I was talking with a friend online today about the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, and I’ll be honest, I was pretty dismayed by where he landed on it. This is a guy I respect, someone who’s made genuinely smart arguments in the past, so I pushed him a little, hoping he’d come at it from some angle I hadn’t considered before. He didn’t. He went straight for the one we’ve all heard a thousand times: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, why do you care?”

Wrong. People throw that word around like everybody agrees on what it means, so let’s just go ahead and check. The dictionary says: unjust, dishonest, immoral. Okay. So the argument is basically that anything falling outside those parameters is fair game for government eyes. Which raises an obvious question, because plenty of things aren’t wrong by any reasonable definition but that doesn’t mean you want an audience for them.

You want strangers watching you fuck? Some of you do, and hey, no judgment, you do you, but for most people the answer is probably no. Sex isn’t wrong, it’s the reason any of us are here, and performing it in front of random people isn’t exactly a universal aspiration. What about going to the bathroom? Everybody poops, it’s as natural as breathing, but I don’t see a lot of people clamoring to do it on stage. Masturbating, crying, having a conversation you’d rather keep between yourself and one other person, none of that is wrong, and none of it is anybody else’s business either. The two things are not the same, and conflating them is where the whole argument falls apart.

I understand what they’ll tell you. These programs exist because terrorists exist, because the threat is real and stopping an attack before it happens requires gathering information ahead of time, and if a few million phone records get swept up in the process, well, that’s the price of keeping people safe. I’ve heard it and I’m not completely unsympathetic to the security argument in the abstract. But when you actually look at how these programs work, at the sheer volume of ordinary people getting caught in a net that was supposedly cast for a handful of bad actors, the logic starts to break down pretty fast. You can’t collect everyone’s data in the name of catching a few people without also, you know, collecting everyone’s data.

And beyond the immediate privacy question there’s something else going on. Normalizing surveillance based on this flawed logic creates a chilling effect on free speech, discouraging people from expressing themselves freely or engaging in activism or political organizing. Over time, this could lead to a society where people are afraid to speak out against injustice, fearing that their words and actions might be scrutinized or used against them.

So if you’re genuinely fine with all of this, if the trade-off makes sense to you, go ahead and shoot the NSA your email address and ask them to check in on you from time to time. The rest of us are going to do our best to keep our private lives private, thanks. Not because we’re doing anything wrong. Just because it’s none of your damn business.

But sincerely, thank you for your service in the war on terror. Maybe they’ll give you a medal or something.

Author:Nick Allison is just a banged-up Army Infantry vet of the War in Iraq. He lives in Austin, TX with his wife, their children and two big, dumb, ugly mongrel dogs. Don’t take anything he says too seriously… he’s just trying to figure out this ride we call existence like everyone else. Also, he enjoys writing his own bio in third-person because it probably makes him feel more important.

Please feel free to send your love letters and hate mail to nick.chaossection@gmail.com.