Why privacy is important, and having "nothing to hide" is irrelevant - <AUTHOR> http://robindoherty.com/2016/01/06/nothing-to-hide.html <comment><USER2> I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance.

We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically.

Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences.

What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden.

That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate.

The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.

<comment><USER3> Not everyone agrees with you that the tech sector is contributing to the building of a surveillance society or police state. There are a lot of people who have carefully considered the issue and come to the conclusion that facebook knowing what posts you liked or ad networks knowing which pages your IP address has visited is not a Bad Thing. It's clear that you don't agree and all debate is welcome, but I caution you not to trip in your rush to claim the moral high ground.

I don't think there's any need to rehash the debate here. Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo. I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing.

It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs. If you don't like what the tech sector is doing, please by all means continue to advocate. Shout it from the mountain tops, go to work for the EFF. But don't discount people that legitimately disagree with you as being irresponsible. At least some of us have made the effort to understand your point of view. The least you could do is to try to understand ours.

<comment><USER4> > Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is > going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to > entrenched interests and the status quo.

It's simply hard to take your stance as one made in good faith.

The US government has a long history of using its national police, the FBI, to infiltrate and subvert domestic political movements that the powers that be found unpleasant -- including using their police powers against modern groups such as the Occupy movement.

Further, we know that the US government has used records held by tech companies to create massive cross-referenced databases of people, including domestic activities. The recent leaks about surveillance programs has made that abundantly clear.

Your position is literally that an organization with a history of doing this kind of activity won't use the technology we already know the government possesses to keep doing the same thing.

So I think there is a need for you to rehash the debate here, because it's not clear how you sincerely hold that position.

Because rather than a rational view, what you describe sounds like irrational denial.

<comment><USER3> You're saying, "We should not trust the government because they did things that I didn't agree with in the past". This seems like an unfair standard to hold any person or group of people to. I would be unhappy if people said "I think that karmacondon has made mistakes in the past, so he shouldn't be trusted to do his job ever again."

I understand what you're saying, and I think I get where you're coming from. But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be insincere.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the government monitoring potentially criminal groups or building databases. That's what we pay them to do. If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with it.

<comment><USER5> > I would be unhappy if people said "I think that karmacondon has made > mistakes in the past, so he shouldn't be trusted to do his job ever again."

It's not about mistakes. Mistakes are - usually - a sign that someone needed to learn. They do not as a rule include wanton intent.

And if a person were to make too many mistakes then they probably should not be trusted.

> I understand what you're saying, and I think I get where you're coming from. > But like the GGP post, you're begging the question and assuming that your > beliefs are so correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be > insincere.

No, that's the opposite. You have beliefs that you state are so correct that they stand on their own, in spite of a bunch of historical evidence to the contrary, starting roughly at the time that we invented writing going all the way into the present. That's a pretty gullible position.

> I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the government > monitoring potentially criminal groups or building databases. That's what we > pay them to do. If they get out of hand then we, the people, will deal with > it.

Potentially criminal groupls: everybody.

You're apparently one of the people where the 'fear' button has been pressed, don't let your fear get the better of you.

Btw, I note that you write all these 'reasonable disagreement' things from the position of an anonymous coward which makes me think that maybe you do realize the value of your privacy after all.

<comment><USER3> We both made the mistake of discussing the US government like it's a single entity. We're talking about hundreds or thousands of individuals spanning multiple generations. I'm not going to worry about government metadata collection because of something that happened during the Eisenhower administration. Each person and group of people should be evaluated based on their own behavior and merits, not the reputation of the organization that they are affiliated with.

It looks to me like the US agencies, and the Five Eyes in general, are capable people who are just doing their jobs. They aren't bothering me and I'm not bothering them. The past actions of the US government or hypothetical scenarios based on historical examples just aren't very convincing. _Anything_ could happen. But I'm not going to concern myself with it until I see some evidence.

<comment><USER6> > Anything could happen. But I'm not going to concern myself with it until I > see some evidence.

So, you are drinking battery acid until you see evidence that it's not good for you?

Or do you maybe take the evidence of other people's experience into account?

If so, how about you take into account the evidence of hundreds of societies that have dealt with massive surveillance (where "massive" still was "almost none" in comparison to today's and tomorrow's technical possibilities) and with oppression (those two empirically tend to go hand in hand).

If those are your sincere beliefs, I really would recommend you pick up a few books about recent German history. How Hitler came to power, how the state functioned once he was in power, how people tried to get rid of him but failed, and what it took to finally remove him. And then continue with the history of the GDR, how surveillance by the Stasi influenced everyday life, how people tried to reform the political system but failed, and what it took to finally reunite Germany.

The history of other countries might teach you similar things, but Germany is a good example because it is culturally a rather "western country", so it's easier to recognize similarities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The issue with the 'nothing to hide' argument is that it puts the burden of proof and determination of whether something is 'hide-worthy' on the target of the inquiry.

If you subscribe to the 'presumed innocent' premise of the law ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence)) then the burden of proof is on the inquisitor.

Either you believe in presumed innocence or you don't. Pick one.

<comment><USER8> My respons to the 'nothing to hide' argument is: "Why are you so scared of things that are hidden?"

That puts _them_ on the defensive. Since now they have to justify their fear for the unknown. And then we're onto the real topic: fear.

<comment><USER9> Someone who pushes the "nothing to hide" argument probably wouldn't understand the implication of your response. I suggest a different approach: say "Okay, in that case what prescriptions are you taking, how much money do you have in your bank account, and how often do you have sex? After all, you have nothing to hide right?"

That also puts them on the defensive side of the argument.

<comment><USER10> Are those really sensitive questions for most people?

