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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."
We should be able to to see what our police are doing and what our congesspeople are doing. Why? Because they work for us. ( If someone from a foreign country claimed the same privelege, we would not take them seriously, right? )
But once you grant that assertion, it follows - for all slashdot readers who are not self-employed - that your employer should be able to watch you.
I'm not advocating either side here, just pointing out the logical consequences of the position that we should be able to watch them.
The goal of privacy isn't to have power over people. Quite the opposite, actually: it's to keep people from having power over you.
Only internal incompetance and lack of interest currently stops your government knowing everything about you!
If we are to have a "transarent" society then the citizen should be able to "see" everything that thier government does. Currently in the US not even congree can see what the executive is doing.
The 60s civil rights movement has triumphed, we have equality -- everybody is downtrodden.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Humans also need dignity. They need to be able to make mistakes. They need to be able to make suppositions about ideas without being judged in order to challenge ideas they do not agree with due to free will, and while this may not be illegal, it may challenge the laws and ideals of society themselves. If someone were to snuff out those who challenge society then it may flourish or fester by people who won't think outside the box (something also valued in business these days). Many times in history we've faced the alteration of convention, but without privacy, convention is re-enforced by group mentality.
The guy who wrote that article is an idiot. He talks about the "transparent society" without considering that other things in society are going to have to change alongside.
If you're going to have a transparent society, and you don't want to be powerless, you need to bloody participate. You need to break down the ultra-specialization that has become so commonplace in modern society, educate yourself about the various sectors that sustain your life and your society, and participate in each of them actively.
The example given was of cops. Well, in a transparent society, you don't want cops, because everyone is a cop. If you see someone doing something, and you know they shouldn't be doing it, you rally the people around and take action personally.
Another example, government. Government isn't supposed to "serve" the people, it is supposed to "be" the people. The matters that government are concerned with should be the very first things that are made transparent, not the inside of your refrigerator.
If all you want to do is sit around in blissful ignorance while the government runs your life, then a transparent society isn't going to make you particularly happy.
If you actually want to be an active participant in your society and work at making it better, transparency is necessary to get started.
This guy clearly doesn't want the responsibility that the loss of ignorance brings with it, but personally, I'll be fucked if I'm going to remain quietly ignorant so people like him can remain blissfully happy.
Those sorts of people are MEANT to be powerless.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
...and, as such, runs counter to government as we know it.
I'm not stating my position on the matter, just pointing out the fundamental flaw of trying to have a government and wanting privacy.
In the case where the cop asks for your name, knowing your name gives no power in itself - you might have given a false name. it's only when that information can be used that the power is given/lost. When the cop does the PNC lookup, that is when they get power. Likewise, if you ask the cop their name, you have no means to use that information and therefore no power.
Even if you could record the police (which in the UK, you can't) you still have to have a means to use that recording for it to have power. Unless there's a heinous action on it, the media won't be interested. You can put it on youtube - but really, who cares?
Oh, and while we're on the subject. Society != Government.
Society is me, my partner, the people in my road, the queue in Sainsbury's. Govenerment is a group of dehumanised institutions - the two cannot be compared
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In my latest journal (don't bother reading it, it's a sucky one. The eclipse one was much better) I mention that my friend Linda spent sixty days in Dwight Correctional Center, a hellhole maximum security state prison here in Illinois for simple drug posession, while a former drinking buddy broke into a man's home and tried to kill him with a butcher knife (Lance claims he didn't actually try to kill the guy) and got fifteen days in the Sangamon County Jail.
When they pass respectable laws I'll respect the law.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Given human history, I'd say that's exteremly likely to happen.. which is pretty much why the US government was setup the way it was. It's too bad we strayed so far from that line of thinking.
Privacy is one of the most fundamental things about being human. If privacy is to become null, the very definition of being human is going to have to change.
I still see one possible problem here. Let's say we have the ability to watch/record the police freely and they can watch/record us freely. You might expect that it would be fine, because the surveillance is mutual, but in reality a problem will present itself pretty quickly: The police are an organized group of people with a common agenda and additional powers over normal citizens, and meanwhile you're just one person trying to go about your normal life.
What tends to fall out of situations like that is that the police would develop the means and methods necessary to protect themselves, hide their actions from your surveillance, and sort through all of your misdeeds for prosecution.
