A tragicomedic irony of course is that most "nothing to hide" advocates demand secrecy and legal cover for their own actions. This sort of doublethink leads to

A tragicomedic irony of course is that most "nothing to hide" advocates demand secrecy and legal cover for their own actions. This sort of doublethink leads to things like a "Freedom of Information Act" in the US that provides a legal framework for concealing information that should otherwise be out in the open. If you apply the "nothing to hide" principle to states' own actions, I can think of two possible conclusions: 1) It is not true that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide (i.e., there is a legitimate right to privacy) 2) State actors have something to hide, so they must be doing something wrong.