There can be few winners in the era of zero privacy

Sholto Byrnes asks: should we expect that our personal data is protected?

How secure is your data? Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg

When should you have a reasonable expectation of privacy? When you confide in or consult with a doctor or your bank? Or posthumously, after you have taken part in a shooting in which 14 people were killed and 22 were seriously injured?

Most of us would think the answer was straightforward. Dealings with trusted professionals are not just expected to be kept confidential. In many cases, those individuals have a legal duty not to divulge information.

But in the current climate 11.5 million documents can be leaked – the so-called Panama Papers – and outrage about the dissemination of the information they contain by the Washington DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and various newspapers appears to be confined to the fact that many people have chosen to keep their money in places where they can perfectly legally avoid paying tax on it, rather than on this gross violation of their privacy.

Apple, meanwhile, fought back vigorously against an American judge’s order to bypass the security function on an iPhone belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook. Unlocking a device owned by one of the two perpetrators of the San Bernardino massacre last December would have, according to Apple boss Timothy Cook, “chilling implications”.

In an open letter to his customers, he wrote that if the government were able to use the law “to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data … Ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.”

The FBI managed to get into the phone anyway. But what strikes me as “chilling” is Mr Cook’s insistence that Apple has the right to obstruct the legal authorities in their investigations. They were following every lead to find out why an American-born health worker and his wife left their six-month-old baby at home one day in order to mow down their colleagues at an event held by the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.

One would have thought that everyone had a moral obligation to do everything within their power to uncover any information that could possibly prevent another attack. For Mr Cook, however, the “breach of privacy” involved in unlocking a dead terrorist’s phone was against his principles. The Pharisaical smugness is astounding.

But that smugness is reflected in that of the cyberterrorists who break numerous laws in multiple jurisdictions in the name of whistle-blowing. Last October WikiLeaks posted emails obtained by a group called “Crackas with Attitude” from the account of CIA director John Brennan. The hackers’ childish defence? The Obama administration were “losers” who supported Israel, they said.

The leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013 were described by the former US NSA director Keith Alexander as “the greatest damage to our combined nations’ intelligence systems that we have ever suffered”. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that they were “likely to have lethal consequences for our troops in the field”.

A year after his disclosures, however, Mr Snowden was nonchalant. “If they can’t show a single individual who’s been harmed in any way by this reporting,” he said in a TV interview, “is it really so grave? Is it really so serious?”

The answer is: it was not for him to say. The power to release private information was not rightly his. The same applies to the Panama Papers. Amazingly Wolfgang Krach, the editor of Suddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper that first received the cache of emails from an anonymous “John Doe”, has admitted: “We don’t know if this source got access lawfully or unlawfully.” But that appears not to have concerned him.

The Guardian, one of the media outlets the information has been shared with, describes the Panama Papers as “history’s biggest data leak”. If all the hundreds and thousands of names involved are eventually released, it could also go down as one of the biggest invasions of privacy.

But this does not appear to trouble these ardent campaigners for transparency. It is for them – unelected publishers and activists – to decide whose right to privacy is respected or not. Indeed, they do not appear to respect such a right at all. The fact that, as Mossack Fonseca, the firm whose emails were leaked, pointed out, “using information/documentation unlawfully obtained is a crime”, does not even register.

Where is the end point to all of this? Does anyone have any right to privacy at all? The British MP Charles Walker pointed out the absurdity of the argument that those with “nothing to hide” have nothing to fear. If people keep saying that, he said recently, “I’ll bring forward a private member’s bill in parliament to ban curtains from people’s homes”.

It is one thing when people choose to sign away their privacy by revealing all on Facebook and social media. It is quite another to strip them of it arbitrarily, with no authority to do so other than that bestowed upon themselves by self-anointed moral crusaders who disregard the harm they do. You think that information currently kept secret should be disclosed? Fine. Then campaign for a change in the law, or to be elected. It is for lawmakers and those who vote for them to make such decisions. These tribunes of the people answer to no one. They are not heroes, but wreckers and vandals.

When we celebrate invaders of privacy on the one hand, and applaud tech companies who pose as guardian of civil liberties on the other, our priorities and values are in serious disorder. Someone will pay for it in the end – and it won’t be these principled law breakers, but those whose lives are ruined by the exposure of what no one else has the right to know, or ended by preventable acts of terrorism.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia