Thursday afternoon in New Haven, CT, I am on a panel to talk about David Brin's decade-old book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? at the 2008 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference: http://www.cfp2008.org/wiki/index.php/%22The_Transparent_Society:%22_Ten_Years_Later.
Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale
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Web site: http://www.omnihotels.com/FindAHotel/NewHavenYale/MeetingFacilities/CFP2008ComputersFreedomandPrivacyConference5.aspxDavid Brin, Alan Davidson, J. Bradford DeLong, A. Michael Froomkin, Stephanie Perrin, Zephyr Teachout
Here are posts from the past, hoisted from the archives:
Lots of Little Brothers:
Not Just Big Brother, But Lots of Little Brothers Too...: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: My father is jolted by his new issue of Reason:
The latest issue of Reason magazine arrived in the mail, and the cover causes a jolt. It is an aerial photo of my neighborhood, with my house circled and the legend underneath: "James DeLong: They Know Where You Are!"
But then he calms down:
The accompanying story has a rather different spin, though. Written by Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for News.com and keeper of the well-known politech email list, it is entitled "Database Nation: The upside of 'zero privacy.'" The theme is that the increasing availability of data is excellent news for all of us in many ways, primarily because of the increases in efficiency and choice in the provision of goods and services that are enabled by information.
After all, if you think that a counterparty's possessing too much information about you is not to your benefit, you can always hide your identity in some way--undertake a transaction through intermediaries, establish cover identities via forgery and using them to set up PayPal accounts and anonymized email addresses, make sure to only use public-access computers out of the range of spycams, et cetera.
And he concludes:
As for the jolt of surprise -- my address has been in the telephone book forever, so anyone with a map and a crayon could always do what Reason did. My feeling of a loss of privacy is actually rather illusory.
I don't have settled (or especially informed) views on this, Dad. But I wonder if your first reaction might not have been more accurate. It takes 20 seconds to find and circle a house with a telephone book, a map, and a crayon--at $10 an hour total cost for low-wage labor, that's six cents an address. Very few people will have an incentive to organize and analyze their data on you at that cost. Those whom you want to send you magazines every month will, but how many others. I think we do have to worry about how governments--future Stasis--will use computers. And there are additional (but far lesser) potential vulnerabilities: weaknesses of the will at the personal or household level that might be exploited. One reason Ann Marie and I never let the kids watch Saturday morning cartoons was that we didn't want to be eroded by advertising-induced waves of pressure for X or Y. We hang up on all telephone solicitations immediately because we know our vulnerability to persuasion too well. And once enough people out there have figured out who we are, our internet wire transmits information both ways.
The way Larry Summers put it was that he wants everybody in the world to know that trying to sell him golf stuff is a waste of time, but that he might well bite if offered tennis stuff. But at the same time he's profoundly uneasy about negotiating with or interacting with somebody who knows and has had plenty of time to think about every detail about all of his purchases for the past twenty years.
Sometimes what look like quantitative changes--the falling cost of information processing--make qualitative differences. This may or may not be one of them. But it may be time to start thinking about how one would live in a world in which every conversation (even informal ones with close family members) may be broadcast around the world.
