Bankman-Fried case serves as evidence of the price of privacy amid societal scrutiny

Bankrupt crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was taken back into custody last weekend. In December, he was released to house arrest on bail of $250 million, but he is now back in prison after a judge determined he was involved in "at least two cases" of witness harassment. In the hearing held in a New York court, the lawsuit stated that the founder of the collapsing crypto empire FTX used a virtual private network - VPN - as evidence of suspicious behavior.

Bankman-Fried's lawyers claimed that he used these services, which make it difficult to monitor surfing, to watch NFL games. According to them, he subscribes to watch through a platform from the Bahamas, where he has lived for the past few years, and had to use a VPN to bridge browsing restrictions from different countries. Judge Lewis Kaplan did not accept the claim. He explained that he could have just watched the NFL via public television broadcasts in California and sent him back to prison.

This is not the first time that Bankman-Fried has been reprimanded and punished for his use of the internet and in particular encrypted networks. In February, Judge Kaplan set a series of new restrictions on his release conditions, restricting his use of the internet, confiscating his smartphone and banning him from using instant messaging apps. Bankman-Fried and his partners in FTX, according to documents submitted to the court, used to use the Signal application which is end-to-end encrypted and sends messages that are deleted automatically. Even if it is an extreme case of a defendant testing the limits of the court's patience, it still reveals a thing or two about the state's general attitude towards measures that protect privacy - they suffer from a negative stigma.

In 2013, Edward Snowden, then a contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), revealed that the organization used to identify Tor users on the internet and attack their Firefox browsers. Tor is a sort of isolated layer between the surfer and the Internet, which by encrypting information gives the user anonymity. The idea was developed during the 1990's by the United States Army, and an open source version of the software was launched in 2002. Throughout its years, it has been supported, financed and received advice from established, recognized, governmental and civil society organizations, including the Office of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in the United States government, Google, the University of Cambridge, Human Rights Watch and the leading American organization for privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Protecting privacy

Although there were those who used to abuse Tor, it was designed to allow the general public to maintain their privacy. But for the NSA, the use of the software was a clear sign of improper behavior, and the attitude towards it was that whoever used the software became a target for the organization's hacking efforts and a target for surveillance. In practice, it is worth noting that only 3% of all internet traffic of Tor users is related to what is known as the "dark web", and most users of this software do this due to mass surveillance and out of concern for their privacy. In fact, weeks after Snowden's revelations about the NSA's mass surveillance, the number of Tor users doubled.

The NSA expressed a stigma similar to the one that the prosecutors in the Bankman-Fried trial presented: those who strive to protect their privacy are seen as those who are apparently hiding something, and apparently the thing they are hiding is important enough to track, snoop on, or deny them access to the internet. It is true that Bankman-Fried is not a convenient example, since this is a person who is suspected of causing losses of almost $9 billion to users around the world through a series of criminal acts such as money laundering, embezzlement and defrauding investors - and yet precisely the difficulties it poses make it especially good because it emphasizes that the right to privacy should not come at the expense of other rights and freedoms, not even at the expense of security.

In the past, companies and countries had to look for ways to extract high quality data for themselves. They had to go through, sort and filter large amounts of raw, unverified and low-quality information. A person would have to declare that they do not smoke in order to receive lower premiums with their health insurance company, and an employee would try to signal to their employer that they are hardworking in order to receive a higher salary.

Today it is possible to extract verified data with high quality and at a low cost. We live in a world where consumers, citizens or users are willing to disclose their personal information for various goods and economic interests. Some will be willing to do this to get a good user experience on a particular social network, while others will be willing to share real-time medical data with their insurance company, for example by installing a physical activity tracking app, to get attractive prices.

This trend has another effect. Voluntary disclosure differentiates between consumers and creates a stigma for those who are unwilling to disclose data. Those who do not share personal information immediately are defined as people who are hiding negative information, and this "hiding" leads to punishment, a form of discrimination, often financial. This leads to a downward spiral: members of a certain group have an incentive, ability and interest in revealing their personal information, and as this behavior becomes more and more acceptable, anyone who does not submit to those incentives is marked and sorted as a suspect, and punishments are imposed on them to push him them to expose themselves.

Take for example the facial recognition systems at airports. Although these systems are in relatively wide circulation, one specific one in which passengers agree to be scanned right at the boarding gate is relatively new. At that moment passengers are asked to look at the camera instead of a person physically checking their passport. Every major airport in the United States uses this method, but it is not mandatory.

Apart from the fact that many do not know that they do not have to provide their biometric data, and usually it is not explained to passengers that this is a voluntary provision of information, refusing to provide it is also not a simple act. So, for example, last July one case made headlines when a Democratic senator, a representative of the state of Oregon, asked not to hand over the biometric data. The procedure in this case is a manual check, but he was politely told that his request would result in a significant delay. In practice there was no delay, the senator presented his passport and immediately passed.

A common argument against privacy is that maintaining it is often in conflict with society's interests, and those who have nothing to hide have nothing to worry about. But this is a flawed argument that assumes, as cyber researcher Bruce Schneier has pointed out, that maintaining privacy is about the effort to hide bad things. In practice, maintaining privacy is as much a personal interest as it is a public interest. Privacy itself has social value, it prevents social control, allows people freedom from the intrusion of others, and builds a society where the collective is required to maintain restraint to allow individuals to flourish as they wish.