<comment><USER9> For some people, no. I tried to cover several different bases, but you get the idea: ask sensitive personal questions. Maybe the money one should be about credit card debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Privacy is less important than the ability to trust your government won't do blatantly illegal things like put innocent people behind bars, steal their money or property, when they actually know that they are innocent. The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules.

I don't live in the US, but the stuff the government whether local, state, or federal gets away with is very scary to me. What scares me even more is how the United States encroaches on everyone else's legal system. That's the underlying problem. Under such governments that are actually out to get people at times without much cause breaking all sorts of rules, that's what's scary.

The type of soft totalitarianism that exists and passes as common place is very scary. And that's really the people you should be scared of, and that's who you really want to protect your information from. Your run of the mill government that's actually trying to do a good job and not break its own rules, that sort of government like my government, scares me a lot less. Despite the fact that they encroach on my privacy. I know heads are going to roll if it comes out that they do things that are blatantly wrong or abusive with the information that they are collecting.

Not so in the US. They always have a half-ass lie that still somehow passes muster.

<comment><USER12> >...The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules.

Isn't that the problem with all governments? Like they say "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"

<comment><USER13> Governments are also made up of individuals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Whenever I read one of these articles I am wondering why the examples of WHY mass surveillance affects ME as average Joe negatively have to be so weak / contrived:

For example, imagine someone convinced by the argument "nothing to hide nothing to fear". Would this example convince them that in fact they do have to fear something? "You might think twice about contacting or meeting people (exercising your freedom of association) who you think might become "persons of interest" to the state". I do not think so, after all, average Joe does not know such people.

The solution, in my experience when talking to sceptical people not convinced of the risks is talking about money. Imagine someone with the kind of knowledge we are talking about with mass surveillance. And imagine this person could inform your insurance companies. Do you still think that you have nothing to hide? One then must only show that data is never "safe" and could always be "leaked" to make a very simple, everyday example of why it is not in my (average Joe's) interest to be continuously monitored.

<comment><USER3> Still not convincing, at least not to me and many of the people that I know. I'm pretty sure my insurance company has already calculated my premiums based on my demographics and claim history. I made not have told them "I have more than five drinks almost every weekend", but they know. They were making inferences from Big Data since back when it was just "data". And practically, I don't think most insurance companies have an infrastructure set up for handling snitching, especially not the smaller ones.

I'm really still waiting to hear a convincing argument as to why I have something to hide, ideally something practical as opposed to hypothetical or philosophical.

<comment><USER6> Imagine some type of insurance that typically costs 100 USD/month in premiums per person and where the insurance company typically pays out on average 90 USD/month for damages per person. Now, imagine that one insurance company has figured out a way to detect a certain group of people who will only have damages of on average 50 USD/month, which make up about 5% of the potential customers, and detecting which of their (potential) customers is in that group costs on average 0.10 USD/month per customer. Do you agree that they will start offering lower premiums for that group of people, because that will attract new customers, and thus increase income?

And what if one company does this - what will other companies do? Will they keep the same price for that group as for everyone else? Then that group will leave for the company that's cheaper for them, right? Leaving the other companies with the higher-risk customers, right? So, they will have to pay out more for damages, right? Now, will they just go bankrupt? Or will they increase premiums to cover the costs?

Noone says that insurance companies aren't making inferences from data. It's just that the more data there is available to them and the more powerful computers and algorithms get, the better they will be able to model risks. And individual companies won't be able to ignore that, even if they want to. And it's the exact opposite of what insurance is intended to do: It's intended to distribute risk. The more exact insurance companies are able to model risks, the more insurance will become unaffordable to those who need it, and the cheaper it will become for those who don't need it.

<comment><USER15> The insurance industry is fairly heavily regulated (in the US). They can only charge different rates based on specific factors. This means that your entirely imaginary (and therefore entirely unconvincing) scenario will remain entirely imaginary (and unconvincing).

Personally, I would prefer if car insurers could price discriminate more based on data. I think this would lower rates for me personally, both in the short term because I try to cultivate safe driving habits, and in the long term because it would create an incentive for everybody to try to drive more safely.

<comment><USER6> > This means that your entirely imaginary (and therefore entirely > unconvincing) scenario will remain entirely imaginary (and unconvincing).

Well, that very much depends on how you look at it. It might be imaginary in so far as regulation in the US possibly prevents those consequences, which is great. One might also see it as evidence that collection of personal data has risks--and that regulation might be one way to deal with those risks, at least in some cases. After all, this kind of regulation is in effect a prohibition on collecting certain kinds of personal data, even if the collection in itself is permissible, as companies won't collect data when they can't use it for anything anyway.

> Personally, I would prefer if car insurers could price discriminate more > based on data. I think this would lower rates for me personally, both in the > short term because I try to cultivate safe driving habits, and in the long > term because it would create an incentive for everybody to try to drive more > safely.

Are you sure that it would? Remember that for the insurer, it doesn't matter whether they calculate your risk (and thus your premium) correctly, what matters for them is that they aren't worse at calculating risks than the competition (i.e., the competition can't outcompete them on price or cause them to be left with a non-representative sample of their risk model), and that on average, their criteria match reality (i.e., they don't take on risks that are actually larger than they can pay for). Even if you in fact do drive more safely than the average driver (as in: at the end of your live, you will have had fewer/less severe accidents), it might happen that their predictive models group you in a different category, because characteristics of your driving behaviour that they use to categorize you are correlated with high- risk drivers. If insurers don't know how to (economically) measure why your driving behaviour is safe, it doesn't matter whether it actually is.

