Slashdot Mirror
David Brin on Privacy
David Brin is interviewed and provides some strong words on modern conceptions of privacy and why they're off-base. Brin asserts - and argues well - that a land with little privacy is a freer land.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
One cannot forget that the Right to Privacy is not a constitutional right. Nowhere in the Constitution does it state that American citizens have a right to privacy.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
Look for yourself.
So if living one's life in full view is such a great thing, why do the powerful arrange things so that they (and their families) don't?
sPh
I bought Brin's book (ISBN: 0738201448) when it came out in '99. I was struck with his sense that surveilance in the larger sense was technologically inevitable- not only cameras, but every expenditure, even RF tags on your money . He argued that it was impossible to supress this capability; that doing so would simply give those in power the ability to take unfair advantage; so we should make everything completely transparent. If we all have the legal right to spy on each other, the little guy can't be sanctioned for finding out what the bigs guys are up to - kind of a pessimists take on "information wants to be free".
Maybe I'm failing to adapt to change, but the prospect of what he proposes makes me really uncomfortable and could lead to a level of social conformity that most of us would find stiffing. Also, I don't know that I have that little faith in our (western civilization's - I'm Canadian) ability to govern our behaviour and that of our institutions.
The book is worth a read - I may just haul it out and take another look.
David is dead on.
/Dread
"Information wants to be free"
Apply this to information about YOU.
My point is, most of our actions are done in the public sphere, and can be observed by ANY casual observer. In theory, what anyone does in a public space, cannot be private by definition. Is it bad that people track you for your personal buying habits?
I dont think so, because I _could_ have spotted you buying it anyway.
Now, the problem is in WHO can see that data. F.E. if the governement or anyone really, has data on me, Id sure want to know what. So I should be granted access to that data. If only to correct errors made.
"Information is power"
It sure is. Just ask the MPAA.
Now who should have this power? Everyone. That way we can garantee supervising the supervisors.
So.. Privacy doesnt really exists, but that does not scare me. Information exists, and what scares me if the powers have infomation, that the public has no access too. That way the balance is off.
Gr
Brin writes:
> Biometric-based I.D. cards for everybody are coming.
> Squint, look ahead 50 years and honestly tell me you
> can envision a world where such things are not simply
> assumed.
I think what bothered me most about the article was this particular foregone conclusion about the future. I hate to disappoint Brin, but I'm not so imaginatively myopic that his is the only future I can see.
> The important factor is not whether such cards exist,
> but whether they are a tool for robbing us of things
> we want and need.
This seems to imply that what we really want or need could be a _lack_ of such intrusive measures in our lives. There comes a point where if you're being challenged to validate your identity at every turn, we begin to adopt a mentality of "That which is not expressly permitted is automatically forbidden."
This flies in the face of the principles on which this nation was founded. As others have pointed out, read through the first ten ammendments (Bill of Rights) to the U.S. Constitution. Disregard what the courts have done to this fine set of principles in the last hundred years, and just read it.
If that doesn't say, "Anything not expressly forbidden is permitted, oh and by the way, these are limits that the powers can be can place on those 'forbiddens'" then I don't know what does.
Quite simply, the society that Brin sees us moving more towards is unamerican in its principles. If our government and society are to collapse and fail eventually, then let it do so because of a failure of the principles that it was founded on, not because of our collective unwillingness to stick to those principles.
Our ( America's) new gov't was framed in the idea that gov't can't be perfect, and that if it gets really screwed up, citizens should have the power to revolt, and to create a new gov't. This, I believe, is the root behind the 2nd amendment. Regular common people, it was written, should have the right to bear arms, form up a non-state controlled militia, and fight for their rights if they need to. ( Of course they never dreamed how of the twisted ways liberals would try to interpret the second amendment. If only they would have been a little more specific.)
I agree with the author. We SHOULD be fighting intensely for rigorous oversight of the Gov't in the cases where we can't stop them from taking our freedoms.. But we should NOT embrace the erosion of our freedom. Freedom is not just "freedom from attack by foreign bad people." Freedom is also "freedom from your own gov't." As we let the gov't be more in control, and in the know regarding each of our lives, we really are setting ourselves up to be citizens of the Big Brother country of the future, where it will be totally impossible for people to revolt if the USA runs astray.
Last year at an Apache Conference I heard David Brin talk. Really interesting! And then I bought his book at the conference. He has a lot to say and definitely worth the read.
The problems that he outlines are very legit and there is only his solution as a way out. For example he says secrecy laws like in Europe are DUMB. Living in Europe I thought they were good, but he put in further terms.
