 |
“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” - Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems, January 1999. |
Time was, only your nosy neighbors knew your business. Not today. These days, everything you do or say is being watched, recorded, and saved in a database forever.
- As a crime deterrent, the city of London has thousands of CCTV cameras in public areas, recording everything. This Is London, 2007 Sept. 19
- In 2001, cameras and face-recognition software scanned each of the thousands of fans who attended Superbowl XXXV in Florida. Call It Super Bowl Face Scan I, 2001 Feb. 2
- The June 2004 issue of Reason magazine paired customer addresses with satellite photos, and delivered magazines with custom covers showing views of each subscriber’s house. Reason Magazine, June 2004
- Credit bureaus maintain massive dossiers on each person, recording details of credit history, bank accounts, employment, places of residence, and criminal records. How Private is my Credit Report?, October 2006
- Supermarkets offer discount cards, which the companies then use to track each shopper’s purchases and figure out buying trends.
- “Electronic tollbooths track your movements on roads and bridges.” Parade magazine, September 16, 2007
The privacy scare has swept through the public. We now have television public service announcements about internet privacy.
Should you be worried about the erosion of privacy? No, you should celebrate it, says author David Brin. His 1998 book on privacy is called The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Grossly simplified, his premise is this: privacy protects the rich and powerful by shielding them from criticism. Only by peeling away layers of privacy can we achieve a level of transparency that will force the powerful to be accountable for their actions.
In all of history, we have found just one cure for error–a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.
Brin casts the privacy discussion in terms of information flow. He introduces the Accountability Matrix. There are four types of privacy/transparency tools.
| 1. Tools that help me see what others are up to. | 2. Tools that prevent others from seeing what I am up to. |
| 3. Tools that help others see what I am up to. | 4. Tools that prevent me from seeing what others are up to. |
You might be tempted to say categories 1 and 2 are good but 3 and 4 are bad. After all, you don’t want the government seeing what you’re up to! That’s the wrong reaction, according to Brin. In reality, it doesn’t matter how much the government knows about you.
Historically, the ability of governments to oppress has always depended on maintaining the one-way flow of information. King, tyrants, and parties in power above all concealed information from the citizenry at large. In contrast, one would be hard pressed to show that restricting the amount of information flowing to the government has more than a marginal impact on preventing the arrival of tyranny.
The way to maintain a free society is to maximize transparency by preserving the free flow of information. It doesn’t matter if the government knows what the citizens up to, as long as the citizens know what the government is up to. An informed citizenry will see and prevent abuses. Only under the veil of secrecy can abuses flourish. Thus, a culture that values freedom should hold categories 1 and 3 as good, and categories 2 and 4 as bad.
Brin makes little distinction between government and companies when evaluating transparency. The need for transparency is no less when the Orwellian institution is a credit bureau as opposed to a government agency. Credit bureaus are Brin’s case in point: for years, the bureaus refused to let people see what was in their own credit report. When the government finally forced the bureaus to be more open, people could finally view their own credit reports and identify errors. The quality and accuracy of credit reports increased because of the new transparency.
Daniel J. Solove, Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School, criticizes Brin for promoting transparency as a panacea. In his 2004 book, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age, he points out that transparency does nothing to help ordinary people who don’t have the resources to sift through a wealth of information.
Brin fails to realize that affording mutuality of access to information will do little to empower ordinary individuals. The reason is that information is much more of an effective tool in the hands of a large bureaucracy. Information is not the key to power in the Information Age–knowledge is. Information consists of raw facts. Knowledge is information that has been sifted, sorted, and analyzed. The mere possession of information does not give one power; it is the ability to process that information and the capability to use the data that matter. In order to solve the problem, a transparent society would have to make each individual as competent as bureaucratic organizations in processing information into knowledge.
Solove’s objection is valid. Bureaucracies are better able to make use of information than an average unskilled citizen. Transparency will not make ordinary people the equal of powerful corporations and governments. Citizens will still need watchdog organizations and advocacy groups to protect their privacy rights. But that does not lessen the need for transparency. As Brin says, surveillance technology is here and it will be used.
[It] is already far too late to prevent the invasion of cameras and databases. The djinn cannot be crammed back into its bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new surveillance tools and databases. They are here to stay.