Useful Comments:
Isn't the kind of privacy we're concerned about losing here a very modern development? I spent a couple of years living in a village in a developing country, and everyone knew everything about everyone else. The universe of people local enough to be interesting was small enough that any tidbit of information: an unusual purchase, a change in routine... anything, was synthesized quickly into a coherent narrative that got passed around to everyone in the village. If you wanted to do something privately, you had to literally keep it a secret -- do it behind closed doors without in any way signalling publically that there was anything untoward going on. This certainly sounds annoying from a modern American point of view, but it really wasn't all that unlivable once you got used to it, and it's how people have lived since the dawn of history. The anonymity we're used to, being able to do things publically that we would prefer our acquaintances to remain unaware of by relying on the difficulty of compiling the huge amount of public information out there, is very new, probably post-WW II for most Americans. What are the ill effects we expect from losing it? Posted by: LizardBreath on May 16, 2004 08:23 AM
For those who missed it, medical privacy in the US is apparently at an end (see http://www.medicalprivacycoalition.org/). I have no idea whether the situation is similar here in Canada, though I should. "The Justice Department now states that patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential," adding that federal law "does not recognize a physician-patient privilege."" Posted by: Tom Slee on May 16, 2004 08:24 AM
Suddenly, monitoring and information processing is cheap, and so, potentially, control is cheap. The "ethics" of a society/polity in which monitoring/information processing was expensive no longer apply. Listing your phone number in a phone directory no longer has the same implications. The penalty for, say, speeding on the freeway, which is appropriate, when the police can only observe and cite, say, one in 4,000 speeders, is not going to be appropriate when the police can cite one in 50, or one in 5. The ACLU approach, which is a reactionary attempt to prevent use of cheaper monitoring to do what corporations and governments will do, is hopeless and misguided. Misguided because it stands in the way of desirable increases in technical efficiency and productivity; hopeless because you cannot stop a force of nature. I suspect the solution is the "empowerment" of the individual by the same technology. Concealment of a kind is made cheaper by the same technology, which makes monitoring cheaper. by: Brian Wilder on May 16, 2004 09:43 AM
"In the greatest surveillance effort ever established, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world. ECHELON is controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) of England, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada, the Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. These organizations are bound together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text remain under wraps even today." http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html "An international surveillance network established by the National Security Agency and British intelligence services has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as lawmakers in the United States question whether the network, known as Echelon, could be used to monitor American citizens. The House Committee on Intelligence requested that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency provide a detailed report to Congress explaining what legal standards they use to monitor the conversations, transmissions and activities of American citizens." http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/05/cyber/articles/27network.html Connect the dots: ECHELON --->BUSH --->ENEMY COMBATANT. We've got nothing to worry about though. Right? Right??? Posted by: Dubblblind on May 16, 2004 10:51 AM
"The biggest threat to our society, he warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people not by too many." Brin does not strike me as someone who has a realistic view of human psychology. His claim is basically that with good enough surveillance tech, everyone has the potential to survey and monitor everyone else so might as well dump privacy to practically eliminate crime, government oppression, etc. As far as I can see this is quite a silly view. We will combine the worst aspects of small villages with the worst aspects of big societies. In a small village everyone knows what everyone else is doing. This produces community but also an often rather straitjacketed conformity. In a big city you lose some of that community but you can also more easily escape the busybodies who try to enforce conformity. In an urban surveillance society, on the other hand, you start to get some nasty social dynamics. Because while it may be easy to COLLECT certain forms of information, it is not so easy to ANALYZE and USE the masses of data that result. In interpersonal affairs this would be a victory for moralists and busybodies. There will be enough of them to immediately tie any "deviant" behavior to an individual and make it public. But the elimination of privacy would not magically bring tolerance for the nonconformists. You will get a "small town" conformity effect enforced not by community rumor but by a small minority of people driven by enough moralistic outrage to spend lots of their time observing others. This observation will be directed disproportionately at deviants. Unlike a real small town where people know about everyone, there will be relatively few people interested in processing the information about your typical average, boring person and then disseminating it where it can do the most damage. A similar thing applies to the government, but with a difference in technological expertise and capabilities. Frankly the internet and advancing personal surveillance tech do not and will not give citizens