User:Secrecy brings great harm

Motivation
Many of the most serious problems in American society are caused by the notion of "privacy" that seems to have become almost perverse in its degree. Some of this may be legitimate, for people fear being embarrassed or ridiculed or worse. This is because Americans have become intolerant of opinions other than their own, and prone to ruin people out of a sense of cruelty. This is very sad, as many of the people who feel they must hide their secrets citing privacy concerns could offer amazing benefits to the world if they could open up and be honest. They could benefit themselves and others far more than via their current paths.

Privacy and Secrecy Enable Crime
Some, however, use the American notion of "privacy" to enable themselves to commit crimes, endanger others recklessly, and escape from the consequences of their actions. Imagine, for a moment, a world in which everything that happens is visible to anybody else at any time. You literally could not even use the toilet with privacy any longer, and nobody else could either. Put aside your probably extreme discomfort at what may at first seem Orwellian "Big Brother" for a moment, and consider these questions:


 * Would child abuse occur for much longer?
 * Would anyone even dare to commit a rape?
 * Would theft stop?
 * Would defamation be able to do much damage?
 * Would leaders whose central purposes are their own power and enrichment remain in office?
 * Would unethical and dishonest officials remain employed?
 * Would the civil rights of millions of innocent Americans continue to be violated as they are today?
 * Would false accusations resulting in psychologically and financially costly investigations, arrests, and prosecutions continue at the level they do today?

Knowledge Without Persecution
"Big Brother" is the notion of being watched and being persecuted by those in power. The world I am asking you to imagine is being watched by everyone at all times, but has protections against persecution by some very high standards of conduct. Government officials would be instantly fired for intentionally lying about anything, and noted for providing misinformation of any kind whatsoever. All of us misinform each other, because we are imperfect, grow weary and misread a page, transpose digits of a phone number, and so forth. But repeated acts of misinformation would be known. We could all judge each other by well-understood standards that everybody is allowed innocent mistakes. A pattern of conduct that shows massive misinformation would show up quickly, and be far more easy to correct before it leads to a Watergate or a Travelgate or an Iran-Contra mess.

Obviously the technology to make all of this happen isn't possible nor cost-effective yet, and society may decide on limits to deployment of such technology. The point of asking you to imagine the extreme is to help you realize that so many crimes ranging from minor to the very worst evils may not be caused by privacy and secrecy, but they are vastly aided and abetted by the current American privacy fixation.

For another example, how much crime is there in a small rural town of 500 in which everybody knows each other at least in passing and often in great familiarity? Compare that to a big city, where virtually everybody is anonymous and unknown by sheer quantity of people, and the much higher level of crime.

Must Act Soon
The saying "knowledge is power" can be flipped to say "ignorance is powerlessness".

Government has increasingly high levels of knowledge on every single one of us. That is only going to become more true. The complaints about the Bush Administration phone line intercepts, Patriot Act, and so forth aren't going to stop any of it. We the citizens of the US cannot verify these things are not being done to us without being nearly omniscient ourselves, which is presently far from possible. We cannot trust government to police itself. The only way to keep this trend from heading towards totalitarianism or similar ruination is for the citizenry to gain the same kinds of knowledge as the government has, on a near real time basis. Otherwise, government becomes all-powerful and the citizens became nearly powerless to defend themselves. In 2008, we are already very far down that road. It's time to hit the brakes, stop and think, and take some other path before we're on a road to nowhere from which there is no exit.