Data is immortal. Hence with data secrecy laws what ends up happening is some people have power and others do not. And having run conferences and mailing lists that is the exact problem. Once I ok the use of my data I cannot control it. For example lets say I want a mortgage. In Europe I sign a sheet saying yes the bank has the right to look at all of my data. But the question what data will the bank look at? And how will they use that data? The secrecy laws do not address that issue. That is the crux of the problem with or without data secrecy laws. I have no idea how the data is being used.
David Brin argues you can give out all the data you want, but you have control on what is being seen and manipulated.
My favourite part of his book is the following (it starts off with that). We have privacy in public. For example lets say that you go to lunch with people. Do other people listen in on your conversation? No because people mind their own business. The reason is because people can see when you are not minding your own business. And that is the crux of his argument regarding privacy laws. We cannot tell companies or governments to mind their own business!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Brin may be right, or he may be wrong.
The fact is that most Americans don't care if they have the government oversite that he speaks of. They TRUST their government.... after all, we're the GOOD guys. We would NEVER do anything wrong.
I saw Phil Zimmermann speak a few years ago and Phil spoke about how technical infrastructures rarely go away. There are no laws mandating 120 volts @ 60 cycles in the US. It's just an infrastructure that's in place, that will likely not go away, ever.
The same will be true for the spying infrastructures that we're allowing our government to install.
Brin's argument assumes a truly awful government will never be elected or take power by coup. Apparently he knows nothing about history.
Installing these infrstructures is a terrible mistake that we will one day regret.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
I find that I agree with David Brin. I have always been a bit paranoid about my privacy and take many steps to safegaurd my private info. In retrospect, though, I have usually been much more relaxed about divulging private info when I know there are more rigid laws to protect it.
For example I would never open an account with an online bill paying service but as soon as my bank offerred one I jumped at the chance. I beleive that we have already traded any true privacy for the many conveniences that most of western civilization now demands. We are our own worst enemies in this regard. The most effective means of protecting ourselves is not to try to hide our personal information but to limit how others can legally use it.
The idea that increasing transparency at all levels is an interesting one, but I would like to see how Brin would deal with the issue of simulated transparency verses actually seeing what is there.
He is correct that as the technology improves it is easier to share information and to gather information, it also makes it easier to simulate and falsify information. (Info-tainment, commercials disguised as informational presentations, etc.)
It might make for an interesting arms race between those who try to see what is really going on and those who obscure what is happening by creating false but believable data with the facilities available to them. A person could be so bombarded by so many 'experts', each claiming a different view point or interpretation of 'what really happened', that the person cannot decide who to believe.
There is probably a necessary layer of filtering required there (i.e. like people wear sunglasses to keep the glare from blinding them -- too much transparency can be bad), but that leads yet again to the accountability problem -- who runs the filters?
As an extreme example, South Africa and Brazil both decided to terminate and dismantle successful nuclear weapons progrms (S.A. after actually assembling and testing weapons). Both countries deliberately decided that the dangers of having that technology were greater than any possible benefit.
So the creation of an Iraqi-style national ID card in the U.S. is not inevitable.
sPh
" I just wish they weren't so contemptuous of the masses. If they weren't, they would notice that people are very sensible."
,in general the majority of people do not care about it and will not do any thing signifigant about it.
.Until this happens I do not believe that the public will be given, "fierce accountability measures", in fact I think that in most cases whatever laws or legislation that get's passed will most likely come out heavily in favor of big busines and not the general public.
.What is more likely to happen is a slow eroision of rights that the general public take for granted and are to apathetic to do anything about and by the time they realise, "hey why can't I do that any more ", and decide that maybe they should have done something about that 'crazy russian commie' who cracked adobe's ebook program and that maybe there Privacy is some thing they should care about,it will be to late and The majority of people through apathy and not a lack of inteligence will have, "grant(ed) our servants the tools they claim they need".
I do not think the problem is that the majority of people are stupid more that the majority of people are apethetic and lazy about issues which could effect them in both the long/short run, and unless something is shown to have a very direct immediate negative effect on there day to day lives
"Government power is kept in check by stripping the powerful down and subjecting them to scrutiny in the application of their delegated power, so that abuse of the power can be caught and rapidly dealt with. We are protected by enhancing our ability to see them, not by reducing their ability to see us."
