Nothing to Hide

Nothing to Hide

Todd Hayen

I’ve heard this phrase, “Why should I worry? I have nothing to hide,” more often than I am comfortable with. This is a clear declaration of innocence with an assumption that the only reason one would have to worry about any sort of repercussions is if they committed a crime.

But what constitutes a crime? And where is this strange misunderstanding that authority has never cared much about “laws” and other such nonsense, before moving in on someone?

Of course, the people who say they have “nothing to hide” do not believe for a second that authority would come after them illegally, on a whim, or for nefarious reasons. Anyone who thinks such things is a paranoid conspiracy theorist and is over-reacting. “You’ve seen too many spy movies,” they might say—movies about East Germany or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Only those oppressive sorts of governments would do such things, and here in the “free world,” we are immune from such shenanigans. “We are past that kind of cloak-and-dagger crap,”they might say.

In fact, I doubt if they believe this sort of thing happens anywhere in the world in the 21st Century (authority herding up people to persecute for no specific breach of any law). Maybe in North Korea or certain parts of the Middle East with terrorists and such, but nowhere in the civilized world. Talk about naive.

But isn’t that the name of the game these days? Naïveté. Or denial. Or stupidity. Or lack of common sense.

For me, and I would venture to say for most of you reading this, it doesn’t take much to see how stupid this line of thinking is—and how incomplete it is. You don’t have to believe that every move you make is being scrutinized and puts you in harm’s way to at least realize and understand the more accessible we are to scrutiny, the more likely something could go wrong, and we could get screwed. And we are approaching very quickly the time when every move we make WILL be scrutinized, evaluated, recorded, assessed, and used “against” us. Whether we have “anything to hide” or not

I put “against” in quotes because gone are the days where we would need to have broken an obvious law or rule to have action taken. The “against” at this point can be quite a bit more subtle than being punished acutely, beaten by police thugs, or thrown in prison. “Against” can be simpler than those extreme acts, it can be being barred from social media or the internet altogether, it can be having your email no longer function, not being allowed to drive more than 10 miles from your home, not being “approved” for a loan, or not being allowed to shop in a grocery store.

On and on and on.

People may not have criminal acts to hide, as the saying implies, but that doesn’t mean they are not being watched, manipulated, and controlled. As time goes by, the criminal acts they believe they are not guilty of will become less and less easy to avoid—criminality now includes donating money to a “cause” we might believe in, yet is contrary to the mainstream narrative. As I have mentioned many times before, my bank accounts were frozen after I donated $150 to the truckers during the Truckers Convoy in Canada. An innocent enough act. Not a single thought crossed my mind that I was being a ”criminal” when I did this, yet I was treated like one.

Members of my family supported the government’s action. They told me I should not be supporting a criminal “cause” (the truckers “taking over Ottawa”). And if I had minded my manners (and not protested), I would not have been “punished.”

Really?

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