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Surveillance is just a tool...

As this post at wired.com, saying that you don't have nothing to hide is not the right way to make a case for or against surveillance. Surveillance in itself is not something good or bad, it's a tool that can be helpful in many ways from keeping us safe to learning new things.

The post makes a good point about how anything we do can be illegal somewhere. Not only that, laws evolve as society does. As such, things become legal or illegal with time as society views changes overtime or to accommodate technological changes. To add complexity to something that is already hard to follow, the law books reflect the way the views of the society that codify them.

As such, we all have done something that it's illegal somewhere at some point in time. Not because we are bad, or criminals, but because the laws are different at different places. Even within a same country, laws may differ between different states and counties. So, if we let law enforcement agencies know everything we do, can get us into problems we don't imagine or need if those agencies decide to act even if out actions are legal where we made them.

Yet, the case against surveillances is not just a legal one. Some of the things we want to keep private have nothing to do with law. Rather, they have to do with things that we want to keep private, or simply we don't want to share because we would feel embarrassed if other people knew of what we do.

Privacy should be a right of everyone, and one that we could take for granted. Each individual needs to be able what he, or she, wants to share and with whom, and what will remain private. No person, government, company, or agency should be able to have unrestricted access to what we do or say freely. Yes, there are public and private places, and the level of privacy we can expect of each is not the same. But even at the public space, we should be able to assume that we won't be subjected to surveillance the whole time we spend on it. And on the private sphere, surveillance should only be conducted if there is a reasonable expectation that something illegal is being done.

At the end, we all have something to hide for whatever reason.

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