If you’ve got nothing to hide

Comrades,

As has been brought up before, some people bring up the argument captured by “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide.”

There have been recent releases by the Washington Post, (here, here, and here). These releases do something that is just about unheard of in American history. The US Intelligence Agencies budgets were release for all people to see. These types of budget reports were usually “top secret”, and weren’t for those outside of the Permanent House Intelligence Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee to view.

This has to make you wonder. If the government doesn’t believe how much money the Intelligence community spends, and what it spends it on, should be made public,then they have something to hide.

What becomes immediately noticeable is the hypocrisy. Usually, when the argument is presented (like the one above), it is usually about government actions against their citizens. However, rarely is such an argument used against the government. For example, when it comes to the Intelligence budget, one can say to the government and the representatives that, “If you’ve done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide.”

How often is such an sentence heard when it comes to the government? So the government was hiding something form the American people, but the very Intelligence community that hides it works from the American people are also collecting information in the American people.

If you have something to hide from the Intelligence community, then you have done something wrong in their eyes. If the Intelligence community have something to hide, then they have done nothing wrong in their eyes.

It becomes a one way street, and the government is the one that is defaulted to with nothing to hide, while it is the American citizens who are presumed to have something to hide. Because the American citizens have something to hide, important information could be contained within it so that the government would need that for Intelligence purposes.

What is so twisted about the “if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you’ve nothing to hide” argument is that it makes the American citizens presumed guilty until proven innocent, instead of having the government presumed guilty until proven innocent. In other words, the government can do no wrong but has the right to hide what it does from the American citizens. The American citizens, however, can do wrong and don’t have a right to hide anything.