The whole issue of who funds party's running for Government needs to be addressed before we will see truly open and observable government and business
People will not wake up one morning and suddenly find all there rights taken away and a secret police officer at there door enquiring about the printed copy of the anarchists cookbook under there bed
_________________________________________________
...is that it's currently a one-way street. We, the individuals, are expected to give up personal information, allow unlimited surveilance and suspicion, and pretty much become an open book for the government and corporations. But the trend is for INCREASED privacy for those groups. Corporations are trying to lock up more and more information under the guise of "trade secrets" and have laws like the DMCA, etc. to back them up. Governments are moving more and more lawmaking into secret sessions, and hiding more information under the guise of "National Security."
I agree with the author that the only way the "transparent society" will work is if the transparency goes both ways. But that will never happen, as both governments and corporations see the citizenry as resources, not equals.
The solution? That's what the whole article is about.
The key notion is "oversight". Which means that you watch the watchers. For government this means things like the FOIA, where citizens can see what the files say. This means open meetings with published minutes. It means that court proceedings are public. Things like that. For corporations, it means things like being able to get a copy of your credit report.
Maybe it should also mean standard reports by businesses that consumers can request that will show what's being tracked, and what those tracked values are for that specific consumer. That way, if a supermarket has used my address (which would be consistent across credit/debit cards and checks) to track my purchases, that I can see my whole file, as it were.
It might mean that a credit agency has to give a more complete disclosure than just the "credit report" which don't currently show any of the standard scores assigned to my profile.
But the basic premise of Brin's argument is that privacy, freedom, and security are all orthogonal. None of these are dependent on the others. Which makes sense to me. While I value my right to be left alone (one type of privacy), I almost consider it cowardice that some people are willing to buy/do things that are questionable but won't put their name to it (like only paying cash for computer security books). Their "privacy" isn't helping anyone be free. In fact, their lack of public ownership of who they are and how they behave makes it easier for the power-hungry to use this secrecy to squelch open debate, since anyone who *does* voice oppositional or open opinions becomes suspect.
I do not have a signature
This interview explains very well Brin's viewpoints, very valid viewpoints, at that. I think it would interest many people to know that analysis of many privacy-thru-secrecy advocates actually subscribe to a philosophy closer to Brin's than they think. After all, it is not the additional security that privacy advocates are against, it is the potential for harm through abuse of the system that they decry. Precisely this harm is what is limited and eliminated by the oversight that Brin speaks of. When you have the good and eliminate the bad, what's to lose?
Most importantly, Brin points out that the citizens should have a say in what aspects of our supposed privacy should be 'transparent' and what should be kept private. This is an important point, don't miss it: the amount of privacy we enjoy should be determined not by committee, but by the masses. What could be more Open Source than this? Even if the committee contains members of the EFF, ACLU, or whatever other organization, that's not enough ... it should be up to the citizens themselves to determine as a mass what is adequate privacy, where to draw the line.
Whenever I think about national ID cards or have a conversation about it, I have to balance my views on privacy (as an EFF member, I have pretty strong views, views that didn't necessarily jive with Brin's before reading this article) and views on the benefits of a national ID system (done right) to verifying identity for online transactions, and such. The potential for limiting fraud through identity verification (done right) is quite large, when you think about it. I would love to see a system that provides for the strongest security (hardware device, biometric, and soft device) in all cases. If a system like this can be assembled and made easy to use without compromising its strength, that would be sweet.
His stance on surveilance might be a little idealistic (I tend to the more paranoid fears of big-gorvernments of now inefficient nation states increasingly getting rough with their own citizens).
He admits readily to being a very optimistic person.
In addition to issues of uniform access to surveilance information, he also talked about his ideas for "EON" Eye of the Needle Foundation, discussing the lack of morality of some high stakes investing, the possibility of the new-rich to donate their money for "positive sum games", charities that do the most good, and at the same time give the givers positive notoriety.
Anyway, disagree with David Brin if you want, but he seems right-on in his personal convictions.
-Mark
Here's the fallacies I can pop off the top off my head:
Make every transaction, every movement traceable! Use scanners and biochips to make sure no one can perform a terraist [sic: Texan] act.
And how would this have stopped the men from threatening the passengers of the planes with boxcutters? The idea of a suicidal attack is that the attacker dies. What the hell use is the post-mortem activity of a dead man? The ability to throw every semite he knew into jail for the rest of their lives?
If we all lead transparent lives, then we can all live in peace --
Stop there.
The Bush administration has put ALL of its records into a vault, effectively for all time. And Reagan's. And Bush the First's. And Jeb's. Cheney is leading the way to establishing a totally opaque ruling junta. They are building walls around themselves. Hell, we don't even know where the Vice President is!!!
