“Ultimately, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
―
The intersection of technology and privacy is a topic that has interested me for decades. I invite you to check out the new website that I’ve dedicated to this topic.
Since the COVID pandemic in 2020, many of us started asking difficult questions about the powerful leaders whom we previously trusted. Whether in government, technology, healthcare, or the corporate world, we witnessed totalitarianism unleashed upon the world’s population in astonishing ways. There have been many defenders of these post-COVID changes. “After all,” they would say, “we’re just trying to keep you safe.”
The changes we witnessed during the COVID pandemic were more of an unmasking of government policy than anything new. The Patriot Act of 2001 legalized the government spying on its own citizens. Since then, it has been collecting huge swaths of data and keeping it indefinitely. Ten years later, the US government passed a bill that allows the government to arrest and detain citizens indefinitely, without any charges or hope for a trial (this is called kidnapping, by the way).
Why does this concern me? As an Orthodox Christian who enjoys studying history, I know that totalitarian governments eventually come for the church. They may not shut it down, but they tightly control it. If Christians step out of line with the government’s narrative, they find themselves in prison, a gulag, a concentration camp, or being executed. With the above mentioned laws in the US, it would be both easy and legal for the government to collect data about its citizens, figure out who is unhappy with the regime in power, and then remove those “pesky” people from society without any trial. While there has been no open persecution of Christians in the US, everything is in place that would enable an exceedingly corrupt government to quickly and legally make its moves.
By protecting our communications and privacy, we can at least decrease the amount of data that the government keeps on us. Without moving into a cave and living off the land, we’ll never be able to eliminate some level of surveillance, but we can reduce it. Hopefully, my articles above will help you understand why this is important and what you can do about it.
But even worse than the potential for government persecution is the present danger of scammers and hackers who break into large systems and post their findings to the dark web. There, bad actors (both foreign and domestic) can access information that can lead to identity theft, blackmail, etc.
Fortunately, there are steps we can take to secure our data.