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."
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.
Those who have nothing worth keeping secret from the public possess very little that is of value in their lives.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
"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."
But those aren't two sides, just one. The OTHER side would claim that no one can ever, without your explicit permission on a case by case basis, record, transcribe, log or photograph anything you do.
For me - government activity should be out in the open and accessible to the citizenry. Private activity should only be disclosed with the permission of the persons involved.
We should be able [to] see what our police are doing and what our congresspeople are doing. Why? Because they work for us.
This is incorrect. It's because they have powers over us. Also, our need to 'see what [they] are doing' does not necessarily extend to their personal life, in so far as their personal life does not affect their role as a government agent.
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?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The main problem here is that when you read the original article, the case Schneider gives contradict what he says. Brin argued that the people who have power can (and will) invade your privacy anyway. They already have the surveillance cameras. In the example Schneider gave, the kid with the portable MP-3 recorder was able to fight back purely because he did have his own recording (of what turned out to be useful to him to record)-- that's precisely what Brin had argued. It's precisely the opposite of what Schneider said: "The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data." Without the "new data"-- the recording-- the kid had no power; the police had all the power.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I think the difference is that oversight/transparency is required in cases where someone wields power. We don't need cameras watching government employees because they work for us, but because they have power over us. No one is suggesting that we watch the employees while they are driving home from work, eating lunch, or even doing routine paperwork. However, filming government agents as they wield tremendous power (cops on duty, meetings between government officials and lobbyists, etc.) is useful to the extent that it can help curtail abuses of power.
Similarly, an employer who wants to monitor all employees with cameras at all times is over-stepping their bounds and infringing on basic privacy. However I think most people would agree that there are times when an employer can justifiably record employee actions (with their knowledge, of course). For instance if an employee is assessing millions of dollars worth of diamonds, a record of their actions seems reasonable. One should also note that casino employees are recorded for similar reasons.
Finally, it's worth noting that when properly implemented, such systems serve to protect both the employer and employee. Taking the diamond assessing example again, the cameras not only help the employer employees who are stealing: they also allow an employee to exonerate themselves by using the footage ("they were all accounted for when I left the room").
To summarize: it's not a question of mere "employment," but rather a question of "oversight when people wield power."
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.
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.
There is no real correlation between the power your employer has over you and the power your government has over you. The phrase 'they work for us' is mostly just supposed to be a reminder that the government and politicians are supposed to be subservient to the will of the people, not vice-versa. If you think it literally means that they have the same relationship to you as your manager/boss at your job, then you have not thought about it very hard.
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.
Because enough of society has bought into the War on Your Rights...er, Drugs that the idea of using employers to be the enforcers of that particular brand of stupidity is easily accepted. The few objectors are probably junkies who should be in jail anyway.
I think bwthomas hit the nail on the head with this. We should be scrutinizing our politicians and police because we have given them special powers in our society, and that needs to bring with it oversight. In the case of employers and their employees, it's not the employer's place to police what people do in their personal lives, unless there is a direct effect on their work. For example, if you show up for work three sheets to the wind, you're probably about to get a pink slip; doesn't matter what drug you're doing it on. On the other hand, if you like to get drunk on the weekends, and snort coke off of the belly of a prostitute while being fucked in the ass by a donkey; you're a sicko, but as long as there is no one being actually harmed (willing BDSM doesn't count), go for it! Just so long as you arrive at work Monday morning clear and ready to work.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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.