Guess which president's records are being selectively released, juiciest scandal-provoking one's first, by the administration? Oh, guess, guess!! Of course, all surrounding records that may show the releases are out-of-context have been sealed. Why? National security, of course.
Point? Privacy is sacrosanct -- for this administration, and all future Republican administrations. And their corporate friends.
Think of it: you ever read the minutes of ANY meeting of ANY corporation such as Enron? EVER?
Their privacy is sacred. And will remain so.
The only thing we will get from "total transparency" is the loss of common rights of privacy for suspiciously arabic foreigners, all non-corporate Americans, and anyone who pisses off the future right-wing administrations, such as popular former Democratic presidents and near-presidents, and journalists who don't agree with the adminstration.
Why in the hell do sane men suddenly get Royalty on the brain whenever a right-wing adminstration comes into power, but want armed citizens ready for revolt when a non-right wing president holds office?
The current power structure has shown what it will do with "transparency": nail its enemies and reward its friends.
No, I think I'll stay with my freedom, if it's all the same to you.
Brin: When the government pursues new surveillance powers, our habit is to kick and scream and moan and then watch helplessly while they get what they want, as when something bad like 9/11 happens. A far more effective
technique is to demand fierce accountability measures in return for granting our servants the tools they claim they need. That?s how to keep both safety and freedom.
It's a shell game. In effect (I won't say it's deliberate) the focus on secrecy keeps the powerful in power. This is becausethe "watchdog" groups are so obsessed with secrecy that they ignore what the observers do with the information that they get regardless.
This works for both sides. The privacy lobby gets the ego boost and righteous publicity, while the watchers manage to get the information they want with minor restrictions on acquisition and very little constraint on its use.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
But there is some information that I strongly believe should be public: tax returns (which, of course, include salary information), credit records, itemized donations to non-profit organizations, ownership of investments, driving records, driver's licenses (including photographs), places of residence, ownership of real property, beneficiaries of trusts, most police records, etc.
That kind of information would allow people to negotiate and participate more rationally in our economic system (e.g., in salary negotiations), and it would allow you to assess conflict of interest issues of other people involved in political decisions. In fact, arguably, without such information, our market economy and political system simply cannot function efficiently.
We are never going to see what the Bush adminstration is doing, not now, not ever. Nor Reagan's, nor Papa Bush's, nor Jeb Bush's.
By fiat, Bush has declared his record as governor of Texas sealed, his dad's sealed, and of course, Reagan's -- a lot of his staff are Reagan's people, and it could be very distressing to read the Iran-Contra records.
Somehow, Jeb Bush got his records sealed, a neat deal since he is violating the state of Florida's sunshine laws.
What the Bush admin wants, and corporations want, and the spooks want, and federal cops want, is access to OUR lives, for snooping, marketing, tracking, occasional blackmail, who knows?
What they do not want is their activities to be shown in the light of day. Ever.
Brin's nuts if he thinks we get a transparent government in trade for us stripping naked on a Homeland Security Monitor's command. We will get a fascist dictatorship beyong the dreams of any Austrian paperhanger.
And ten years from now, a pony nuke will detonate in front of the Statue of Liberty, and won't we all look like goddam idiots.
Not a single thing that the constitution's rewriters are proposing will stop a determined attack. They will get through, and we will respond by becoming even more psychotic.
There is NO correlation with privacy and vulnerability. Singapore, a nation which posts goverment monitors at apartment buildings to monitor the citizenry, was recently amazed when the CIA told their authorities that they had three, THREE Al Queda cells operating in their Perfect, Safe, Orderly World. Their Homeland Security, probably the most insane in the world, was totally flummoxed.
I imagine their response will be more instrusive monitoring of all citizens.
Insanity on more insanity. We discover a fire in our house, and we try to douse it with gasoline. Since that doesn't work, obviously we need more gasoline; and shout down that man over there if he unpatriotically points out that it won't work.
Brin's argues that we should be screaming for more oversight, not for more privacy protections.
This argument seems a bit overly optimistic. Even if we have oversight, how do we know the government (or corporate America) is really disclosing everything they are doing with our private information. If Enron has taught us anything it's that corporations do not do what is in the best interest of even their own shareholders, let alone the random Joe Schmoe. Brin points to the Freedom of Information act as being a good example of oversight of the government. Is it? A lot of what people ask for comes back highly redacted.
Furthermore, his solution seems like it would be expensive. How much would all these oversight committees cost? Who's going to want to raise taxes to pay for them?
