The Myth of the "Transparent Society"

palegray.net recommends a piece by Bruce Schneier up at Wired. Schneier addresses the central fallacy of the "transparent society" idea promoted by David Brin, and also takes on the flawed arguments that attempt to justify increased government monitoring of citizens. From the article: "If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with."

Comments

Re:Watching the police

[whoever57]

I don't understand why police interviews are not typically recorded. In the UK most interviews have been recorded for a long time -- probably 20 years.

After all..... if the police have nothing to hide, why should they object to interviews being recorded and the defendant getting a copy of the tape?

"Inevitability"

[pavon]

If you haven't read the book, basically the argument that Brin makes is that the complete loss of privacy is inevitable given technology, and thus we shouldn't delude ourselves in thinking we can preserve it, but rather embrace it and fight for transparency on both sides. I don't buy the inevitability argument, and whether he is right or not, the best course of action to preserve balance of power is the same - to fight to preserve privacy on our part, and to increase transparency in the government.

However, there are some more interesting arguments in the book. For example consider CCTV systems. Assuming that their installation is inevitable, he argues that we should fight to make the feeds were available to everyone not just the government. This would empower us to watch the government as much as government is watching us. However, the biggest opposition to this would not be from the government, but from citizens themselves who trust the authorities to watch them, but not their neighbors. This was the attitude he was trying to counter in his book.

Re:Schneier is actially *making* Brin's point

[arevos]

This is exactly what The Transparent Society proposes. Leveling the playing field. Schneider seems to be proposing we go further than just leveling the playing field. Yes, he's proposing that the government become more transparent, but he's also arguing that the activities of its citizens become more opaque.

Brin wants a level playing field, but Schneider's arguing that we should slope the field heavily away from the government. If they have all the guns, we should at least have a monopoly on the data to preserve the balance of power.