A transparent society where industry and government can spy and know all information about the citizens and consumers would allow government and industry to crush any opposition to the criminal enterprise or status quo.
It is our collective ignorance and current system design that creates an environment conducive to the production of criminals and extremists.
Criminals and extremists create huge profit centers for business.
Fear may be the biggest generator of income creating fictional needs and an artificial economy.
If someone one can create fear in your mind and then provide some solution to eliminate that fear, then they have a sale.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
But once you grant that assertion, it follows - for all slashdot readers who are not self-employed - that your employer should be able to watch you.
Yes. My employer has purchased a chunk of my time and effort. He should be able to see what I am doing during that time. Inasmuch as I am using his equipment, he should also be able to know what I am doing with that equipment. He should be able to know what project I am working on, what strategy I am taking, what the progress status is, and so on.
If I am in his office, he should be able to physically see me. I should not expect to be able to work in a closet with the door closed and make my boss knock before he comes in. It is perfectly acceptable for me to keep my door open and let people (particularly my employer) walk right in at any moment.
Once I go home, and am off the clock, that is a completely different story. My employer should have zero visibility to what I do on my own time, with my own resources. That is none of his business.
What is the problem here?
I think what Schneier is saying is that two people in different power structures exchanging the same information (exchanging names during a traffic stop, etc.) does not lead to equal power. Instead, the exchange of information needs to be directed in such a fashion that it negates the pre-existing differences in power structures.
However, I do believe that his example was indeed poorly chosen. If both the kid and the police had walked away with the recording of the initial conversation, the police would not have had the power to do what it attempted to do during the prosecution: commit perjury with no risk of discovery of said perjury. Instead, what I think Schneier is getting at is that in order to diminish power differences between government officials and regular citizens, government officials need to be subjected to greater scrutiny than regular citizens. In other words, while citizens might be monitored on streets and have their phones tapped, government officials ought to be monitored 24/7 with the feed available in real-time to the public.
This is an obvious exaggeration and fraught with problems (do I really want to see Senator Larry Craig have sex with other men in a bathroom?), but the point is that equal access to similar data is not enough when the different parties start at different power levels. Instead, data access needs to be constructed in such a way that it reduces existing power differences. This requires that the party that starts with less institutional power needs to be able to access more data about the other party.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
For those of you unfamiliar with Brin's notion of the "Transparent Society," the first chapter of his book is available for free online, and there's of course the Wikipedia page.
Personally, I think Bruce Schneier is sort of missing the point; if anything he seems to be advocating the same sort of system as Brin. Brin's general thesis is that with ever-increasing technological capabilities, with cameras becoming ever-smaller and cheaper and networks increasingly ubiquitous, this loss of privacy is sadly inevitable. Given the choice of surveillance being solely the domain of government, or the domain of both the people and the government, the latter is preferable, and also has some interesting side-benefits. Balancing power between people and the government is one of the major benefits.
The constitution does two things: limits the power of the government, and makes sure that what power they do have is used properly.
I would argue that this is entirely backwards to the intent of the US Constitution. The Constitution does not limit the power of government, it grants power to the government. Government power should not be limited by what we say it can't do, but instead it should only have what powers we directly give to it. That is the reason we are in the mess we are with the Bush administration, we have let the definition of what powers the government has be changed.
This was actually one of the primary arguments against the Bill of Rights when it was introduced. The claim was that, by explicitly listing limitations on what the government could do, it would imply that the government could do anything else it wanted to do. Funny thing about that argument, it seems to be bearing out. The compromise was to include the Ninth and Tenth Amendments; which, ideally, state that the list of rights isn't exhaustive and that the Federal Government has no more power than is listed in the Articles of the Constitution. To make life easy:
Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Tenth Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Essentially, the Ninth states that the list isn't exhaustive and that the people have other rights. So, next time someone says to you, "there is no Constitutional Right to Privacy" bitch slap them and show them this amendment. Just because a right is not listed in the constitution, doesn't mean that we do not have it. If you really want to carry that "not in the Constitution" stupidity to its logical extreme, you don't have a Right to Life either. Keep in mind that the oft quoted "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" isn't in the Constitution anywhere; it's from the Declaration of Independence. A document which was really just a rant to King George III about what an asshole he was, and has no legal standing in the US.