The simplest solution is to just protect people's privacy. I really don't see why Brin has a problem with that.
Several times, Brin also talks about how our Liberties are not based on controlling what the government knows about us. Really? Well, he must be ignoring those handy laws about the government not being able to search our homes unwarranted, and that people are assumed innocent until proven guilty. What he is advocating is a police state, where anything that is yours is the government's right to know about ("I cannot believe how many sincere civil libertarians have actually convinced themselves that freedom is best preserved by blinding government. That has nothing whatsoever to do with how we acquired our present liberties."). Wrong David. That has everything to do with it.
...to quote the Good Doctor---in this case, the powerful will always try to cloak what they do, at least if we avoid the sort of fascism/Klingonry in which you _gloat_in_public_ over how much you're screwing everyone else. That is, no matter what the restrictions are, the powerful will buy their ways out of them, or what's a heaven for (that is, what's the point of being a powerful bastard if you can't enjoy things not available to other people)?
The only solution I can see is to eliminate power differentials; this is probably impossible. However, this doesn't eliminate pursuing a "harm reduction" policy. To my mind, the most obvious course is putting a floor on how powerless or abject you _can_ get, and increasing the likelihood of turnovers in societal power.
For example, we will never be able to guaranty that innocent people won't be imprisoned, but if we do guaranty that anyone, no matter how much we might hate them[sic], has the right to vote and to publish their grievances, and not to be killed, then we are all a bit safer from the government. If we put in a firm anti-lynching policy, we are safer from The People; if there is some kind of basic sustenance floor to the economy, we are less open to coercion (don't bother telling me it's not 'really') by our bosses.
If one party is always in power, they will treat members of others badly. If there are fairly regular changeovers, every party has an interest in seeing that the losers are not treated too badly. Similarly, if Mr Ashcroft could be convinced that the guns and cameras he wants will eventually be aimed at _him_....well, he might get off on it, unfortunately---he already believes himself to be living in a Universal Dictatorship, where you're always under observation and your only right is to freely choose to agree with the Boss or go to a very bad prison forever.
Sorry; well, to pop the stack: if a _reasonably_ _rational_ Attorney General were to believe that that powerful white men like him were eventually subject to frequent random stops in his neighbourhood, racial profiling there wouldn't be an issue (this is why the "racial" element is so nasty---it cuts off the feedback loop by assuring some people that it will never happen to _them_).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
To them, it's just as harmful for a supermarket to know what salad dressing you bought as it is for a convicted abuser to know the location of the battered wives shelter. But this is obviously absurd.
Why is this absurd? The point is, if privacy is not valued for it's own sake, it will be taken from you when you really need it. Of course we don't need special rules to protect privacy when even Mrs. Grundy can see that it's needed.
The Anschluss was approved by an overwhelming majority of Austrian voters. Albert Goering, who did not share the political beliefs of his more famous brother, described how this vote worked to his Allied interogators after the war.
Voting took place in a large hall. In the centre there was a table, surrounded by seated officials, with ballots and ballot boxes. At the far end of the hall was a privacy booth. One approached the table and was handed a ballot with the Brinesque instruction that if voting "yes" (in favour of unification), there was no need for privacy - you could skip that long lonely walk to the booth. (Amusingly, the "Yes" alternative was printed very large on the ballot, the "No" very small. The Nazis weren't exactly subtle.)
Goering insisted on using the booth, but of course this was tantamount to an admission that he was voting "no". He could afford to do this because his powerful brother could free him from the clutches of the Gestapo (as happened on more than one occasion.) Most voters didn't have that luxury.
There was no way to argue the merits of privacy in the particular case, as Brin advocates, without arguing the case itself. If it had been possible to argue for privacy on a principled, rather than particular, basis, more people might have voted "no".
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
In the original interview, he parrots phrases like:
We are - even after 9/11 - toweringly safer and freer than any other people in history.
...
no government ever knew more about its people than ours does - and no people have ever been so free.
Obviously he has never lived outside the USA for any significant length of time, and obviously he doesn't know much history.
Even in the United States in the last couple of centuries, some people at some times were freer than they are now. Could Thoreau have done what he describes in Walden today? Of course not - or at least, not legally. He had no means to pay the property taxes that would be levied on his "house in the woods".
You have to be careful with this. Live by the populist sword, die by the populist sword.
Though it would be what actually was "populist" Rather difficult for some political extremists to make bogus claims about representing a "silent majority".
"Argues well?" No. Forcefully, and perhaps eloquently, but very badly.
