These are dark days for privacy.
Facebook is selling your personal information – and that of your friends – to the highest bidder. The Obama administration adopted the Bush policy of warrantless wiretapping, and demands even greater freedom for oversight. And a new policy of the TSA requires select passengers to be either body-scanned or submitted to humiliating pat downs. Even though the media hyped stories of outrage, with women and small children being subjected to what was clearly abusive behavior, the overwhelming majority of air travelers rejected calls for resistance. Over the holiday, most people I talked to had already lapsed into acquiescence: “it’s invasive, sure, but whatever keeps us safe…” Evidence that the scanners are both ineffective and hazardous is ignored. Dual fears of terror attacks and missed flights won out over civil rights. And so it goes.
Meanwhile, the latest WikiLeaks document dump is revealing the secrets of the global elite, including a US plan to spy on the leaders of the United Nations, Arab leaders begging the US to bomb Iran and a top Chinese official hilariously ordering a Google hack after finding disrespectful comments about himself online. What’s interesting about this is how it parallels the hack of climate scientists’ emails almost exactly a year ago. I for one criticized the people who hyped the so-called “Climategate” thing using a lot of the same terms that government apologists are using today: you can’t take private comments out of context, hacking an email server is theft, etc. And let’s leave aside whether the two events are reasonably comparable or the motives of the different hacker/leakers. Exposure is now a tool of asymmetrical warfare, rather than a power that only governments possess. And this leads to some interesting possibilities.
Back in the PGP days, smart kids like me advocated strong encryption for the masses as a sort of my-home-is-my-castle defense from government surveillance. And while that had – and still has – some merit for dealing with individual communications, key exchange never really caught on, and we’re exposed in so many areas of our online lives that encrypting your emails or even proxy browsing and avoiding social networking is little protection. I’m increasingly won over to the ideas on write David Brin, who’s been proposing something called “the Transparent Society” since the 1998 Wired magazine article (and, later, a book) by that name.
Basically, the idea is this: the increasing sophistication of surveillance methods makes the pursuit of privacy a cat-and-mouse game that average citizens can’t win (or, as Brin quotes Heinlein as saying, “‘privacy laws’ only make the bugs smaller”). However, rather than giving up on civil liberties, Brin advocates that this cut both ways: advocating ‘sousveillance’ of government by people as well as the other way around. Additionally, he uses the analogy of a restaurant to show the benefits of a more ‘transparent’ approach to privacy. When you are in a restaurant, Brin notes, other patrons are dissuaded from eavesdropping because you can see them leaning over, cupping their hands to their ears to listen in on you. If you were surrounded by screens, contrariwise, it would be easy for others to listen in on you without you knowing about it.
If you can watch them watching you, in other words, you at least have the power to know what information might be used against you. Moreover, you can have your own record of where you went and what you did to combat against government intentionally or (as is more often the case, accidentally) accusing you of something you didn’t do. There could be reasonable exceptions carved into the law for intimate privacy, for example, or to protect victims of abuse. But the idea that privacy is a wall that protects you has been revealed as a tragic fiction.
There’s gaps in the idea, obviously. But giving up the illusion of privacy in favor of real, genuine, verifiable accountability is something that free people should not be afraid to take a serious look at, in this age of porno-scanners and secret emails on the Internet. We need to open our eyes.