some magical capability to observe the government. You won't even be able to use your mini-cameras to catch cops beating people in jail if they use the simple expedient of removing such devices from suspects. It's not like you're going to be able to set up webcams in NSA headquarters either. I certainly don't see how it would do anything about the potential for intelligence abuses - collecting information on dissidents and threatening to use that against them. Indeed, they can sit back and relax while that information is collected for them and the public demands that something be done about the undesirables. We're a society that doesn't watch CSPAN or support real investigative reporting. How the heck would there be enough people to do the difficult and mostly-boring job of collecting lots of amateur intelligence about their own government? Hell no, we're far more interested in gossip about each other and in enforcing conformity, that's where virtually all of the energy will go. Posted by: Ian Montgomerie on May 16, 2004 12:16 PM
DeLong's aware of Brin's ideas on this subject. He reviewed Brin's "The Transparent Society" soon after its publication: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Transparent.html I'm moderately ashamed to say that I haven't read Transparent Society, despite having read most of Brin's fiction, and having been exposed to his basic thoughts on privacy and transparency in lite form there. Posted by: RT on May 16, 2004 02:30 PM
I had a recent experience that relates to the issue of privacy, albeit peripherally. Bear with me and go easy on the flames if you feel that this is irrelevant: "I got a call from someone at the Ford Motor Company Credit department concerning someone whose name I did not recognize. I assumed that this person (let's call him Joe Blow, although I forgot his real name) had listed me or someone whose name was similar to mine as a credit reference and FMC was calling to check up on him. I didn't want to screw the guy's chances of getting credit because a mistake was made, so I called FMC (during my workday, because the time difference necessitated it). It turns out this was not a credit check gone wrong, but instead Mr. Blow was my upstairs neighbor at the apartment complex I lived in, and the FMC representative started to ask me a number of questions about him. No, I had never met him. No, I had never seen a black Mustang in the garage where I park. And no, there is no way that I would relay a message to him. Actually, I regret saying no to that last one. I should have said yes, then asked how much I would be paid to work as a paid agent of the Ford Motor Company Credit Division, and whether they would insure me if Joe Blow took umbrage at the messenger of bad news and beat the shit out of me." I guess all this is to say that I think that private corporations will be as blithely unconcerned as the government about the privacy (and safety) of others, and will eagerly enlist unrelated parties to do their dirty work. Yes, what the government can do to you is generally worse than what corporations can do to you (at least here in the U.S.), but the experience was far creepier than any I have had with any governmental agent. Posted by: no name on May 16, 2004 03:21 PM
I spent Saturday afternoon with my eight year old son on a tour or Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena. I have a friend who works there (Cal (BS) '82 MIT (PhD) '85); it was the annual open house to the public and science exhibitions for children. He showed my son and his daughters around. The highlights were the kids lying down and having a six-wheeled robot truck drive over them; and, looking as the 42" flat panel screen hanging on the wall outside my friend's office and moving a mouse to zoom in on an image of the Western United States, then California, then Southern California, then Los Angeles County, then Jet Propulsion Labs, then over to my neighborhood, then to my street. I'm told they can get a lot closer with a lot better resolution. My friend is now mapping the rain forests to track deforestation using radar technology to make maps and pictures. Posted by: Cal on May 16, 2004 10:13 PM
Book Review:
David Brin (1998), The Transparent Society, (New York: Addison-Wesley: 020132802X): For perhaps two centuries people living in today's advanced industrial societies have had a modicum of privacy. Before two centuries ago, privacy was nearly unheard-of: you lived in a village where everyone knew everyone else and everyone else's business. Between two centuries ago and the present, people moved out of the village and out to a--relatively isolated--farm, or into a city where the sheer number of people made relative anonymity--and thus privacy--possible. But, at least according to David Brin, the future will be different. In the future privacy as we know it today will be nearly impossible to attain.
In the future privacy will be next to nonexistent because of the explosion of audiovisual, communications, and computer technologies. Cheap hard disks will allow people to collect massive information about transactions: who did what. Cheap cameras will allow people to collect massive amounts of information about locations: who was where. Cheap computer power will allow the sorting and searching of massive amounts of information in search of those nuggets of data relevant to any one particular person. And cheap computers will allow anyone--or anyone with access codes--to access what will essentially become the stored life history of anyone. From David Brin's perspective, this change is coming. The only question is who will have access to the information that will be contained in the great surveillance databases. Will the information be "secret" and "private"--in which case only governments which may turn thuggish will have access? Or will the information be "open" and "public"--in which case we will once again be back in the village, where nearly everything is done in public and everybody knows everybody else's business: truly a global village.