His central thesis is that government "sight" will not be abused if there is citizen "oversight". He completely ignores the fact that, again and again, the majority of citizens have proven quite willing to allow the state to run roughshod over the rights of the minority.
Brin writes from the position of a supporter of the general political and social status quo - his outlook is basically that our society is the best that's ever been. In this article, he claims we're both the safest and the freest, making no mention at all of such facts as our absurdly high incarceration rate. I've read other essays where he's quite exhuberant about his praise for modern western culture.
Now that's all well and good. While his praise of the system is sometime more emotional than rational, he does have some good points. But he seems keenly unaware of the nature (maybe even the existance) of dissent, and of the sociopolitical reaction against it.
Would citizen oversight have protected leaders like Martin Luther King and Huey Newton against the FBI's COINTELPRO? Would it have protected anti-globalization protestors who were pre-emptively raided before WTO protests in Seattle, IMF protests in D.C., and the RNC in Philadelphia? No. The system had done an excellent job of convincing the masses that these people were a threat to The Very American Way Of Life.
Brin's a smart guy. I like a lot of his fiction, and on many issues he's pretty right on. This, however, is not one of them. He argues from either ignorance of, or deliberate refusal to acknowledge, the attitudes of the majority toward political dissent.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I grew up in small town American -- places where the neighbors knew who you were, and were likely to tell your parents what you were doing. There are some obvious bad points to that, but also good points. Brin's proposal amounts to using internet cameras, etc., to create a similar situation everywhere.
It's likely to happen regardless of whether we want it to or not -- between the government using every opportunity to stampede the sheeple into allowing increased governmental powers to "protect" them, and old folks whiling away their time with video cameras (I think that was a Brin novel...). But several things are needed to make the good balance the bad:
1. Government should be at least as subject to surveillance by citizens as the other way around. That is, if a corporate official comes around a congressman's home or office the day before a vote, we should at least be able to see him going in and out. If they go out to a restaurant, we can tape them -- if they are taping us.
2. There are a few government issues which have to be worked in secret -- weapons designs (sometimes), military planning, police investigations. But these categories should be strictly defined, as limited as possible. Everything else must be open to the public, and classified items must be opened up as soon as possible. There must be severe penalties for overclassifying materials -- mandatory minimum of being barred from ever working for the government again, plus fines and possible jail time. Don't depend on gov't prosecutors to enforce this -- private citizens can file charges before a grand jury, prosecute if the grand jury indicts, and get well-paid out of the fines. (I know, that's encouraging the sharks to go feed themselves. Better on gov't officials than us...)
3. There are public areas and private areas. You DON'T surveil private areas without a warrant. If you saw what Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith were doing inside Mr. Smith's house, you'd better keep it to yourself, you damned peeping tom!
4. One big fear about a no-secrets society is that we have things we don't want the neighbors to know about -- not illegal stuff, but embarrassing. If you knew what your neighbors were hiding, you probably don't have anything to be embarrasssed about . We'll have to get used to people not being perfect. Small-towners know that -- and the only ones that are excessively concerned about what their neighbors are doing are the old ladies without a life... ("Old lady" is not defined by gender...)
5. Don't expect perfection from politicians, either. J. Edgar Hoover once had enormous power, more from fear of what might be in his secret files than from respect of his abilities as director of the FBI. Remember, once it's out in the open, it's not blackmail material any more...
5. Repeal a hell of a lot of outmoded laws. We're not only worried about the neighbors seeing something embarrassing, but also about some malicious DA digging up a 150 year old law and prosecuting.
If we all lead transparent lives, then we can all live in peace --
Stop there.
The Bush administration has put ALL of its records into a vault, effectively for all time. And Reagan's. And Bush the First's. And Jeb's. Cheney is leading the way to establishing a totally opaque ruling junta. They are building walls around themselves. Hell, we don't even know where the Vice President is!!!
Did you even read Brin's article? If you had, you would have realized that the problem he has with the current debate is exactly the thing you point out--that our loss of privacy is currently happening without a corrisponding loss of privacy within the Government.
Without that corrisponding loss of privacy within the Government, it strips us of our own privacy without the necessary controls to allow us to know who has information on us and what they are doing with it. It also allows a small, elite class of people to arise who can control information on themselves (and, thus, do great harm or illegal stuff a'la Enron), while the rest of us are relegated to "sheep."
Until this transparency happens in Government, there is a problem.
The current power structure has shown what it will do with "transparency": nail its enemies and reward its friends.
And that's why Brin, in his article, called for transparency within Government. Otherwise, we cannot watch the watchers.
