What Do You Have to Hide? Everything! (Chapter 4, Part 1)

I grew up with the understanding that the world I lived in was one where people enjoyed a sort of freedom to communicate with each other in privacy, without it being monitored, without it being measured or analyzed or sort of judged by these shadowy figures or systems, any time they mention anything that travels across public lines.
– Edward Snowden

I want my tombstone to read: "I lived. I died. Now mind your own damned business." What do I have to hide? Everything! Which is to say, any information I am required to reveal is data I decline to disclose.

Privacy is the single most effective way to preserve freedom against encroaching government. In his book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, the political scientist James C. Scott commented on the role of one form of data inventory played in the rise of the modern state: the census. Scott wrote, "If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are imagining a state whose interventions in that society are necessarily crude." Data is power, both for individuals and for governments.