSDAP involved the total integration of the state, the legal system, industry, media, and civil society into a single coercive apparatus in service of a genocidal war. German corporations were not “cooperating”; they were subordinated, aligned, and legally compelled within a one-party totalitarian state.

fmlpp 13 hours ago|||
Some, even most, were cooperating, and some others from other countries, like USA, too.
mugat2 14 hours ago||||
history is a lie agreed upon.

the common man's task is to figure out "agreed upon by whom?"

jacquesm 1 day ago||||
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897035
frumplestlatz 1 day ago||
Yes, we substantially disagree on a contentious policy question. That does not change historical fact, nor does it make claims like “dwarfs anything the Germans could have wished for” anything other than profound historical illiteracy.
defrost 1 day ago|||
FWiW I come from a large extended family that racked up a lot of time on the pointy end of much of this; Desert Rats, Japanese PoW camps, jungle fighting, and a good deal of the post WWII ground work.

So I really do have to ask you, when you spoke of:

> The problem is the repeated use of Nazi analogies and grossly inflammatory language,

What, exactly, is up with the current US administration, Trump, Miller, clear throws to Blood Tribe language, veiled messages of racial purity and all that .. is it all "just a joke" ?

The early moves of both Stalin and Hitler, before either became the world villians we all know, was to extend their borders within their own countries so that they could sidestep "the law" of the land with their own personal squads of intesticial vagueness.

The administration is unquestionably veering unilateral and authoritarian and can no longer be trusted by allies.

amazingman 1 day ago|||
Let's just stipulate everything you said is true. You do realize that the subordination of German corporations validates the quote you're ostensibly arguing against? Given your framing, German fascists would have loved the scale of cooperation that the American fascist executive branch is receiving from corporations, rather than have to do the difficult work of subordinating them.
frumplestlatz 1 day ago||
The German population[1] was not unwilling; your error is not recognizing that it started with cooperation and grew until all of society was subordinated to the totalitarian state.

There was massive alignment across their society. What they “achieved” would not have been possible any other way.

As someone that abhors the destructive ideologies of that era — and has spent a considerable amount of time studying the history — it’s amusing ironic to be repeatedly compared to the predominant fascist ideology (not that you personally have done this) by people echoing the behavior of the predominate destructive left-wing ideology of the day.

From a historical perspective, it’s not the right-wing that I’m worried about now. I worry about the totalizing, agency-eroding, violence normalizing, and norm-enforcing (thought terminating) “ethics” that have taken firm hold of the left’s levers of power over the past 15 years.

[1] except for the German populations that they literally wanted to murder, of course.

amazingman 1 day ago||
I definitely have worries about far-left capture if/when a power vacuum occurs after the current fascist executive and semi-fascist legislative experience the whiplash of Americans finally pushing back. But you know what? I'll start focusing on that when we get closer to that reality. It's the fascists currently in power that deserve our focus. And you seem to be willing to carry water for them. I assume you don't see it that way, but that's hard to square with some of your other comments.
treetalker 1 day ago||||
Not at all! Perhaps I’m mistaken, but my understanding was that anything not recent should get a year tag in the title (at least that’s the pattern I’ve recognized).
jacquesm 1 day ago||
You're not mistaken, but that wasn't an accident.
keyle 1 day ago||||
C'mon, you know it's convention to write the year of publication in a title. No agenda beyond that.
nephihaha 1 day ago|||
You think this is about Trump, it's happening worldwide.
mugat2 14 hours ago||
I wince or sigh every time ic someone characterize policy etc. as some political actor's individual will. isn't everyone exhausted with the political theater yet??
nephihaha 10 hours ago||
Exactly. Especially when certain policies crop up in multiple times and places. The electronic panopticon is on the menu everywhere.
Vinu_pro_ 1 day ago|
[flagged]