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Privacy, Part Two: Unwanted Gaze
In The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy In America, law professor and columnist Jeffrey Rosen first blames expanding sexual harassment and gender discrimination law for wanton destruction of individual privacy. Cyberspace is second on his list.
A growing number of lawyers and scholars, including Rosen, say they now believe that fundamental changes in Net architecture are necessary to protect constitutional values and restore the notion of the "inviolate personality" to the private lives of Americans. These would include copyright management systems to protect the right to read anonymously, permitting individuals to pay with untraceable digital cash; prohibiting the collection and disclosure of identifying information without the reader's knowledge, or using digital certificates to create psudonymous downloading.
To Rosen, author of Gaze, cyberspace is posing a greater menace to privacy by the day. He details the l998 forced resignation of Harvard Divinity School dean Ronald F. Thiemann, who downloaded pornography onto his university-owned home computer. A Harvard technician installing a computer with more memory at the dean's residence was transferring files from the old computer to the new one and noticed thousands of pornographic pictures. Although none of the pictures appeared to involve minors, the technician told his supervisor. University administrators asked the dean to step down.
Harvard justified its decision by claiming that Divinity School rules prohibited personal use of university computers in any way that clashed with its educational mission. But the dean was using his computer at home, not work. And no student or colleague suggested he had improperly behaved in any way as head of the Divinity School. His work was never questioned. It's ludicrous to suggest that the school would have fired him if he'd been downloading sports scores or bidding for furniture on eBay. But although he'd committed no crime and performed well in his job, he was forced out in disgrace, while his intimate communications were discussed in public. Even in a supposedly freedom-loving and prestigious university, what Justice Louis Brandeis dubbed the right of every citizen to an "inviolate personality" -- the part of our private thoughts, communications and explorations once thought beyond the reach of exposure and dissemination -- that is private could be invaded and voided.
The Harvard case also underscores the blurring of boundaries between home and work caused by technology. Millions of employees and workers criss-cross between their employer's equipment and their own for work and personal communications.
The one serious omission in The Unwanted Gaze, perhaps because Rosen is a member of the Washington journalistic elite, is his unaccountable failure to consider the media's role in growing assaults on the idea of privacy. Journalism has become a prime instigator of the destruction of privacy.
Until recently, politicians were permitted the right private lives, along with other citizens, as long as their private behavior didn't compromise their work. But journalism has been breaching that tradition for years, considering even the most private details of public people, now considering even themost private d etails of public officials' lives to be its business, justifying intrusions like the Lewinsky story in the name of investigating character and protecting the public. The contemporary press, which should be defending the right of individual's to historic privacy protections, is demolishing the idea of the inviolate personality, particularly for public figures. This has driven countless people from public service and discouraged many more from entering.
Because the Net is the planet's largest and fastest Xerox machine, as well as the world's greatest new marketing opportunity, it constitutes a particular menace to privacy and is escalating its erosion. Personal information can be - is -- gathered and transmitted more rapidly and comprehensively than has ever been possible.
Corporations busy stealing their customer's private information are now eager to appear concerned about it. In June, more than 30 major technology companies -- AT&T, American Online, Microsoft, Hewlitt-Packard among them -- went to the White House to announce a Net protocol designed to serve as an automatic privacy-protection agent -- the so-called P3P-compliance. But a number of privacy addvocay organizations, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and Junkbusters derided P3P's claim to being any kind of real privacy-protection.
Many of these critics referred to what's known as the "VCR syndrome," which holds that in a country where most people can't figure out how to program their VCR's, overly technical solutions to privacy concerns are doomed. Despite the White House-generated hype, this leaves the idea of privacy in trouble.
The idea of the "inviolate personality" is one of the greatest and newest freedoms in history. In our time it's not only being nibbled to death but obliterated, and almost all of us are willing, even enthusiastic participants.
Rosen believes that changes in Net architecture and new encryption technologies ("snoop-proof" e-mail) could in a few years restore Justice Brandeis' ideal: the right of every individual to determine "to what extent his thoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated by others." Others agree. A professor in the United Kingdom sent me this e-mail in response to Part One of this series: "... one of my students has just completed a thesis that describes a system that allows you to send messages across the system that are guaranteed anonymous. The system assumes the use of PDA like machines but can definitely be made to work. Privacy of content can of course be obtained by encrypting the messages. (Up to a point etc ...) My student's system is a simple analogue of the public phone system. So it can work since the phone system allows anonymity."
Despite the clear and logical reasoning of his book, Rosen isn't persuasive on the idea that new software will protect our thoughts and secrets. The threshold of privacy referred to by Brandeis and outlined by the Constitution's framers has been nearly wiped out by the media, by gender-discrimination and harassment rulings, and by rabidly invasive and corporately-funded information-gathering software.
Rosen makes a great case that the idea of the inviolate personality has nearly been killed off. He fares a bit more poorly with the idea that it will magically be restored in a matter of a few years with digital cash and a handful of encryption programs.