No, I think I'll stay with my freedom, if it's all the same to you.
But you have already lost your freedom. Enron happened; the powerful elite who can control the public's ability to see what they are doing already have closed the shutters and have already committed crimes which took money out of your pocket (if you are an investor or live in California and buy electricity here).
Only transparency (which means also the transparency to see what Bush--and Clinton--had to do with Enron) will allow you to prevent a bunch of elite thieves from picking your pocket in the future.
Think about it. Greater insight into what our government is doing, supposedly on our behalf, is a Good Thing(tm) independent of Brin's transparent society ideal.
I've enjoyed almost every book written by Brin, with the exception of the book "Earth". In this world of tomorrow, privacy is a thing of the past. Virtually everything you say and do is open to public scrutiny. It was a frightening world, one in which I would not wish to live in.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Hmm. And we could apply the same priciples to the economic world as well as to the govermental world, couldn't we? Like, say, when a company releases financial and accounting data to it's shareholders. How do we know they're telling the truth? Well, we should require that this information be audited by an independent agency. That should stop any abuse from happening. Gee, what a great idea.
Maybe Andersen could do the "oversight" of the government's data collection...
I can (with misgivings) accept a transparent society, with government and citizens having access to a large amount of information about citizens, government, and government processes.
But there is another requirement to this.
With transparency MUST come tolerance. And I worry that there is not sufficient tolerance in our society to allow transparency. There are too many "minority rights" issues still around for me to really believe that there is enough tolerance for transparency to work well.
I'd also say that this would require removing a lot of the so-called victimless crimes, drug use among them. But then, that's almost a completely separate (and loud, probably) argument.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
The reality of the world today is that each one of us leave a trail of bits as we pass through our days. The purpose of "privacy" is not to stop those bits, but to keep them from being aggregated and used against me.
If my kroger buyer card shows that I do not buy pork and I charge fuel and fertilizer on my lawn care company visa, I do not want to be questioned by the FBI as a terrorist. The oversite needs to be on the use of the data, not it's existance.
My doctor needs the ability to genetically screen for disease, but my insurance company, even if it knows my flaws, should not be allowed to charge more. In the past I had the security through obscurity that my privacy provides, but this is no longer the case.
The transparent society is an open source society. The 'source code' of an individual are their life experiences. The exploits are already in the wild. (People generally by milk and produce in a grocery so why are those sections the furthest apart?).
The success of the transparent society will depend on the protections we provide for our most valuable intellectual property we own, ourselves.
Lawrence Lessig has an article that descibes a new system for protecting IP. Add ability to copyright your personal data and we have a start on the Transparent Society.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Strange that you agree with me substantially but act exasperated.
Those "hate crime" law of which you speak. Just what do you rate the probability that David Brin is going to be convicted of one, even if he wrote something that offended the powerful? I'd put it as pretty close to zero.
Look at the people who do get convicted. For example, there's that case of a 16-year-old convicted of tying a 33-year-old black man to a tree and setting him on fire.
Now, which is more plausible: that a single 16-year-old can manage, single-handedly to tie a fully grown male to a tree, or that he was kind of a loner, a bit outside the community, and handy?
"Hey, Lemuel, we've got to catch somebody for this. How about that weird kid nobody likes?" happens.
"Hey, Lemuel, we've got to catch somebody for this. How about David Brin?" does not happen.
The biggest problem with a lack of privacy is when you want to do something the majority doesn't like: The freedom to do only that which others approve of is no freedom at all. Yet see what happens when everyone knows you're gay in Podunk, North Carolina or say 50 years ago just about anywhere. Until we stop harassing or prosecuting victimless "crimes", or just people who are different, we need privacy.
From what I have read of Brin, his problem with privacy advocates is that they are uncompromising. He believes that we need to bargain on privacy. If we can get the same information about the government and corporations as they get about us, then the bargain is even, and we have a better restraint on their extremes.
Enron had plenty of privacy, even from those who owned part of it.
I personally think Brin has some wrongheaded ideas, but that he brings up points that others aren't really talking about. Sure, let's force the openness from the government first, but if everyone can do everything in secret than we must suspect everyone. That is not a healthy way to live.
There's a big difference between the UN Declaration and the rights as laid out in the US Declaration of Independence. In the US document, government is to give way to individual rights ("...that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it..." From memory, so it might be a little off). According to the UN document, as I quote again below, individual rights give way to the governing body, i.e. the UN.
