Privacy and the Government's Dossier on You

[Anti Federalist]

An EPIC series of posts on privacy.

THIS is the fuck WHY you have to defend your privacy, even if you are "doing nothing wrong"!

Here is a link to the NSA dossier program he is talking about.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/vast-new-spying-program-was-started-secret-bogus




Privacy and the Government's Dossier on You

Posted by Michael S. Rozeff on December 15, 2012 07:47 AM

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/128415.html#more-128415

The government's spying apparatus has ratcheted up. This occurred earlier this year. New details are now emerging. If the government collects data on all Americans and trolls through it looking for crimes or potential crimes, and if you have not committed a crime, what's wrong with that? The latter is the common argument that dismisses government spying. I said earlier that we are entering a Kafka-esque world. When I read The Castle and The Trial years ago, they made a deep impression upon me, as much or more than 1984 by Orwell. Kafka's novels provide one perspective on what's wrong with government spying on everyone. Privacy and liberty disappear simultaneously via this spying for the innocent as well as those who have committed crimes or contemplate doing so. How? Here's a taste of what Kafka-esque means.

First, each person is "small" but faces a "large" government. That government is bureaucratic. The small person is against a faceless thing that he or she doesn't know how to defend against. This bureaucracy can divert the person from one office and procedure to another endlessly. The frustration with this is enormous. The person loses the capacity to act freely and must contend and defend against charges and suspicions.

The bureaucracy is inscrutable and powerful. Its resources dwarf each person's. The purposes of this spy-bureaucratic machine are unknown to the individual. It is making decisions over lives but people are not privy to them and can't affect them. The power relationship between you and government is altered drastically when the government creates a dossier on you. You are in the dark. You are helpless and powerless. You feel that way, and you are. You are placed on the defensive. You no longer can act freely. Your freedom and your privacy both vaporize. You become fearful of speaking to others and expressing yourself because this is going into your dossier and may be used against you. Not knowing what the government is looking for or what it may concoct, your freedom is drastically inhibited. You weigh and measure every ordinary activity, every association, every contact with a foreigner, every contact with an ordinary American for fear that they may be under suspicion and investigation and that you will be drawn into it by your association with them.

You may be called into an interrogation at any time for reasons unknown. You will have to face this alone or else hire expensive counsel. You do not even know what the potential charges might be. You are subject to incriminating yourself, even by innocent remarks. You become subject to searches and seizures. Strange men in dark suits show up to question you, your neighbors and people where you work. People around you pull away from you out of fear, thinking you must be guilty if they are investigating you.

Your enemies and people who dislike you or are antagonistic to you or want to drag you down, these people inform on you. They add to your dossier. You face unknown accusations by unknown people. The authorities begin to place "holds" on your activities. You find you cannot travel without their approval. You cannot do a bank or credit card transaction without the approval of some bureaucrat or without getting permission in some procedure. Doors close and you do not know why. In The Trial, the protagonist meets with his death at the conclusion. Two men slit his throat, as I recall, and he has no idea why.

The first sentence of Kafka's great novel begins as follows:

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had 
done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.”

[Anti Federalist]

Privacy: Inversion of Citizen-Government Relation

Posted by Michael S. Rozeff on December 15, 2012 08:32 AM

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/128510.html

There will always be a need for people to regulate their interpersonal relations, and this will be met by some form of governance or other. The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence promised a form of governance in which the people created a government that was their agent. The people, however, HAD to monitor the government continually if this principal-agent relation were to succeed, because the government was given various powers that could be expanded. As people turned to money-making and other activities, the monitoring declined and the government's powers increased

Government dossiers on every American and other government actions that diminish privacy and freedom invert the proper relation between citizen and government. The citizen should be monitoring and controlling the government, not the reverse.

What we are experiencing is the continual destruction of the main thrust of the American Revolution. The most important war in this country is the Counter-Revolutionary War, of which attacks on privacy are a part. This Counter-Revolutionary War has gone on since the Constitution was approved. It is a silent war, an unrecognized war.

[Anti Federalist]

Oh Lord, THIS!

Privacy: The Tort of Invasion of Privacy

Posted by Michael S. Rozeff on December 15, 2012 01:06 PM

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/128520.html

There is a branch of the common law of torts that focuses on invasion of privacy. One article on this is Robert C. Post's 1989 California Law Review piece "The Social Foundations of Privacy: Community and Self in the Common Law Tort." Unfortunately, most readers do not have access to university libraries and cannot tap into this and other literatures. Copyright restrictions stand in the way.

One should realize that privacy is a big subject, that privacy itself is very hard to define, and that invasions of privacy involve a cluster of very different kinds of activities that can harm individuals. No single case will lead the way to a complete understanding. I want to use the case below to illustrate that privacy has a strong social component in the common law, and in this particular case, physical aggression doesn't enter in. In fact, in the tort law of invasion of privacy, the plaintiff need not show that he or she has even been injured. The reason for this is that the law against privacy invasions is upholding (protecting) certain kinds of social interactions in general within the society. Invasions of privacy that destroy these interactions are punishable even if there are no damages in a particular instance to plaintiffs. I think that most of us will understand why the law is what it is and why the court reached the decision it did, even though it may or may not not gibe with libertarian tenets and deductions based on self-ownership and property.