Also, the incentive can actually be a problem, exactly because risk models employed by ensurers tend to not be an exact representation of reality. If you have an incentive structure that does not align with reality, the incentive can end up promoting harmful behaviour. For example, one obvious proxy for safe driving habits could be lack of sudden decelaration. It's easy to measure, and generally, if you pay attention to traffic and drive with foresight, you usually will not need to brake suddenly as much as a reckless driver. So, it's probably true that both, incentivising people to not brake suddenly would have as one consequence people driving with more foresight, which should reduce accidents, and also that people who don't brake suddenly generally are a lower risk for the ensurer than those who do. However, this proxy can not distinguish whether you brake suddenly because you didn't pay attention--or because someone else didn't pay attention and surprised you. In the latter case, though, the thing to do to avoid an accident might be to brake as hard as you can. But that will be seen by your insurance as risky driving behaviour (which it most of the time is) that comes with a higher premium, so you have created an incentive for the driver to let an avoidable accident happen. Note that the driver in question won't think about this for an hour before deciding what to do, it's a gut reaction that might well be influenced by having internalized "braking hard costs money".

And also: What if you actually are a really good driver but you enjoy braking hard? What if you brake hard just for the fun of it, in situations where it's completely harmless. Is it fair if you have to pay higher premiums for that? Such incentives that work via proxy measurements of the actual risks tend to force adherence to a standard of behaviour. I find the idea frightening that insurance companies might get to dictate "safe behaviour", where the specific behaviour is not actually necessary for safety, it just happens to be easily distinguishable from risky behaviour, so behaving differently costs you money, simply because it's difficult to figure out that your behaviour is not actually risky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It pains me to see that power-hungry people used most techies as useful idiots to implement their own goals - how many politicians with dirty hands are now getting on board of prime tech companies? They finally understood what technology can offer to them. It seems like the end game is who is going to control everything - those types can finally see the time when technology is sufficiently advanced to control every aspect of our lives. It seems like technology would enable a special caste above law, with power unlike anyone before them. Instead of using technology to improve living conditions of all, establishing new, unseen before, more democratic and free society, we seem to be hell bent on preserving all the nasty traits of previous societies and even doubling down on them by having almost complete control. Seems like some dystopian sci-fi novel is happening now :-(

<comment><USER17> I'm always suspicious of that specific dystopy.

It's not that they aren't trying, or that we are not letting them. The problem is that technology is very "stubborn", "subordinating" only to those it chooses to, and those are always almost impossible to predict. No elite was ever successful on that kind of coup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone.

I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should.

It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.

<comment><USER19> >>I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should.

When late 19th century Germany started recording census data, a clerk made the suggestion that they should also record each person's religion. No one objected. What could be the harm, right? They were already collecting age, gender, occupation, etc. so they might as well collect one more thing.

Half a century later, the Nazis were able to use those same historical census records to identify whose grandparents were Jewish, and therefore who must be Jewish, which greatly aided in rounding up those people.

So imagine: a piece of information commonly believed to be harmless to reveal about oneself became the primary method that facilitated one of the greatest atrocities in human history.

The lesson here is that tomorrow's government may turn out to be very different than today's. Information you willingly reveal about yourself today, or don't mind others (such as the government) finding out about you, may be used against you, your children or their children.

That is why privacy is supremely important.

<comment><USER20> Yes! Everybody should read [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html) who quotes Cardinal Richelieu "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

As Schneier puts it: two proverbs sum it up: "Who watches the watchers?" and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A tragicomedic irony of course is that most "nothing to hide" advocates demand secrecy and legal cover for their own actions. This sort of doublethink leads to things like a "Freedom of Information Act" in the US that provides a legal framework for concealing information that should otherwise be out in the open.

If you apply the "nothing to hide" principle to states' own actions, I can think of two possible conclusions:

1) It is not true that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide (i.e., there is a legitimate right to privacy)

2) State actors have something to hide, so they must be doing something wrong.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have two unrelated thoughts.

"Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well.

There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that rarely gets addressed simultaneously, and I'd like to see it sussed out more in concert; what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? It's unacceptable to me that TOR gets used for child pornography, and it's unacceptable to me that my government finds out I'm gay before I come out to my family.

I don't want to provide those who would do Evil any safety or quarter. I also want to give people a powerful shield to protect themselves against judgement and persecution from the public and sometimes the law.

We should talk about achieving _both_ of these goals, but we generally don't.

<comment><USER23> Does it bother you that national highways are used by kidnappers, and civic electricity is used by rapists?

It's infrastructure, so it's all inherently neutral. SSL is used by banks, protesters, and criminals alike. You can't weaken it for one group without weakening it for everyone. It's also global: you can't backdoor an IRC client only for marijuana users in the US, for instance.

So if you get to surveil pedophiles in the US, it means that Saudi Arabia gets to surveil homosexuals. We're on the same infrastructure.

Also, it's important to recognize that illegal behavior is a critical part of Democratic change. If SSL could discriminate based on your intent to break a law so we could arrest them all, people campaigning for marijuana legalization would all be in jail, and the law would not be changingl. So would people in the 60s campaigning for civil rights, and every homosexual in the country. There is always a grey area period of time in which people break a law because they don't believe in it. That period of civil disobedience is how laws end up getting changed. Even (especially) morality laws against things like sexuality, drugs, or alcohol. It's important to a living democracy that the police are not a perfect force.

<comment><USER22> I'm not content simply throwing my hands in the air as everyone else seems to be. We should talk about other options.

There _might_ be a way to stop pedophiles and kidnappers, and rapists that we haven't thought of simply because we're not willing to talk about how we could do it.

Highways have police. Where are the digital police? I'm not sure I prefer such a thing, but why don't we even discuss it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This issue always boils down to the LOTR argument for me: the surveillance power is too great, and no individual or group can or should be trusted with it, regardless of its actual current or potential future benefits.

The crux of the debate then is where to draw the line between safe and unsafe amounts of power?

<comment><USER19> It's not the amount of power that makes it unsafe, but rather its nature. In order for it to be safe:

1\. It must be granted through democratic means.

2\. It must be under strict oversight by an independently elected or appointed group that's free from both private conflict of interest and popular pressure.