The Tenth Amendment was supposed to also be the stop gap on the Federal Government claiming other powers which were not given to it by the Articles of the Constitution. But this may as well not exist anymore as the US Supreme Court gave Congress a complete end run on it by ruling that intrastate commerce effects interstate commerce and therefore can be regulated by the Federal Government. As such, the Federal Government merely needs to show a link between any activity they want to regulate and commerce of some sort, and they can now regulate it.
The US Constitution is not supposed to "limit the power of the government". It is supposed to grant powers to the Federal Government, and they can go get stuffed if they want to do anything else. It is a huge problem that the perception of this has been turned around. The Constitution has stopped being the way in which We the People pass powers to our government and become a shield we try to use to defend ourselves from a Federal Government grown out of control. My hope is that we can fix this, and put the Federal Government back in it's box; I worry though, that this can only end badly.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
You answer an example in a hypothetical world with a counter-example in the real world, therby implicitly ignoring the hypothesis.
Please consider the hypothesis at hand: that in a transparent society all actions are visible. Would mobs still act the same if each member knew that he could be individually held accountable?
The more you fear,
The more you hide,
The more you lie. --Yes, "Let Go"
We need privacy because we are afraid. We are afraid of what people will think of us/do to us if they know our innermost secrets. We are afraid people will take what we have if they know how to access it. We are afraid that we will lose the respect and love of our friends and family if they know the things that we do/believe/have done that they don't approve of. And therefore, we have passwords on our accounts, we have secret combinations on the locks we use to secure our belongings, and we tell lies about who we are and what we believe.
If we could totally and completely trust the people around us, we would have no need of privacy. But we don't trust everyone, and therefore we hide things.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Yes, I think so. Living in a transparent society has nothing to do with living in a society where everybody acts rational. If you are in a mob, you are pretty sure you are acting right, even though you still act irrational.
While that may seem to be a logical continuation of this line of reasoning, the problem is that you're thinking there are only two levels - companies and employees. There's a third level - citizens. Society is ultimately "the boss" over companies that exist within that society. Sot it goes citizens > companies > employees. We can pass labor laws, including limitations on working hours, maternity leave, and even employee monitoring. It boils down to the citizenry deciding for itself what kind of society they want to live in.
Much like the logic goes "if the employee doesn't agree, they can quit the job", the logic also says "if the employer doesn't agree, they can leave the country."
If you think the example is the opposite of the point Schneider was trying to make, then I think you misunderstand what Schneider is saying. A relevant quote from the article:
So what he's really saying is that people should be able to record the government, police, etc. but that police/government should not be allowed to record the people. I've never read Brin, but Schneider is interpreting Brin to say that we should all monitor each other, and that it's ok for the government to be watching us so long as we're watching them watch us. Schneider is saying (to paraphrase), "No, the government is too powerful already, relative to individual citizens. We should be able to watch them, and they should not be able to watch us. That would be way more likely to equal out the balance of power."
Well, I think it is fairly certain that Bruce Schneier is smarter than most of the people here, probably including you and certainly including me.
I'll grant that that doesn't preclude him being an idiot as well, but not in this case. It is wise to be a bit skeptical about the possibility of putting a utopian scheme like a transparent society into effect. It's all very well to say that we give up our privacy and the people with power give up their power, but they can verify that we're giving up our privacy a lot more easily than we can verify they're giving up their power -- at least until its too late.
It's the Achilles' heel of most utopian schemes; even if you can imagine them working, it's hard to believe the transition from the status quo could take place without the whole thing running off the rails.
In any case, anybody who's seriously talking about a transparent society outside the context of a philosophical thought experiment is either a fool or a liar, often a bit of both. When the idea we can get along without privacy comes out of the mouth of business or political leaders, it's never followed by a shout of "and I'll be the first!" In fact, it tends to be defending some loss of privacy by somebody else that particularly benefits them is in reality good for everybody.
Right.
I think you've grasped the essential point: privacy is tied up with power. We can imagine a transparent society, and I think if it were not a dystopia, it must necessarily be a radically egalitarian one. However, there are a number of significant dystopic scenarios to be considered in a transparent society, such as the tyranny of a majority over a minority. One might argue that these scenarios are in fact impossible, but it's a purely theoretical argument. I believe I'll remain skeptical of any plans to put such a utopia into effect for now.
However, our society is based on restraining the powerful -- at least the politically powerful. More transparency, I do not doubt, would be better when applied to the workings of power.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.