Whether this is an attempt at trolling or not, I am not sure, but I believe many people, especially those somewhat removed from marginalized populations, also hold this viewpoint.

I advise those that hold this viewpoint to see the excellent video, "Don't Talk to Cops". This should not be seen as an indictment of the many good people that work in law enforcement, but rather one of a system that incentivizes convictions over actual guilt or innocence.

At any moment in time, it we are breaking so many laws because of how the laws are written. It's illegal to speed. Who has never done that? A cop can pull you over. If the cop is having a bad day, and asks you to do something you don't want to, and you argue, now you're resisting arrest, which is another crime. And then for how many people has the next step been imprisonment and/or death due to an altercation that all started from a thing nearly everyone does almost every day?

The government does not need more powers to find more people guilty of crimes that shouldn't even be illegal. There are already too many people in jail and too many people dead due to a justice system that, sadly, skews far away from actual justice.

What's right and wrong changes every few decades. Not too long ago a guy was jailed and pushed to suicide because he was gay. In UK.

There are countries today, where you can be put in a concentration camp for being gay (Chechnya Republic in Russia).

There are people that had to escape USA because they warned people of government institutions abusing the law (see Snowden for 1 example).

There are people killed in Mexico for protesting against drug cartels and corruption in government protecting them.

Liberal and paceful France sent spies to put a bomb and explode ecologists' ship that was protesting against nuclear tests in international waters. Later New Zaeland caught the spies, and France blackmailed them to release the spies threathening war.

It's pretty common for nice democratic governments to do EVIL things. It's even more common for non-democratic, or non-liberal governments to do that. Most of the time you're fine, because government ignores most people. But the law is concerned with protection of the few that wouldn't be fine.

> So if you don't unlock your phone, it's an admission of guilt.

Even medieval inquisition had higher standards than that. They tortured people, but at least they required them to admit the crime. You don't even want that. Congratulations.

Perhaps others' lives are too uneventful. In these here parts of Western Europe we had 3 dictatorships active within the last 50 years (up to ~1980 -- Spain, Portugal, Greece), including torture and everything. Easter Europe had worse up to 1989. All could come back quite easily.

And even in other parts of Western Europe there was mass surveillance of political opposition, lots of cases against activists, hundreds of thousands of people against the political establishment (e.g. in Italy), mafia, etc.

Not everywhere is like rural Iowa.

I'd strongly recommend to use secure passwords and maybe a password manager. Further, I'd recommend using different aliases and email addresses for different websites, or at least keeping email addresses private where possible.

If we want to preserve these rights we can't just appeal to their utility for the individual.

Free speech affects my ability to improve society. Right to privacy affects my ability to cover my own ass.

Without protection of privacy - very few people will exercise their free speech when things get hard.

That said I understand people who are afraid that loss of privacy would be asymmetric but I don't think that would happen. Celebrities and public figures will always have less privacy than everyone else.

If Trump wants to know your tax returns - he will. You don't know his, no matter how much you want to.

And anyway, Trump insist he could murder someone and give himself a pardon. You can't. So, even if the information flow is symetric - the consequences aren't.

Actually this isn't the most important reason for privacy.

Privacy and other basic rights do very little for me as an random law-abiding dude. I don't break laws, so don't have any reason to cover my ass. I don't have much to say, so not being allowed to express my opinion doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Even in the doomsday scenario where evil totalitarian dictator takes over the country and mass-surveils everyone and otherwise stomps on our rights, it probably won't be that big a deal to lowly me.

The most important reason for protecting individual privacy is to protect the future of society and civilization itself. The average dude in Nazi Germany and Pol Pot era Cambodia probably barely noticed his loss of individual rights as far as daily life was concerned. Mass surveillance enables mass control, and the worst atrocities in history have all happened in environments where individual rights - including privacy - were disregarded. It's bigger than just me. It's about protecting society itself and giving my children a decent world to live in.

Well it sounds like the Australians who will put you in a cage for 10 years for not unlocking your phone very much do care what you do with it...

Everyone has done something wrong, often to the point of theoretically being felonies.

https://mic.com/articles/86797/8-ways-we-regularly-commit-fe...

I understand the evidence indicates that some people do choose not to unlock their phones on demand by police, even when they are innocent. You can interpret that as an admission of guilt if you like; this puts you in the same moral boat as police who write up a confession for someone and then fake their signature, because they just know the guy is guilty.

You can say what you think all you like, but the evidence is against you.

This is provably not true. In fact, you need to come up with evidence proving that there is NOTHING to lose by unlocking your phone.