Privacy may matter due to compromat

When I was growing up there was a scandal around Snowden and mass surveillance programs run by democratic countries against their own citizens. I was reflexively against these programs, and as were most of the online crowd I fit in with. They were illegal, represented a huge invasion of privacy, were not constitutional, etc… There was one problem. When I thought about why they were bad, I kept coming up empty.

The standard arguments given were some combination of appeals to abstract “rights” without and trading off of those rights against other things or an explanation of why those rights actually mattered. What few consequential arguments I did hear were pretty terrible. e.g:

• this will lead to totalitarianism (how, why?)
• when you know someone is reading your mail, you’ll start avoiding saying certain things because you feel observed. (Not really, only if you think there’s a consequence. Unless you’re sending bomb plans/ISIS propaganda, why would you care?)

I think there are two good consequential arguments that do hold water.

1. Once you have a surveillance dragnet in place, it naturally grows over time. It also naturally becomes more and more used by different levels of the state. Eventually, the usage spreads to non-extreme cases.
2. Having compromat against important people is a very quick way to own them and then to subsequently influence elections/politics. Dragnets give the intel services massive amounts of compromat on officials/media/opposition/etc…

The first is a fairly standard argument about state power and it’s use. If there’s a tool which is useful, the institution it’s embedded in likes it and there’s ever more pressure for it’s use, (we could have stopped that terrorist attack, we could have caught that murderer) and it’s ever more powerful due to technological progress + continued investment, my default expectation is that over time the scale and scope of usage will grow. This could be bad if it’s used for purposes that we don’t think are just/good. e.g: spying on domestic “extremists” where that means an ever wider range of beliefs. It could also be good if preventing crime/problems is easier. The trade-off is hard to judge.

The second argument around compromat is a bit stronger. Basically it goes something like this. One way to get a human asset is to have material on someone that if you make public will make them very said. Ideally it would land them in prison or destroy their life. This is why recruiting spies often means finding people’s weaknesses/vices. Maybe a person has an affair. Maybe they’re an addict. If you’re really lucky maybe they’re a pedophile. Catch them on film with a child, or provably watching child pornography, and you basically own them.

If you can see every message flowing through the phone network/web/whatever, you can also see messages from politicians, judges, etc… Many of those people will have done bad stuff at some point in their lives. This is compromat you have access to. You as a high level person in the deep state tap a college on the shoulder and ask for info on someone with a certain codename. They give it to you. You then

• just leak it to the media to destroy a person who’s politically against you
• use a cut-out or an anon communication method to approach that person and get them to act a certain way Also note that this doesn’t require that much. If at least one member of the cabinet or one person in a MP’s staff has serious enough skeletons, you know have an inside link to any government/MP you want.

Again, it’s not clear who would do this. The deep state? The ruling gov? The two main parties against smaller outsider parties (e.g: the UK during the cold war).

Again, it’s not a given that this does or would happen. It’s also not implausible. In the US the FBI was politicized and used by both sides to launch phony investigations. It’s not clear why that didn’t/doesn’t happen with domestic intelligence collection.