Brin makes a good case that the technology will bring us to one of these two outcomes. And he argues that the first outcome--in which we try to preserve our "privacy" by restricting access to the great surveillance databases--is a very dangerous outcome. It is a dangerous outcome because secret knowledge is power, and if the twentieth century has proven anything it is that governments cannot be trusted with secret knowledge. The great tyrannies of the twentieth century flourished because their surveillance gave them control and their secrecy kept enough citizens from realizing what they were up to fast enough. The advent of modern audiovisual, communications, and computing technologies greatly amplifies the power of surveillance, and greatly multiplies the danger if it is not countered by a greatly amplified power of the people to survey the government. And popular surveillance over the government carries as a side effect a potential loss of privacy. Anything that restricts popular access to information about other citizens restricts popular access to information about the government as well.
I believe that Brin's book is not necessarily an accurate forecast. The futures that he envisions will probably never come to pass. And the choice that he foresees may well never be posed in the stark form in which he poses it. Yet the book is useful: the future Brin envisions is clearly one of the possible futures that might come to pass, and the consequences of what he sees as the wrong choice in that possible future could turn the twenty-first century into an abattoir that would make the twentieth century look like a Sunday picnic.
If enough people read Brin's book, or are brushed by the currents of thought in represents, then it may turn into a self-negating prophecy: a warning of dystopia that by virtue of the horror it paints helps avoid that horror. That was the function of George Orwell's 1984. That is an honorable role for anyone's book.Book Review:
In the future privacy will be next to nonexistent because of the explosion of audiovisual, communications, and computer technologies. Cheap hard disks will allow people to collect massive information about transactions: who did what. Cheap cameras will allow people to collect massive amounts of information about locations: who was where. Cheap computer power will allow the sorting and searching of massive amounts of information in search of those nuggets of data relevant to any one particular person. And cheap computers will allow anyone--or anyone with access codes--to access what will essentially become the stored life history of anyone. From David Brin's perspective, this change is coming. The only question is who will have access to the information that will be contained in the great surveillance databases. Will the information be "secret" and "private"--in which case only governments which may turn thuggish will have access? Or will the information be "open" and "public"--in which case we will once again be back in the village, where nearly everything is done in public and everybody knows everybody else's business: truly a global village.
Brin makes a good case that the technology will bring us to one of these two outcomes. And he argues that the first outcome--in which we try to preserve our "privacy" by restricting access to the great surveillance databases--is a very dangerous outcome. It is a dangerous outcome because secret knowledge is power, and if the twentieth century has proven anything it is that governments cannot be trusted with secret knowledge. The great tyrannies of the twentieth century flourished because their surveillance gave them control and their secrecy kept enough citizens from realizing what they were up to fast enough. The advent of modern audiovisual, communications, and computing technologies greatly amplifies the power of surveillance, and greatly multiplies the danger if it is not countered by a greatly amplified power of the people to survey the government. And popular surveillance over the government carries as a side effect a potential loss of privacy. Anything that restricts popular access to information about other citizens restricts popular access to information about the government as well.
I believe that Brin's book is not necessarily an accurate forecast. The futures that he envisions will probably never come to pass. And the choice that he foresees may well never be posed in the stark form in which he poses it. Yet the book is useful: the future Brin envisions is clearly one of the possible futures that might come to pass, and the consequences of what he sees as the wrong choice in that possible future could turn the twenty-first century into an abattoir that would make the twentieth century look like a Sunday picnic.
If enough people read Brin's book, or are brushed by the currents of thought in represents, then it may turn into a self-negating prophecy: a warning of dystopia that by virtue of the horror it paints helps avoid that horror. That was the function of George Orwell's 1984. That is an honorable role for anyone's book.
