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Comment by karmacondon | Hacker News Reader

Dissent is much more effect when it's done out in the open. Right now anyone can stand on a street corner and state whatever views they hold, start a website, hand out flyers or express any idea using any number of methods. That's the key to democracy, not whispers from secret sources who refuse to name themselves. We reduce democracy when we force dissenters to use privacy as a shield instead of allowing them to use the first amendment as a weapon.

It doesn't matter what the soviets or any other country did. Democracy is and has always been about the right to open expression. If we lose our right to publicly discuss unpopular ideas then privacy is the least of our concerns. Private communication matters in a state that is already telling people what to say and what not to say. We should all be willing to make great sacrifices to make sure that never happens where we live, not planning for what happens when it does.

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Common Sense, the pamphlet that inspired many to fight in the early years of the American Revolution, was published anonymously. Don't discount the power of anonymous dissent; the US owes its existence to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_%28pamphlet%29

I don't think the matter at hand here is using privacy as a shield, but rather having the ability to voice dissenting opinions because of privacy. Privacy is a means of preventing oppression/coercion against those holding dissenting views. It ensures that those in power do not have the ability to suppress dissenting views, rather than forcing dissenters to use it as a shield. We still have the first amendment, but privacy helps protect it and mitigates the social pressures related to the first amendment.

There's a difference between privacy and anonymity. Privacy keeps people from seeing the stuff that you don't want others to see. It has little to do with freedom of speech. Anonymity is putting stuff out in the public without them knowing who said it. Yes, it's freedom of speech, but it's also freedom from accountability.

In a fully functioning democracy, you should be free to say whatever you want openly without being threatened. If you can't make an argument openly, I would immediately question why: is it because society is unjust, or because you can't stand behind the argument?

I would argue that you would still need privacy, in so far as to allow an amount of time in which you could form your dissenting thoughts in private, write them down, iterate them before you go to the street corner and announce them to the world.

If everything was in the public space or monitored then people with dissenting ideas may not have the will or motivation to iterate on them as is necessary to create a well reasoned thesis, and hence they would fall flat or be cast out as just another nut job.

Oh, no - I'm not trying to downplay the need for privacy. I'm saying that privacy and anonymity are two separate things and people too often mistake one for the other. Privacy is everyone's right, but it has nothing to do with dissent. Blasting your opinions out into public while shielding yourself with a pseudonym isn't privacy.

I consider that anonymity and pseudonymity are aspects of privacy. What's private there are the associations between activity and identity. We need "privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful" (see Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Julian Assange et alia).

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