The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

by David Brin

  Cameras aren’t the only surveillance devices proliferating in our cities. Starting with Redwood City, near San Francisco, several police departments have begun lacing neighborhoods with sound pickups that transmit directly back to headquarters. Using triangulation techniques, officials can now pinpoint bursts of gunfire and send patrol units swiftly to the scene, without having to wait for vague telephone reports from neighbors. In 1995 the Defense Department awarded a $1.7 million contract to Alliant Techsystems for its prototype system SECURES, which tests more advanced sound pickup networks in Washington and other cities. The hope is to distinguish not only types of gunfire but also human voices crying for help.

  So far, so good. But from there, engineers say it would be simple to upgrade the equipment, enabling bored monitors to eavesdrop through open bedroom windows on cries of passion, or family arguments. “Of course we would never go that far,” one official said, reassuringly.

  Consider another piece of James Bond apparatus now available to anyone with ready cash. Today, almost any electronics store will sell you night vision goggles using state-of-the-art infrared optics equal to those issued by the military, for less than the price of a video camera. AGEMA Systems, of Syracuse, New York, has sold several police departments imaging devices that can peer into houses from the street, discriminate the heat given off by indoor marijuana cultivators, and sometimes tell if a person inside moves from one room to the next. Military and civilian enhanced vision technologies now move in lockstep, as they have in the computer field for years.

  In other words, even darkness no longer guarantees privacy.

  Nor does your garden wall. In 1995, Admiral William A. Owens, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described a sensor system that he expected to be operational within a few years: a pilotless drone, equipped to provide airborne surveillance for soldiers in the field. While camera robots in the $1 million range have been flying in the military for some time, the new system will be extraordinarily cheap and simple. Instead of requiring a large support crew, it will be controlled by one semiskilled soldier and will fit in the palm of a hand. Minuscule and quiet, such remote-piloted vehicles, or RPVs, may flit among trees to survey threats near a rifle platoon. When mass-produced in huge quantities, unit prices will fall.

  Can civilian models be far behind? No law or regulation will keep them from our cities for very long. The rich, the powerful, and figures of authority will have them, whether legally or surreptitiously. And the contraptions will become smaller, cheaper, and smarter with each passing year.

  So much for the supposed privacy enjoyed by sunbathers in their own backyards.

  Moreover, surveillance cameras are the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. Other entrancing and invasive innovations of the vaunted information age abound. Will a paper envelope protect the correspondence you send by old-fashioned surface mail when new-style scanners can trace the patterns of ink inside without ever breaking the seal?

  Let’s say you correspond with others by e-mail and use a computerized encryption program to ensure that your messages are read only by the intended recipient. What good will all the ciphers and codes do, if some adversary has bought a “back door” password to your encoding program? Or if a wasp-sized camera drone flits into your room, sticks to the ceiling above your desk, inflates a bubble lens, and watches every keystroke that you type? (A number of such unnerving techno-possibilities will be discussed in chapter 8.)

  In late 1997 it was revealed that Swiss police had secretly tracked the whereabouts of mobile phone users via a telephone company computer that records billions of movements per year. Swisscom was able to locate its mobile subscribers within a few hundred meters. This aided several police investigations. But civil libertarians expressed heated concern, especially since identical technology is used worldwide.

  The same issues arise when we contemplate the proliferation of vast databases containing information about our lives, habits, tastes, and personal histories. As we shall see in chapter 3, the cash register scanners in a million supermarkets, video stores, and pharmacies already pour forth a flood of statistical data about customers and their purchases, ready to be correlated. (Are you stocking up on hemorrhoid cream? Renting a daytime motel room? The database knows.) Corporations claim this information helps them serve us more efficiently. Critics respond that it gives big companies an unfair advantage, enabling them to know vastly more about us than we do about them. Soon, computers will hold all your financial and educational records, legal documents, and medical analyses that parse you all the way down to your genes. Any of this might be examined by strangers without your knowledge, or even against your stated will.

  As with those streetlamp cameras, the choices we make regarding future information networks—how they will be controlled and who can access the data—will affect our own lives and those of our children and their descendants.

  A MODERN CONCERN

  The issue of threatened privacy has spawned a flood of books, articles, and media exposés—from Janna Malamud Smith’s thoughtful Private Matters, and Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy’s erudite Right to Privacy all the way to shrill, paranoic rants by conspiracy fetishists who see Big Brother lurking around every corner. Spanning this spectrum, however, there appears to be one common theme. Often the author has responded with a call to arms, proclaiming that we must become more vigilant to protect traditional privacy against intrusions by faceless (take your pick) government bureaucrats, corporations, criminals, or just plain busybodies.

