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 your employees

[bwthomas]

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.

Re:I empower you

[node 3]

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. That's impossible. To require people do the impossible in order to make a system work ensures the system won't work.

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. It's extremely disturbing that you think the best form of law enforcement is the lynch mob.

Another example, government. Government isn't supposed to "serve" the people, it is supposed to "be" the people. It's supposed to be both. "By, Of, and For, The People" is the quote.

The matters that government are concerned with should be the very first things that are made transparent, not the inside of your refrigerator. That's quite true, but misses the point. Pretty much *every* aspect of the government should be immediately transparent, and there should be no part of the government that stays opaque longer than something like 50 years (although the argument for military secrets lasting at least as long as the thing they refer to is compelling, and I won't argue strongly one way or the other about that). But the contents of your refrigerator should only become transparent by your choice, and no one else's.

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.

Re:Watching your employees

[Sylver Dragon]

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.

Re:I don't get it...

[Sylver Dragon]

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.