3\. There must be reliable mechanisms to quickly and efficiently strip said power away from the authority if they are determined to have used it irresponsibly.

<comment><USER25> #2 doesn't happen with US democracy now at any level. It also inherently contradicts #1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very good, but it's funny how on the "why IPVanish" page he links to, the first reason given for using a VPN is, to watch Netflix from any location! Oh the horror of limited localised Netflix content. We must protect ourselves. (Really it is awful, I use a VPN for that purpose too). But the point is, it doesn't seem popular to hide metadata from ISPs with VPNs. Will it ever be popular? I'm not so sure. For good or bad, I'm suggesting most people don't care that their IPs are recorded. Email content is not seen, nor what I type into this comment form.

Also, when I send an email to my friend "firstname.lastname@example.com", sure the data captures the send-to email address. But the data doesn't know who laserpants actually is, nor does the email content get saved. I'm not saying laserpants can't be found if the law decides to investigate, but I doubt it's a matter of pressing a button to bring up the real name of laserpants. Especially if laserpants uses different email addresses and a shared internet.

<comment><USER27> I think Snowden showed that it is as easy as pressing a button which is why he went and blurted it out. The NSA were also working to make it easier to track people.

My take on it is privacy is dead or nearly and we have to have good legal protections of who can use what data and when. The privacy arms race will mostly be won by big government with lots of resources and enough willing/foolish patriots (Depending on your point of view).

<comment><USER28> I agree. And the logical next step is that there will be inevitably abuses, that some of the victims of these abuses will ultimately access power, and that we will have proper privacy protection after that, like we do for regular mail or like we do for your physical home.

It is just a shame that we have to go through the whole cycle given that we just know it should happen. But in a way, the more extensive the surveillance is, the quicker this cycle will happen. And right now we are in a pretty bad place already. So let's be optimistic!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is an interesting post on the topic from reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_beli...](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/cd89cqr)

<comment><USER30> The thread under that comment just serves to reinforce the OP's point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is correct but appeals to freedom of speech/expression and association won't work. People don't believe in these any more if they ever did. They're being paid lip service at most.

Both professional and amateur politicians are taking notice. "We support freedom of expression, however" there's always something more important: safety, inclusivity, respect, diversity, civility...

We have dozens of examples, in the west, with hate speech laws, discrimination laws, mobs organizing online over some tweet, employers firing people because of offhand remarks, even opensource projects being assaulted over unrelated comments made by contributors.

</comment><comment><USER32> The definition of "privacy" very much differs significantly among different generations and cultures. Compare the Dutch to the Americans, or anyone over 35 with anyone in their teens or early 20s. There is a smaller overlap in what they all consider "private" than you'd at first think.

</comment><comment><USER33> I really like the phrase "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care about privacy" is equivalent to "I have nothing to say, so I don't care about freedom of speech" .

</comment><comment><USER34> I forget why now, but I was reading this article[0] by Moxie Marlinspike, from 2013, just a few days ago.

Interesting how the same argument can take so long to take hold, and how long some truths need to be told before they gain the traction needed to make a change.

0: [http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide- is-t...](http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong- way-to-think-about-surveillance/)

</comment><comment><USER35> meh, I want to have my cake and eat it too. (I'm not making fun of someone, this is actually how I feel, and there is some tension between requirements.) I don't want any surveillance whatsoever, I want to just be able to do whatever I want, jeez. To live freely. I shouldn't even think about being watched.

At the same time, take something like the Dell database that was just stolen, and criminals starting to do their criminal crimes. Then I want courts to be able to flip a switch and say, you know what, if you're brazenly stealing a private company's database and calling its customers trying to defraud them, at some point there is some probable cause to make you stop doing that or figure out who you are. You're not just going to stay anonymous behind a skype number while you're defrauding people halfway across the world.

Also I don't want some bitcoin asshole to pay off an old soviet general and get a nuclear bomb, just because they think it would be a fun troll to blow up a major city, trololo.

These aren't theoretical concerns - ransomware, kidnapping, all these yucky things that civilized societies don't have, all happen absent rule of law.

There's a reason there wasn't a period in the Constitution (specifically the fourth amendment) after the words "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects shall not be violated." (Extra points for what _is_ there.)

Even absent an anonymous Internet, way back in the eighteenth century, there were limits on privacy. Think of it like an operating system - a good kernel isn't reading my memory contents and slowing me down, but if I start performing illegal operations I might very well get shut down :)

It's not an easy line to find. Also, I don't want tens of thousands of people employed doing this crap. It's a minimal thing we need to live safely and sanely, not some fun snooping. Frankly I don't see why humans even need to be involved, until crimes start getting committed and the courts are trying to figure out why or where.

<comment><USER6> > Then I want courts to be able to flip a switch

But you also don't want anyone else to flip the switch, or it being flipped for any other purpose. That might just be impossible. So you might be better of without the switch.

> You're not just going to stay anonymous behind a skype number while you're > defrauding people halfway across the world.

Also, for this problem, as for many others, there are many possible solutions that don't involve surveillance.

> Also I don't want some bitcoin asshole to pay off an old soviet general and > get a nuclear bomb, just because they think it would be a fun troll to blow > up a major city, trololo.

So, you would prefer them to use USD cash instead, then?

> These aren't theoretical concerns - ransomware, kidnapping, all these yucky > things that civilized societies don't have, all happen absent rule of law.

Except they very much do happen in "civilized societies". And sometimes with the help of the powers of authorities.

> It's not an easy line to find.

No. But it's quite easy to see that the direction we are heading is completely at the wrong end of the spectrum.

> a good kernel isn't reading my memory contents and slowing me down, but if I > start performing illegal operations I might very well get shut down :)

Which is very much the opposite of mass surveillance.