One case that Post discusses is Hamberger v. Eastman, decided in 1964 by the New Hampshire Supreme Court. A summary of the facts:

"Hamberger and his wife (plaintiffs) rented a house from Eastman (defendant). Eastman’s house was directly adjacent to Hamberger’s house. Unbeknownst to Hamberger, Eastman had placed an audio recording device in Hamberger’s bedroom. For nearly a year, Eastman listened and recorded the Hambergers’ conversations and intimate activities. After finding the recording device, Hamberger became greatly distressed, humiliated, embarrassed, and sustained mental suffering which impaired his mental and physical condition. Hamberger brought suit against Eastman for invasion of privacy. Eastman moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim. The trial court reserved judgment on the issue and transferred the case to the New Hampshire Supreme Court for review."

The Supreme Court decided in favor of the plaintiffs. It denied the defendant's motion to dismiss the complaint.

When you rent an apartment, do you control the walls and what's in the walls? Is that a grounds for saying that Eastman trespassed by installing a bugging device? Did he violate a property right? Is your right to privacy in this case a right to clear walls without listening devices hidden in them? Did your rental contract say that or is it known to entail that? Is it up to the Hambergers to buy an electronic sweeping device and check for bugs? I do not know the answers to any of these libertarian-based questions. What I do know is that the common law doesn't look at the matter in this way. It looks upon it in an entirely different way.

This doesn't prove anything but it suggests that consideration of defenses of privacy need not rely on or be restricted to considerations of property.

However, libertarians might possibly take solace that Post and the law recognize injury to "individual personality." But, going against this recognition, the personality is not what is meant by the "self" in "self-ownership". Furthermore, an invasion of privacy, as in this case, involves no physical aggression or the threat thereof. Perhaps it involves a kind of fraud. The renters perhaps expect privacy when they rent, but if we go in the direction of expectation, then we are going toward the area of social norms, which has been an underpinning of the law's approach to this kind of invasion of privacy.

Post's article explains the common law's positions on privacy torts by turning to the work of famed sociologist Erving Goffman. Goffman says that in our social interactions, we follow rules of deference and demeanor. In following these, we establish aspects of our identities socially. Each "individual has a unique self all his own" but "evidence of this possession is thoroughly a product of joint ceremonial labor..." If these rules are broken, they can "damage a person by discrediting his identity and injuring his personality." The person, the self, is being disconfirmed.

Post, using Goffman, is trying to explain more exactly why invading privacy is so serious, even though there is no physical aggression. It not only causes acute embarassment but it makes the person feel as if they have been stripped naked and humiliated. The same kind of thing happens when your dwelling is burglarized. You lose something well beyond property that has been taken from you. There is a sense in which others have betrayed you.

The law of torts upholds social norms, and this simultaneously is good for society (as are the norms) but also for the individuals in that society. Post calls them "civility rules". The personality that would be upheld by these rules he calls the "social personality". Actual personalities that follow the rules conform to a social personality. This shapes the society and community.

The rules include privacy rules. Violation of them violates the society, which is why damages to a given person are not relevant in their enforcement. "Thus even if particular plaintiffs are not well-socialized and hence have not suffered actual injury because of a defendant's violation of civility rules, the law nevertheless endows such plaintiffs with the capacity to bring suit, thereby upholding the normative identity of the community inherent in the concept of social personality."

In personal interactions, we know enough (or should) not to pry and to let others reveal what they want when they want to. This is another aspect of a civility rule. Husbands and wives have to let their mates have their regions of privacy. Parents have to let their children have their regions of privacy. We operate very imperfectly, of course, in this realm as in all other realms.

When we move away from person to person privacy considerations and consider government to person relations or media to person relations, social norms do not suddenly vanish. When police and government agencies routinely invade privacy, civility rules are being violated wholesale. This is bound to undermine a society that depends on such rules for deference and demeanor and for proper development and expression of personality. Thoughtless expansion of privacy invasions by governments and police are likely to cause very negative social effects. I'm reminded of the equally mindless war on poverty and war on drugs. The government is very good at unleashing destructive forces on society. Invasions of privacy are no exception.

[Anti Federalist]

Privacy Invasions of the TSA

Posted by Michael S. Rozeff on December 15, 2012 02:12 PM

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/128551.html

My last post said that invasions of privacy "not only causes acute embarassment but it makes the person feel as if they have been stripped naked and humiliated." This is precisely what the TSA's airport procedures do. They invade every person's privacy. They strip you naked in a machine, or else they invade your body and its most private parts. Emptying your pockets of personal belongings, having to remove your shoes, having to remove personal items of apparel, and having to explain personal matters such as metal implacements or other devices are all of the same ilk. All are humiliating invasions of privacy.The TSA is violating social rules of civility every day in every way on large numbers of people.

The government is replacing social rules of civility with social rules of incivility. It wants people to accept and be grateful for its humiliating treatment of them. Is it this easy to change social norms? I don't know. If it succeeds, it changes the social personality of Americans in this society. I don't even want to think about what the public schools are teaching about social and civic matters and what kind of social personality they are attempting to form.

[Danke]

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