AVB on Nostr: The EU's Chat control is evil. It also makes the European Union a totalitarian ...

The EU's Chat control is evil.
It also makes the European Union a totalitarian regime.

The moto is always : "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
That line appears wherever privacy is discussed, and it works
because it smuggles in a false definition before the argument even
begins.2
It redefines privacy as concealment. Once that move
succeeds, resistance to surveillance can be painted as suspicious
from the start.
The right response is not embarrassment, nor the weak claim that
everyone has private shame he would prefer to keep off display. The
right response is definitional: privacy is not the hiding of guilt but
control over


Privacy is control over disclosure, not concealment, the power to
selectively reveal oneself. That definition separates privacy from two
adjacent concepts. Secrecy is narrower, and anonymity concerns attribution.
The “nothing to hide” argument works only by collapsing
these three into one; once they are held apart, it loses its force.


The political dimension is more direct. Surveillance enables
control independent of prosecution. The opposition that can be
monitored can be neutralized: donors identified and pressured,
organizers tracked and harassed, plans discovered and preempted.
Totalitarian regimes require surveillance not because all citizens are
criminals but because surveillance enables control.
“Nothing to hide” ignores that the watching itself is the threat.
The people using that phrase are either naïve
(and therefor the enemy of progress) or evil.