> Frankly I don't see why humans even need to be involved,

Humans who see the potential of the collected data will get involved. People who want to abuse power don't usually wait until someone gives them permission to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Personally I really think that encryption is a matter of second amendment and in the day of knowledge and communication the right to bear encryption should fall under the second amendment. Hell, the US even classifies encryption as a munition. We should be using the same argument for encryption that we are using for the right to own guns and form militias.

I wonder if the encryption will be recognized as a right under the second amendment by the court if it goes to that.

<comment><USER37> meh - the second amendment isn't very popular these days, and outside the US (well of course it doesn't apply but additionally) people really don't seem to appreciate it

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend you read _Tradition of Freedom_ by Bernanos (original title in French: _La France contre les robots_ ).

Written in 1944, there is a specific passage where he argues against this "but I have nothing to hide!" argument, only criminals benefits from hiding, right ? He talks about how a simple citizen who never had trouble with the law should stay perfectly free to conceal his identity whenever he likes for whatever reason, and laments how this very idea already died.

The extract is available online [1] in French, the google translation [2] is not that good.

[1] [http://www.books.fr/quand-bernanos-predisait-une-societe- sou...](http://www.books.fr/quand-bernanos-predisait-une-societe-sous- surveillance/) [2] [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.books.fr%2Fquand- bernanos-predisait-une-societe-sous-surveillance%2F)

</comment><comment><USER39> Thing is that everyone have things to hide. I think there should be extensive list of what you have to hide and reasons why.

I would start with two:

-salary : thieves, kidnappers (do you really trust that everyone in law enforcement is trustworthy they can cooperate with thieves)

check your contract, you might get even fired because you leaked your salary, and it is your duty to keep it secret and explaining that some hacker did that does not matter

-contacts : maybe someone will be stalking your friend and he might get access to your friend because you were hacked. You also should not share your friends mails and numbers without their consent.

They might be at least angry at you because you shared their contact info. \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment> Maybe you guys have better or more ideas.

But nothing to hide applies to hermit on top of the mountain. If someone thinks otherwise he is an as __*le because he does not think about people around him.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans.

If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it is a political problem. If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media.

PS noticed another fun topic there are blacklisted keywords on HN, like F words. Isn't censorship more concerning than privacy on a media? And funnily enough all the "lite" censorship nowadays are first about sex and gross words. Are sex and slang that dangerous?

<comment><USER6> > Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging > during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans.

Why do you think that?

> If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it > is a political problem.

Why do you think that?

> If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate > place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media.

The internet is the real world.

Also, who wants to make the internet a non-public media?

<comment><USER40> Because main manufacturers of equipment are also from paranoid puritans country ? (Huawey, Cisco, juniper, alcatel, nortel, ericson ...) And that it make MITM easy for agencies since government heavily subsidise telecoms maybe? ($$ for a backdoor)

And since Internet is globally like a very fast Gutenberg press, it has the same property as printed paper: privacy is not a problem of the media, but of the institutions/organizations trying to control it. It is controled by law or force. Law/force comes from/is backed by government, so if you don't have privacy then complain to your government for his actions (or lack of).

Sum up: privacy is not an internet problem (media). It is a problem between the citizens and their governments (use of media).

Had you opened a good history book you should know it. And also in the same books you should discover that the concern for privacy has already existed before internet : the more governments are authoritative the more they both tend to love secrecy for themselves and hate public debate for the others and want to control media.

Control of media by the government do not always align with the public's best interests. DMCA, patents, IP laws, "censorship for the protection of the kids" ? Does it ring a bell? Google who wants you to read only sites that have nice ads so they filter out as non relevant some information.

Want to overthrow your government in the shadow? commit a crime? Sext your gf? I don't care about these usage and consider them accessory. They divert people from real problems like accessing the information vehicled by the media.

By the way, they make very nice tinfoil hats nowadays. There are successful crowdfundings for it.

Ho, and internet is the real world? Ah ah ah.

As much as "war and peace" is the real world.

<comment><USER6> OK, I guess I'm starting to get where you are coming from. I read your original post pretty much as saying that people who wish for privacy on the internet are wrong.

I still disagree with you, though. Yes, of course, technology alone cannot solve the political problems. But I very much think that technology can play a role in implementing and securing the political will. If you think of a democratic voting process as a piece of technology, for example, that by itself won't make a dictator go away. However, if there is a general consensus that democracy is the way to go, the specific implementation of the voting process very much makes a difference as to whether rogue actors can subvert this political will or not. If you make it so that votes cannot be bought and that the general public can watch the election from start to finish, that makes a democracy robust against a minority of people who try to rig the vote, for example.

I think information technology has a similar role to play in securing privacy. You can build systems that are far more robust against surveillance than facebook, for example. That doesn't help if the police comes after you for not using facebook--but it might prevent Mark Zuckerberg from figuring out how to manipulate the masses to vote for him as the next president ... or whatever he considers his interest ;-)

Also, I think the internet is actually a pretty good basis for that. In contrast to previous networks, at its basis, it doesn't distinguish between clients and servers, and it is a mostly transparent network with all the intelligence at the edge, so it's technically relatively easy to build your own protocols and applications without approval from network operators.

As for the internet being the real world: Yes, I get where you are coming from, but I think the distinction in this way is still counterproductive, as it supports a narrative that is used by the other side that implies that somehow the internet is special and that therefore human rights don't apply, and that special (and usually more restrictive) laws are necessary, as if laws that forbid fraud, say, for some reason didn't already apply if the fraud was committed via the internet.

<comment><USER40> I am coming from the sububurbs of Paris. Internet is not the problem.

Internet is expensive, exclusive, not efficient, not securable. It is the wrong tool for privacy. I have taken part in building it.