The passage I quoted ("These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.") says nothing about malicious intent; you are making the assumption that the purposes and principles of the UN are not malicious to anybody. As soon as the purposes and principles of the UN are malicious to anybody, your statement of what that passage says ceases to be true. My statement in this case still remains valid: the UN is declaring that its interests supercede individual rights.To save you some trouble; yes, there are laws in the United States with which I disagree and think violate human rights, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence.
Chris Beckenbach
One of the most powerful tools, in war and politics, is surprise. Without it, power almost never changes hands. Think about it. How do you get the upper hand when someone else controls the police, the press... (and I'm mainly talking politics here, not war... though the same principles apply).
You don't have to be a revolutionary to have a problem with the way things are being done - and legitimate protest can lead to targeting. A significant political movement has a hard time developing when its members are isolated, harassed, and discredited before they can form up.
And if you think that loss of privacy will be symmetrical, they you Just Don't Get It.
Those who retain privacy will be the usual suspects: the elected, the appointed, the wealthy, and the popular.
It will be a simple power (surprise) shift in favor of those who already have the power, just like newspapers and TV stations love "campaign finance reform" that shuts private citizens and groups up and lets the press blather on as much as it wants - because it maintains and expands their power.
Politicians like speech restrictions and privacy reduction for exactly the same reason.
It may seem cynical to some of you, but go to the capitals, volunteer to help, sit in on the meetings, talk to insiders, and see what they think. See how they talk about their relationship to "the people."
As someone wise once said to me, "You may not be in the game, but you're still on the board, so you had better damn well care about the rules."
Every time the privacy thing comes up, I say the same thing, and I'll say it again here:
I have no problem with being watched as long as the public gets to watch the police.
Usually I have to post the link to the first chapter of Brin's Transparent Society, but I don't think that will be necessary this time.
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
Mod parent up, mod parent up, mod parent up!
The parent post actually seems to understand what Brin is talking about. It is almost a perfect response (almost exactly what I was about to write).
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
As a person who believes in God (even though I am not necissarly too religous) I believe that God knows and sees everything I do, but for some reason this does not bother me. In this context, the problem is not that people can see or observe what I do, but rather their reactions, attitudes, and social impositions based off of their opinions or percieved personal benefits relating to what they think I should be doing.
Theologically, God has a reaction too (eg natural consequences). However, I trust the reactions of of God alot more than I do of men and government - even though I value justice (eg for a murderer) men are finite and don't always get it right.
EG. How much money I have is none of your business only because I dont want fools marketing me to death, friends bagering me, and the government being able to confiscate it at will. If I am isolated from these then I really don't care. A simple solution might be to let people have trade and bank accounts that are not linked to their identity, but secure enough for accountability.
Anyhow, I don't think governments can give us things like this. We need to secure them for ourselves through technology.
What you're missing is that society is already headed towards the future you describe. But it'll be a future where laws are applied only to the poor, for the benefit of the rich.
And I don't know where you get the idea that this requires extra laws. I think it requires that extra laws aren't passed.
And as to who gets to watch who... There are a lot more poor people and the rich will never seperate too far. They need maids and nannies and butlers, etc. The rich will of course have more ability to watch any individual poor person, but there will be a thousand poor people willing to watch and record the rich person.
Neither future will be good, but the one that doesn't include selectively enforced laws to punish the poor even more than now.
I don't really care that Brin didn't adress a certain thing, I'm not trying to say that he's right, just that I think surveillance technology will eventually get to the point he describes and there are multiple ways a future with that technology can play out.
If surveillance technology remains obvious, big cameras, easily detectable broadcasts, then there will be a privacy gap. The rich can afford better scans and smaller cameras.
But I think eventually cameras will be so small you won't be able to easily spot them and that they'll do encrypted bursts of pictures on spread spectrum. It'll appear to be random noise unless you know the key or manage to get close enough to the camera just when it sends.
I don't believe that the rich are ever going to hire only other rich people to take care of their houses and country clubs, so the "poor" (or really, anyone) will have a chance of accessing them. There will also be more people looking to snoop on any given rich person than on any given poor person.
Now, I don't think that a society where everyone is snooping on everyone is a good one, by any means. But I don't think laws will protect the people from it. (If the police could use hidden cameras and catch all the "baddy of the week" who would support laws preventing this? "Just think of the children...")
So, being that I think 90% of the people are going to get snooped on, I think their only defense is going to be snooping on everyone else. It'll be harder for politicians to push for opressive laws if you can find pictures of them and their family violating these proposed laws.
To summarize, I don't see it as an ideal world by any means, but I think it's inevitable in one form or another.