Touché! I can totally see the parallel you're making between 1. the political-marketing talking points that spokeslizards for the military-industrial complex regularly insert (for free!) into "news" articles and 2. intimate conversations over phone, text, email, etc. among family and friends.

Wait, no I can't. Those two speech acts are in no way alike. Only the former is even claiming to be "anonymous"; as for the latter, when my brother calls me, I know it's him even though the conversation is (or should be) private. In the sentence you quote, I wasn't talking about privacy. I was referring specifically to the value that society gets from journalists' reporting of anonymous speech. When the anonymous speaker has a unique point of view that is rarely heard, anonymity is quite valuable. When instead, as is usually the case, the anonymity is that of a well-heeled lobbyist for a wealthy industry, who has his arms run up 27 other reporters' asses in addition to this one's, anonymity only serves corrupt purposes. This article is an example of that.

It's a very simple and sensible distinction. If you work for the government, you can not expect privacy in any work function. For everything else, you get the same privacy guarantees as normal citizens.

Bah. This is a government worker talking about his job in a quasi-official capacity, not "those who oppose us." I should know as much about what he's doing at work as my company should know what I'm doing at my job.

> I should know as much about what he's doing at work as my company should know what I'm doing at my job.

Is that what you tell the traffic cop too?

My emerging principle is that privacy should scale inversely with power.

If you have little or no influence over others, you should have a very high right to privacy. This typically also means a limited ability to fight against abuses of that privacy.

If you've got high levels of influence, through wealth, political power, criminal tendencies, or other means, then your right to privacy should be correspondingly diminished. Your actions by nature have a high level of impact on others.

That's a point I see few privacy advocates articulating. Actually, I've run into a few who point-blank deny it, or argue that only limited classes (usually governments) should be subject to sunshine.

You may want to notice that one of them gets to use a quarter or so of the income generated by the other side's work, and among other things they use it to build a police and a military that can then be used to force the people on the other side to do pretty much anything. You may want to consider that this asymmetry in power possibly should be balanced somwhere.

Your argument really essentially calls for a monarchy. The deal in a democracy by definition is that the population at large is in charge: Everyone pays for public infrastructure, and everyone gets a say in how exactly the money is spent. If those people who are hired by the public for executing their wishes are allowed to work in secret, the democratic process can not work, as without any feedback as to whether your actuator is doing what it has been ordered to do, a control loop can not function. That is why people in particularly powerful official positions should not get any privacy with regards to their jobs. Their sex lives and medical records (etc.) still should be their private matter as everyone else's, obviously, and noone in the "privacy movement" says otherwise.

Yes?

If you can't tell the difference between what happened to Nicolae Ceaușescu and what happened to Fred Hampton I'm not sure what planet you're living on.