Ideas main vector is words and language and their meaning not the paper on which it is written. Education change the world. Because with or without internet, words get exchanged by humans. All e-learning attempt without someone to mentor have failed.

Getting in touch with people is working best where they actually live (at my experience). Internet is a very updated map, not a territory, and it has blind spots.

And democracy is not about voting. It is not a system, it is a property that should ideally apply to a system.

A monarchy, a dictatorship, a republic can be democratic, the same way that any geometrical figure can be concave or convex. It is just a property that "the people"'s interest caged (oops born by luck randomly citizen of a place) in a nation are being "fairly" re-presentend.

Native americans not being representented by their government on their traditional land (or palestinians in israel, corsican & muslims in france, scotts in UK, ouigour in china, flamish/wallon in belgian) is it fair?

Well, I don't know. Fairness at my opinion is a non achievable goal but a never ending unknown path.

Internet has a lot of answers, but very few interesting questions being asked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Don't mix __misuse of private information __and __privacy __. All the "chilling effects" listed here are implications of misuse of private information. On the other hand, in a world where we have weapons which can single handedly wipe out whole civilizations, we need to make sure it doesn't get used by some lunatic.

From that angle, a tight security apparatus (which may include surveillance), is necessary for our survival. I think we should think more about how we can prevent the "misuse" of private information than preventing surveillance completely.

<comment><USER6> Well, yeah, how can we prevent misuse of private information other than by keeping it out of the hands of those who might abuse it?

It's simple: You have to create a perfect test that can tell good people from bad people, and then build a police force that only hires good people.

The fact is that there are people in this world who are willing to hurt other people for their own advantage. You cannot fix that by giving huge amounts of power to some more or less random selection of the general population. There is no silver bullet, and trying to construct one nonetheless tends to end badly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Our digital lives are an accurate reflection of our actual lives"

Which of course presumes we have a digital life, and which of course has been proven repeatedly to not be the case. It is also not accurate.

Take data warehousing companies who are profiling home IP addresses and hoovering up any digital breadcrumbs people leave behind, like user agent strings, length of time spent on a page, any previous cookies stored locally on the machine: an enormous store of value for anyone who decides to purchase such information, except for the fact that it has no value.

The 'info' exists without any context, and could even be poisoned by a small portion of users who decide to stuff the system full of disinformation to control market share or lobby for certain products.

Also - IPV4 addresses (now more than ever) can be attributed to several hundred people because ISPs grant a subnet to multiple customers.

This is not saying everything's fine and our digital doppel is a fuzzy haze of nonsense. But it does say that privacy advocates are apt to overestimate how accurate such information is, and that the people who buy such information are finding out this too and have probably decided to pay more to other collection points to get a finer-grained doppel of some person.

I say let them spend more, but I will cry tears of joy when I find that money has been ill spent too and doesn't accurately portray a person digitally.

</comment><comment><USER43> The problem is people who have never been on the wrong side of an encounter with law enforcement have no clue about why all these "super tools and powers" given to police, TSA, FBI etc. are so incredibly dangerous.

They just watch the news and get fear-mongered into thinking, oh we better arm the hell out our "protectors".

Usually the first experience with abuse by police is enough to wake people up but if they are white and middle-class, such an encounter may take years to happen.

</comment><comment><USER44> Why don't privacy proponents don't go all in and just ask to get rid of the Internet? Surely, privacy is easier to maintain when communication is inefficient.

Perhaps that's because privacy is actually an archaic and backward idea that maintains all of our problems alive. I can't think of a less progressive (more conservative) idea than privacy.

The next most important revolution in human history will be our transition to a completely transparent society.

<comment><USER10> How do we get to a completely transparent society without massive collateral damage? I understand the rationale for the goal but the transition is so very difficult. I wish more thought was being put into it.

<comment><USER44> My only concern at the moment is to get people to realize that privacy is not good. Only when people understand that our goal is transparency can we come up with a strategy to make the switch.

Considering that we need to get to a transparent society, contributions to the privacy movement only ensures that the transition will be even more difficult and violent.

<comment><USER45> Have you written anywhere about how you arrived at such a radical position?

(I mean radical in the traditional sense, not as a slur)

<comment><USER44> I don't see how it's radical. It's the only logical conclusion.

Many people have written about this. I haven't read a single convincing argument in favor of privacy as anything other than a defensive measure.

<comment><USER45> So no? I don't care about the labeling. I want to better understand the reasoning. Or at least, what pieces of information make it so obvious.

<comment><USER10> I'm of a similar (although not identical) opinion to miguelrochefort. The short answer is... if you imagine a utopia, do you imagine lots of secrets or lots of openness and acceptance?

The reality is that I came to this conclusion through a long process but I'm pretty tired. The process definitely considered whether the 'private' version of the world was even possible. I don't think it is. Surveillance will happen. Better we accept it and keep an eye on how it's used than pretend like we can prevent it in the long term. Even if you were able to discourage the ubiquitous 'high tech hackers' and 'big data' forms of surveillance (which I don't think you'll be able to do), bribes and drones will continue to be used for the powerful to get what they want.

<comment><USER45> How do bathroom doors fit into this?

In your utopia, if you ask me a question, do I have to answer honestly? That people would always want to answer honestly is not a satisfying answer.

<comment><USER10> Bathroom doors are great. Let's not confound surveillance of interactions and privacy in the extreme sense.

Bathroom doors allow you to interact with yourself with _some_ level of privacy. People know you're in there. They know for how long. They know if there are extreme sounds or scents. If you misuse the plumbing or other bathroom features there is clear evidence of this. In rare circumstances, the bathroom door can be kicked down while someone is using the bathroom.

The most common result of such information is "are you ok darling?".