"Already," writes Rosen, "user-friendly Web sites are spring up that give you the benefits of encryption without the hassles of having to understand the difference between public and private keys. A site like ZipLip.com, for example, allows you to send encrypted e-mails for free without leaving any records that can be subpoenaed or searched."
Rosen writes about the technology of anonymity and pseudonymity being developed bycompanies such as Zero-Knowledge.com, which is based in Montreal. For a modest fee, says Rosen, you can buy a software package called Freedom, which allows you to create five digital pseudonyms, or "nyms," that you can assign to different activities, from discussing politics to surfing the Web.
Should free citizens in a democratic society have to spend money for "nyms" to preserve the privacy they ought to be -- and once were -- accorded in law? How many millions of computer users will even know of this new technology, or have the money to use it?
Rosen's implication is that even if software caused the problem, then software will clean up. His assurances seem a bit "gee-whiz." But to ignore them cynically on that basis, or to trust them completely, ignores the history of technology. What people can create, others can and will undo. Technology that can be used will be used. In an otherwise powerful book, he also glosses over powerful incentives for eliminating privacy in cyberspace. First, the megacorporations dominating media, business and government will continue to aggressively explore ways of tracking potential customers as Net use grows. Secondly, law enforcement agencies like the FBI have been fighting for decades for the right to deploy tracking programs like "Carnivore" (see part one) and are hardly likely to back off. And finally, powerful institutions -- the entertainment and movie industry, professions like law and medicine, and entities like the U.S. Congress itself -- will inevitably seek to regain the primacy they had -- until the rise of the Net -- over copyright and culture, as well as the setting of social and political agendas. It seems naive to think that "user-friendly" Web sites are going to save the inviolate personality people once had, and are entitled to have again.
I have to disagree that the increasing intrusion of the media into the lives of politicians and public figures is a bad thing, at least for the rest of us. These people accept that they are to have their lives scrutinised to a far greater extent than normal people - it's part and parcel of being in the public eye.
What you say is true, but there is also the price to be paid. A lot of people who would have made excellent leaders and public figures avoid stepping into limelight for precisely that reason: they do not want their private life ripped to shreds by nasty people looking for any dirt they could find.
As usual, it's a matter of balance: allow people in power to hide their business and corruption will flourish. Strip them of any privacy and no decent person will want to become one. Hard separation between public and personal might help, but it's somewhat unnatural and not likely to work well. I don't think there is a good solution.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Basing something on a book is technically copyright violation.
No, it's not. Even leaving aside fair use, ideas are not copyrightable. So don't pretend to be a hard-ass lawyer.
Who controlls the digital certificates?
So-called "certification authorities" (CAs). Who they would be is a subject of much debate.
Bah humbug. They own the computer, they dictate how it's used. Simple as that.
Not as simple as that. The poster correctly points out that finding, say, baseball statistics on the same computer would not have caused any problems at all. This is actually not a privacy story (other that the obvious moral: don't put personal stuff on other people's machines). This is a story about puritanical attitudes to sex and maintaining a facade of respectability.
But inappropriate use of company resources has always been a reason for firing somebody.
Don't be anal-retentive. Receiving a personal email on a company machine is, technically, inappropriate use of company resoures. Ditto reading Slashdot and a bunch of other stuff. I can assure you that a company that will fire people for sending/receiving personal non-offensive emails at work will soon find itself with a severe personnel problem. Send/receive a sexually explicit message, though, and things can get ugly very quickly. So, again, it's mostly not about privacy but about attitudes to sex.
However, people lost there individuality to the collective many moons ago
Speak for yourself.
The price of popular culture is losing yourself.
Is it really? Sometimes I eat at McDonalds, occasionally I listen to bubblegum pop music (so, shoot me), and I have been known to watch popular movies. So how does it make me lose myself?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
"I f*** farm animals"
Interesting that you should write that in a discussion on privacy. Personally, I do f*** farm animals. I am a zoophile, an ex-FAQ-keeper of alt.sex.bestiality, and it's not much of a secret to anyone who knows me. (Why did you think I was using a psuedonym?)
And my situation is a good example of why David Brin's Transparent Society will never work. My personal life harms no one, and in my state of residence it's perfectly legal. But I guarantee you that if my personal life were revealed to everyone, I would have problems with my employer, not to mention my coworkers and possibly with over-zealous law enforcement who aren't familiar with the (lack of) sodomy laws in this state.
It's happened to me already, you see. A usenet.kook hired a private detective to ferret out information on me, then wrote to my previous employer. Although I broke no law, my career was nearly destroyed because of a private behaviour outside the mainstream, found by someone who was able to snoop on me too easily. I'm a little harder to find, now...although I have no illusions that I'm completely unfindable.
The premise behind Brin's Transparent Society is that we can catch corporations and governments doing illegal things also. But how many people have money to pay for investigation of every corporation or government agency they suspect of wrongdoing? Are corporations held responsible for legal-but-frowned-upon behaviour, or do they just ignore outcries until they affect their profits? And of course, any corporation has the funds to research the individuals opposing them, and destroy their lives if they can.