Light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives.
…
We may not be able to eliminate the intrusive glare shining on citizens of the next century, but the glare just might be rendered harmless through the application of more light aimed in the other direction.
The benefits of transparency are already being recognized. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allows citizens to access a wealth of federal documents that shed light into the workings of the US government. Many US states have similar laws to achieve transparency into the workings of state governments.
We are still a long way from Brin’s transparent society, but we are moving that way.
I think I figured out what Mr. McNealy said several years ago, and I’ve gotten over it.
I did get the creeps the first time I noticed google was sending me ads that had to do with the topic of the gmail I was reading. Silly me. I thought someone was actually reading my email.
I’ve never really given much worry to the government snooping on me individually, or a corporation either. Why would they bother? And when I think about personal individual online friends, enemies, coworkers, children, church friends, etc. snooping on me, I aways come back to the same conclusion: the only way to avoid problem is to be the same person when (I think I’m) in private as when someone is watching. Then I’m less likely to embarrass myself. (I don’t always succeed in being H.O.T.–honest, open, transparent–but I think that is the goal I should have.)
Luke 12 (New Living Translation) says it nicely:
I look at this as a matter of principle. Am I really afraid the government is going to uncover some deep dark secret about me? No. But I do value privacy, and object to the sly incremental trend towards “transparency” - that’s a pretty little way of saying Big Brother is watching.
This is one reason I’m skeptical about the so-called War on Terror; its been used to justify this invasive behavior, which the president has no doubt lied about. Remember when he said that when telephones are tapped, a warrant is first obtained. Then the whole NSA thing came out about instances where warrants were bypassed. It all like, “Well, would you rather the evildoers destroy us?…national security…terror alert…attack thwarted.”
But as the article pointed out, this isn’t just the government - its private corporations also. But there has been a marriage of the two. And when the government wants to know what kinds of searches you are doing on Yahoo! and Google, guess how they respond? Well, Google resisted at least.
“which the president has no doubt lied about”
I think there is plenty of doubt about this; just because you don’t trust him and think he’s evil or something doesn’t make it so. A warrant is USUALLY obtained prior to wiretapping, but OBVIOUSLY in some cases it takes too long to get a warrant. In the ongoing fight against terrorism, one can’t stick with old, antiquated rules that don’t recognize our technological advances. We are in the 21st century, not the 20th.
However much you may think that they don’t exist, Chris, there is such a thing as national security.
correction: “they don’t” should be “it doesn’t”
“I think there is plenty of doubt about this; just because you don’t trust him and think he’s evil or something doesn’t make it so. A warrant is USUALLY obtained prior to wiretapping, but OBVIOUSLY in some cases it takes too long to get a warrant.”
Direct quote from President George W. Bush:
“Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”
Notice he said “any time” a wiretap is mentioned, so the logic about how obvious it is in special circumstances to break the law and avoid the FISA court system just doesn’t cut it. No one is above the law. Not even if you are the president, and your daddy was the president. This is an obvious case where Bush was caught in a lie.
If it takes too long to get a warrant, then push for a change in the law. But don’t break the law and use that as an excuse.
If it takes too long to get a warrant, then push for a change in the law. But don’t break the law and use that as an excuse.
Exactly, I am alarmed at the complete disrespect for the rule of law in the name of national security.
Ok, agreed that the best route would have been to push for a change in the law. However, I understand the decision not to go that route since it would have publicized tactics used in the WoT and by the time the law was changed, it would have been no longer useful. Plus, there are legitimate arguments that the wiretapping is legal.
“Plus, there are legitimate arguments that the wiretapping is legal.”
All of these so-called “legitimate” arguments involve a very loose interpretation of the Constitution, and undermine the spirit of the document. Presidential authority can never trump separation of powers. When checks and balances are in place and the administration deliberately supersedes them, all the while publicly claiming they are in compliance with them, how can they then make a constitutional argument to excuse their actions? I’m no expert in constitutional law, but I think I learned enough in my seventh-grade civics class to know how ridiculous that sounds.
Nice posting! It was featured in this week’s edition of the Carnival of Open Records.
Regards, Maverick
Thanks for the notice maverick!