Redditor offers excellent insight into the "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" argument

Except that completely disregards the fact that we're supposed to live in a free nation. One of the freedoms that is implied in the Constitution is a freedom to be left alone. Surveillance is not being left alone. It's being treated as a criminal with no specific accusation and no probable cause.

Furthermore, terrorism is vanishingly rare in comparison to so many other sources of instability and death. Gearing our entire strategy toward the rarest situation and treating it like the norm is an awful way of dealing with it. You strip freedoms away from people, and in our cause we militarized the shit out of our police departments in response to a threat that has never really materialized (regular, large scale terrorist attacks) that now we've instilled such an us against them mentality that they're serving warrants with APCs, they're easily manipulated into full scale SWAT responses as the first option, and they're terrified of the communities they're supposed to serve.

Lastly, what is the goal of terrorism? To force change through fear. In response to the fear of terrorism we've abrogated multiple constitutional amendments. We've let our position as a free nation fall to the wayside because we're scared. Now we're not the first generation to do this, McCarthyism was the blueprint, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a real, material act of surrender to terrorism to do so. We were founded by a group of people who were willing to fight and die for these beliefs, and in our inheritance we have lost that conviction. We've become so afraid of out own shadows and the spectres of our imagination we're willing to give it all away.

So I reject your argument. It's not worth it. We fight this war an we win by keeping our freedoms, by being kind to its other victims but firm in our defense. In short we win by being the land of the free and home of the brave. Not the land of the surveiled and the home of the terrified.

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