The Transparent Society will shift power away from individuals and towards those who have the resources to mine and act upon information. It will create a homogenized society, and threaten everyone whose lives differ from the mainstream by any minor behaviour or percieved difference from 'normal'. It's a dangerous concept, and I believe a very evil future for Brin (who I otherwise respect) to be promoting.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
- Any government official (including local government, police inspectors and Tax/Customs) can self-issue a notice requiring your ISP to give up emails and/or HTTP traffic logs to them.
- Notices don't expire
- Notices can come with an attached "gagging order" that makes it an arrestable offence (5 yrs emprisonment) to tell anyone a notice has been served on you
- Gagging orders do not expire
- Notices can require you turn over a secret encryption key; if you are a company employee with access to the key (for example, a
.uk technician with access to the .us based ordering system for a major multinational can be ordered to download the key from that system on the .uk government's behalf) - If you have the authority to order the production of the key (for example, a UK resident CEO of a US company) they can serve a notice on you to do so
- If you fail to produce the key (and forgetting / losing the key is no defence unless you can prove it in court) there is a 2 yr jail sentence in your future.
- Once they have the key, no-one is liable for its safety or for any losses you suffer as a result of its disclosure
- What few safeguards exist are in a Code of Practice that can be re-written by the government at any time; in addition, there are no penalties for failing to follow the Code of Practice.
- The target (and/or recipient) of the notice is not required to be suspected of a crime; it is enough that the official is investigating a potential crime
- the "economic well-being" of the UK is a valid justification for notices - so trade unions, human rights organisations and foreign multinationals competing against government-lobbying firms are all valid targets with no further justification required
It shouldn't be too surprising to hear that three ISPs have already announced they are planning to move their servers overseas; the largest--
-=DaveHowe=-
I have a pretty simple solution for this: a few times, I've swapped cards with someone! I just approach them as we exit the store if they are in line in front of me and I notice them use the card. I just explain "hey, do you know they use this to track buying habits? I'm kind of a privacy freak and don't like it, let's swap cards to confuse 'em. This isn't even my card, I have no idea whose it is!" The first time, I did it with a guy I knew. Since then, I've swapped it three more times. I also have two people I swap doubleclick cookies and the like with occasionally.
I think the best way to protest this crap is not to stop shopping there. If you complain to the manager and say "I won't shop here anymore, they just look at you like you are nuts and say "fine" and since the VAST majority of folks don't care, your boycott has no effect. Instead, do things like this to undermine the effectiveness of the data, so the fabulous things these companies are selling don't really come to pass.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Here's a rather fascinating interview with David Brin (probably picked up from slashdot earlier) that I found a fascinating read. Its about having the light shine both ways.
Link is here
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Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
marotti.com
First off, i don't necessarily agree with Rosen's first claim that sexual harassment is the leading cause of the violation of personal freedom. Sexual harassment, which can go against both sexes, is just another form of plain old harassment, which has been going on for centuries. People have learned to either learned to adapt to it and ignore it, or go off the deep end and sue whoever looks twice at them.
But enough of that. I see the internet as provding more freedom than the real world can. In the internet, through chat rooms and MUDs / MOOs, a person can REcreate themselves to be whatever/whoever they want to be. Most everyone wants to be someone else, a more gregarious character or someone without physical limitations. In the physical realm, this is not possible. The internet provides a place where we can be all that we want to be.
That true freedom also can be a form of privacy. In this other self you create, you can be as private as you like. You need not include all your actual personal identifications. False information flows abundantly on the internet.
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Bad spellers of the world, untie!
We have known for some time--practically since the end of the Second World War (and to a certain extent before)--that the cloak of privacy is shrinking, and eventually it will be gone.
Already, the powers that be are training the public for the day when anyone can turn on a television or go to a website and watch the daily activities of a total stranger. Witness the success of shows like "Big Brother." The groundwork was laid years ago, and though people deride their banality, soi-disant "reality shows" like "Cops" and even (dare I say it) "The Real World" have been preparing people for this for years. Voyeur shows like "Big Brother" were simply the next logical step.
Eventually, the common citizen will have to conduct his or her life under the unblinking stare of the camera, not knowing who will be watching or when. I suspect that eventually, everyone will be watching everyone else. We will all be the stars of our own little Truman Shows.
And when this is in place, then they will have won. Intelligence agencies such as the FBI and NSA can be dealt, however ineffectually, because they can only do so much. The scenario I describe is akin to what's going on with distributed computing processes: you don't need just the best or the brightest to work on the problem. Every extra set of eyes helps.
We know that large segments of a population can be stirred up by mentioning a few key issues. How hard would it be for a fundamentalist figure to convince conservatives to spy on one another (and others) for evidence of sin? How hard would it be for some government official to say, "It's for the good of the children"? When you have a large body of motivated people working towards a common goal, little can stand against them. It is up to us, those who know and can see what is going on, to make sure that they act for the good of all, rather than for ill.
Fight the Power. Close your blinds and stay out of others' business.
www.alarmist.org
Pretending you know something about copyright when you obviously don't is technically stupidity.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.