Bathroom behaviours are interesting because they provide a real case study on the impact of acceptance on privacy. On a first date, where you're not presenting the real version of yourself, you don't want the other party on the date to know anything about the events while you're in the bathroom. Over time, if the relationship progresses, the secrecy around these events changes. The reason for this secrecy changing, I believe, is trust/acceptance. Over time you know that if the other person learns more about the bathroom events, it will not change how they perceive you. If you're in such a relationship, it also doesn't mean you wont use a bathroom door, and it doesn't mean you don't want your partner to use one.

Hopefully that analogy makes sense. Most privacy advocates have a list of 'secrets' they fear will be used against them. I think we're more likely to see a world where this fear is addressed through improved respect of differences, compared to a world where suddenly surveillance is effectively impossible.

<comment><USER5> Excellent comment, but I lost you at::

> Most privacy advocates have a list of 'secrets' they fear will be used > against them.

What makes you say that?

<comment><USER10> Why do I think privacy advocates have a list of 'secrets' they fear will be used against them? Because most of them are intelligent people who understand how society works. Society today is full of lies, secrets, and hypocrisy. If someone knows your secrets but you don't know theirs, you're probably vulnerable.

I don't think privacy advocates, and persons such as myself, differ in opinion on the problem today. The difference of opinion is on where we're trying to get to and how we get there.

Tbh, I don't know yet how to get to the end state I'd like to see.

<comment><USER5> Ok, so you are making an assumption there. I don't think your assumption holds, it is very well possible to be a privacy advocate and to at the same time not have any crucial secrets worth keeping.

Privacy is a good thing, whether you have secrets worth keeping or not is immaterial, privacy doesn't have anything to do with secrecy. The two are often mixed but if you look a bit longer you'll see that they are in fact orthogonal concepts only very loosely related.

Taking your bathroom example: there is obviously nothing secret about what is going on in that bathroom, you can infer most of it from your own experience. And yet, we do seem to feel the need for privacy.

Another example would be a diary. Diaries are intensely personal and our etiquette around them is that if you happen to come across someone's diary that you do not open it to read it. It is considered a private document, even if it will not contain any secrets it may contain thoughts that the writer does not want to divulge to the world at large.

So privacy does not require any secrets at all to be a very important thing to many people, including privacy advocates.

<comment><USER10> We're into semantics here. Privacy provides a way to hide detail, to prevent confirmation, and to allow people to deny things. For simplicities sake I consider these, or more broadly, anything protected by privacy, to be 'secrets'.

I don't think the word 'crucial' that you added is useful here.

<comment><USER5> Such simplicity is lossy and in this case the loss is crucial, hence that word and that's why sometimes (not always, I'll give you that) semantics matter.

Especially when not seeing that distinction might cause one to state something that is either not true or that inadvertently allows re-framing the discussion in ways that hamper progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> People of the U.S lost it because they allowed this to happen by "not caring about it". And the whole privatized everything is bollocks. See what the costs of "health care", "college education" and most importantly "how the cops" have become. Health care and education has to be free if the people in the society is to remain intelligent. Even by the scale of economics, providing with good health care for free would cost much less that what it currently costs. The police is severely lacking accountability that it much needs. Read the original article linked in here. Think about it.

</comment><comment><USER47> OK, so now David Chaum is proposing PrivaTegrity.[0] It's "meant to be both more secure than existing online anonymity systems like Tor or I2P and also more efficient". But it includes a "carefully controlled backdoor that allows anyone doing something 'generally recognized as evil' to have their anonymity and privacy stripped altogether". Just exactly how the bloody hell can a backdoored design be styled as more secure than Tor and I2P?

There's no fool like an old fool, as they say. Sad :(

[0] [http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online- an...](http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-anonymity- plan-to-end-the-crypto-wars/)

</comment><comment><USER48> Many would trade their privacy for what they think is safety.

<comment><USER49> And they're more than welcome to trade their own privacy, although I think it's unwise. The trouble is when they trade _my_ privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This read changed my mind. Even I don't have nothing to hide, I need to care about my privacy.

</comment><comment><USER51> Bravo!

I've been making the chilling effects argument for several years:

[http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-chilling- ef...](http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-chilling-effects/)

[http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/29/very-chilling- effects/](http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/29/very-chilling-effects/)

[http://www.dbms2.com/2015/06/14/chilling-effects- revisited/](http://www.dbms2.com/2015/06/14/chilling-effects-revisited/)

This article makes it with reasonable, appropriate breadth.

</comment><comment><USER52> The reasons given are largely consequentialist. There are deeper philosophical reasons why privacy is important in this context. The essential reason it is important concerns the proper relationship between the individual and the state. Surveillance and intrusion violate the proper relationship and establish an improper relationship between the two. In other words, to justify the relation and thus intrusion, one hold concepts of state and individual that are anti-individualistic and place the state above the individual. The undesirable effects follow. To borrow Koneczny's terminology, a surveillance state is move away from Latin civilization perhaps towards Byzantine civilization.

</comment><comment><USER53> ( __ _Apologies for the blatant plug_ __)

On this subject, if anyone is interested, we just launched a free, open source, Android mobile app to help people manage the complex issues of digital and physical security. It's got simple lessons on everything from sending a secure mail to dealing with a kidnap.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella)

</comment><comment><USER54> In a recent study I read, millenials overwhelminly didn't think that the fredom of speech should be upheld, so why would privacy?

Many people have already gotten in trouble or fired all based on private conversations. Most people didn't care about the privacy implacatons, because of personal feelings.

I feel like our civilization has gone backwards: online mobs determine guilt and the ends justify the means.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's government that has something to hide and it's them I don't trust, which is why privacy is important. I wouldn't want government searching my home on a whim and neither my digital content because they're the ones with the track record of planting evidence, seizing assets, and perpetuating falsehoods for their agendas.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there any polymorphic encryption toolkit that could enable a custom encryption method tailored for your own use? Kinda like security by obscurity for encrypting your own important files by deviating from the established standard encryption schemes in order to overwhelm capabilities of Mallory's/Trudy's reverse engineering?

