Watching this film (about 1 hour, 20 minutes) reminds me so much of Citizenfour. A conversation with some old faces, and many new (to me) faces, “NOTHING TO HIDE” illustrates beautifully the reasons against thinking you have nothing to hide from surveillance.
The argument of social control really struck with me. I recently finished reading “Nineteen Eighty-Four” where much of the protagonists preoccupation with Big Brother and the Party has to do with control over the populace. The United States’s position that mass surveillance helps find and stop terrorists doesn’t hold muster when you look at the incredible benefit a regime gets from a self-controlled population. Believing that your Facebook messages, all your emails, all your texts, and all your phone calls are collected and retrievable for later makes you think twice about what you’re sending. I think we should all be more careful about what we record digitally, but worrying that every action will be collected by the government is beyond reasonable.
“Nothing to Hide” paints an unsettling picture of how governments around the world watch everyone – and we know they are, they have admitted to it publicly in the 2013 “it’s just metadata” response to Snowden – all the time. The only ones who aren’t caught in this web are the people they’re trying to catch. Meanwhile, our freedom to express ourselves is killed in the crossfire.