> The author's point was you can't opt out and not seem like a criminal.
But why is that? Let's face it, if you care very deeply about INFOSEC then you're probably someone who actually has something to hide from people (criminals, military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the matter.
If you're the latter then you'll correlate yourself with the former whether you like it or not, and while we all agree that correlation is not causation, it is something that might get you examined at the very least.
Remember, police can't psychically predict who among the population has actually committed a crime or not when it happens, so they have to do "good old fashioned police work" (as I've seen it described in NSA threads) to investigate suspicious activity and verify it's innocuous, to determine who in a possible set of people actually committed a given crime, etc.
By behaving in almost the same fashion as actual criminals you make it that much harder to be discriminated out of the "possibly criminal" set early in the course of an investigation.
In this case the only thing she mentioned that seemed criminal was converting cash to gift cards to shop anonymously on Amazon — exactly the kind of thing a criminal would actually need to do to procure materials for a crime, if they wished.
Is this unfortunate? Absolutely! But so are many other tradeoffs society makes, even down to waiting at a red light even when the intersection is actually clear. If it were easy to separate criminal activity from other activity we would hardly need police or forensics.
I just realized that the same argument could be made regarding gun control.
> But why is that? Let's face it, if you care very deeply about GUNS then you're probably someone who actually has to protect from people (criminals, military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the matter.
I think it all boils down to the amount of trust we put in our governments. Both guns and privacy are a protective measures against corrupt governments. In todays world privacy is probably a magnitude more important and also associated with lesser drawbacks than guns, as it would be impossible to organize resistance while being under todays surveillance.
Yeah, there are a lot of parallels. But for every person who is genuinely concerned with government overreach and that alone, I see 50 more Bundys who use government as rhetoric to play up anti-social/selfish ends.
But why is that? Let's face it, if you care very deeply about INFOSEC then you're probably someone who actually has something to hide from people (criminals, military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the matter.
If you're the latter then you'll correlate yourself with the former whether you like it or not, and while we all agree that correlation is not causation, it is something that might get you examined at the very least.
Remember, police can't psychically predict who among the population has actually committed a crime or not when it happens, so they have to do "good old fashioned police work" (as I've seen it described in NSA threads) to investigate suspicious activity and verify it's innocuous, to determine who in a possible set of people actually committed a given crime, etc.
By behaving in almost the same fashion as actual criminals you make it that much harder to be discriminated out of the "possibly criminal" set early in the course of an investigation.
In this case the only thing she mentioned that seemed criminal was converting cash to gift cards to shop anonymously on Amazon — exactly the kind of thing a criminal would actually need to do to procure materials for a crime, if they wished.
Is this unfortunate? Absolutely! But so are many other tradeoffs society makes, even down to waiting at a red light even when the intersection is actually clear. If it were easy to separate criminal activity from other activity we would hardly need police or forensics.