</comment><comment><USER56> There are so many unproven ideas and theses in the first (argumenting) sentence alone.

Maybe privacy is a right granted by someone. But do I need to fight for all rights? Can I not trade some for some others? E.g. I don't want to live in a completely free market, becaues in a completely free market thiefs and bullies always win. In our real life markets at least they need a lawyer's license first, which stops some of them from succeeding.

Does it really underpin freedom of expression? Is complete freedom of expression something that is worth fighting for, something people want? Look at something where expression is nearly completely free: Clothes. Most people tend to wear what other people wear.

Free society. What is that? Why do I need it?

Democratic society. Doesn't the current global development show that democracy is failing us? Every system comes to an end, and democracy certainly is behind the top of the hill.

I stopped reading after that sentence. If a blog post doesn't even think about the nuances of what they are talking about, there won't be much content anyways.

Just a little side note: I was in China three times now. Many people consider China very unfree, very undemocratic. But I see people there having more hope, more optimism and more opportunity to develop their dreams than we have in the west. And mobile internet is developing bigger and faster there than anywhere else, despite having nearly everything run via one mobile, government observed app: Wechat. In some regards I wonder if it is really "despite" government control or "because".

</comment><comment><USER57> Don't trust someone who says "I have nothing to hide". And certainly don't trust them with your secrets!

</comment><comment><USER58> There are very few topics where I just cannot get the point of the discussion among smart people, but this is one of them.

Look at the real world NOW, 15 years after all the surveillance. You still can explode bombs and kill people middle in a european capital without any encryption at all. Is this the kind of surveillance you are afraid of?

If you want to hide something, there are infinitely many ways to do this. No surveillance can (or ever will) read the one time pad encrypted communication. So you have (and always will have) your freedom and capabilities to hide — what's your problem?

Arguments like "well then show me your bank account" are just plain stupid: I have no interest in sharing this information with my work colleagues, my neighbours or my friends just because it would have implications in some social aspects (it's not about security!). But his information is only sensitive in context of a personality. I'd neither have problem to show anything to a random stranger nor would I be interested myself in this information coming from a random stranger.

If somebody uses my information in an unethical way, it is not the problem of a surveillance, but that it's possible at all.

Exposing my personal data to a government during an investigation could also protect me by verifying my alibi. We have nothing to hide, right?

The comparison with free speech is ridiculous. Free speech is the opposite of hiding and doesn't imply breaking the law. Hiding implies playing by other rules, than commonly established. Free speech is important because eventually I might have something to say. But no one would ever agree that he or she will have something to hide eventually (without getting criminal).

So I'm still missing the point...

<comment><USER13> Yes because you assume the people who are collecting your data are ethical, secure and will always share your opinions and beliefs.

Say your bank account information was stolen and someone used it to blackmail you because as you said it would have, "implications in some social aspects".

Say the country you live in converted to a religion you are not part of or want to be any part of. Imagine if they had a record of your beliefs and used it as a handy tool in mass genocide.

Say someone working for the government or a start up was jealous of something you had, and used their access to take your information in order to discredit you.

Say you medical information was sold by a fitness start up that went bust and sold to insurance companies to bump your premium.

<comment><USER58> If we assume, that — by default — people are unethical, governments are corrupt and most people in power are criminal, then you're f*cked anyway. With or without mass surveillance.

<comment><USER6> We don't assume anything by default, we just make an empirical observation of how people behave, and then act accordingly. The empirical observation is that there are people who are unethical, corrupt, what have you. And also, the empirical observation is that there exist certain group dynamics that make certain societal developments very hard to reverse. That is why it seems like a very good idea to avoid putting too much power into a single person's hands (in case it turns out to be one of the bad apples, or in case the power is delegated to a role rather than a specific person, in case one of the bad apples ever gets into that role), and to try and avoid the kinds of developments that tend to end badly.

Nobody says that _all_ people are unethical, or _all_ governments are corrupt, or that _all_ people in power are criminal. But rather, that being part of a government or having power does not prevent people from being unethical or corrupt. Bad people are generally a minority, but they do exist. That is one reason why we have government and police and military in the first place. But there is nothing that necessarily prevents bad people from becoming part of government, police, and military. That is why it is important to limit the power of those institutions. To limit the damage that bad people inside them can do. And also to limit the appeal to bad people wanting to become part of them. That's essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers, BTW. It's a security mechanism that protects you from bad people in power - not because all people in power are bad, but because occasionally bad people manage to get into powerful positions, and that tends to end badly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "I have nothing to hide, and what I am keeping private is encrypted by a quantum- and $5-wrench-method-resistant encryption."

</comment><comment><USER59> My goal is more modest, to fix the problems with posting using real names if possible (and not by using real name policies).

</comment><comment><USER60> Truth prevails; it is not mass surveillance but mass data manipulation we must be concerned about now.

</comment><comment><USER61> What an irony that the link is missing the "s".</comment>


LastPass 3.0 Is Here: New Design, New Features - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lastpass.com/2013/11/lastpass-30-is-here-new-design-new.html

<comment><USER2> This was quite an experience for us here at LastPass utilizing multiple UI/UX design firms, splitting them between products and attempting to land new UI/UX experiences all at the same time. If anyone has questions or thoughts on it we're all ears.

<comment><USER3> This looks great! The Chrome plug-in is much nicer/more modern and the autofill is very nice.

Only thing I noticed so far (and its a bit of a 'nit') is that the icons are not retina/high-res so they look really pixelated on my Macbook Pro Retina...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The one feature I was waiting for:

* support for dynamic JavaScript single-page apps (Backbone.js, Angular.js, etc)

Thanks for fixing it!</comment>