Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.