  That is the usual conclusion—but not the one taken here.

  For in fact, it is already far too late to prevent the invasion of cameras and databases. The djinn cannot be crammed back into its bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new surveillance tools and databases. They are here to stay.

  Light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives.

  The real issue facing citizens of a new century will be how mature adults choose to live—how they can compete, cooperate, and thrive—in such a world. A transparent society.

  Regarding those cameras, for instance—the ones atop every lamppost in both city one and city two—we can see that very different styles of urban life resulted from just one decision, based on how people in each town answered the following question.

  Will average citizens share, along with the mighty, the right to access these universal monitors? Will common folk have, and exercise, a sovereign power to watch the watchers?

  Back in city number one, Joe and Jane Doe may walk through an average day never thinking about those microcameras overhead. They might even believe official statements claiming that all the spy eyes were banished and dismantled a year or two ago, when in fact they were only made smaller, harder to detect. Jane and Joe stroll secure that their neighbors cannot spy on them (except the old-fashioned way, from overlooking windows). In other words, Jane and Joe blissfully believe they have privacy.

  The inhabitants of city number two know better. They realize that, out of doors at least, complete privacy has always been an illusion. They know anyone can tune in to that camera on the lamppost—and they don’t much care. They perceive what really matters: that they live in a town where the police are efficient, respectful, and above all accountable. Homes are sacrosanct, but out on the street any citizen, from the richest to the poorest, can both walk safely and use the godlike power to zoom at will from vantage point to vantage point, viewing all the lively wonders of the vast but easily spanned village their metropolis has become, as if by some magic it had turned into a city not of people but of birds.

  Sometimes, citizens of city number two find it tempting to wax nostalgic about the old days, before there were so many cameras, or before television invaded the home, or before the telephone and automobile. But for the most part, city number two’s denizens know that those times are gone, never to return. Above all, one thing makes life bearable: the surety that each person
knows what is going on, with a say in what will happen next. And has rights equal to those of any billionaire or chief of police.

  This little allegory—like all allegories—may be a gross oversimplification. For instance, in our projected city of “open access,” citizens will have ten thousand decisions to make. Here are just a few examples: • Since one might conceivably use these devices to follow someone home, should convicted felons be forbidden access to the camera networks?

  • Might any person order up a search program, using sophisticated pattern-recognition software to scan a throng of passersby and zero in on a specific face? If such “traps” could be laid all over town, a lot of fugitives might be brought to justice. But will individuals ever again be able to seek anonymity in a crowd? Will people respond by wearing masks in public? Or will safety ultimately come when people unleash their own search programs, to alert the watched about their watchers?

  • When should these supercameras be allowed indoors? If cameras keep getting smaller and more mobile, like wasp-size drones, what kind of defenses might protect us against Peeping Toms, or police spies, flying such devices through the open windows of our homes?

  The list of possible quandaries goes on and on. Such an endless complexity of choices may cause some citizens of city number two to envy the simplicity of life in city number one, where only big business, the state, and certain well-heeled criminals possess these powers. That elite will in turn try to foster a widespread illusion among the populace that the cameras don’t exist. Some folk will prefer a fantasy of privacy over the ambiguity and arduous decisions faced by citizens of city number two.

  There is nothing new in this. All previous generations faced quandaries the outcomes of which changed history. When Thomas Jefferson prescribed a revolution every few decades, he was speaking not only politically but also about the constant need to remain flexible and adapt to changing circumstances, to innovate as needed, while at the same time staying true to those values we hold unchanging and precious. Our civilization is already a noisy one precisely because we have chosen freedom and mass sovereignty, so that the citizenry itself must constantly argue out the details, instead of leaving them to some committee of sages.

  What distinguishes society today is not only the pace of events but also the nature of our tool kit for facing the future. Above all, what has marked our civilization as different is its knack for applying two extremely hard-won lessons from the past.

  In all of history, we have found just one cure for error—a partial

  antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes,

  a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

  Scientists have known this for a long time. It is the keystone of their success. A scientific theory gains respect only by surviving repeated attempts to demolish it. Only after platoons of clever critics have striven to come up with refuting evidence, forcing changes, do a few hypotheses eventually graduate from mere theories to accepted models of the world.

  Another example is capitalism. When it works, under just and impartial rules, the free market rewards agility, hard work, and innovation, just as it punishes the stock prices of companies that make too many mistakes. Likewise, any believer in evolution knows that death is the ultimate form of criticism, a merciless driver, transforming species over time.

  Even in our private and professional lives, mature people realize that improvement comes only when we open ourselves to learn from our mistakes, no matter how hard we have to grit our teeth, when others tell us we were wrong. Which brings us to our second observation.

  Alas, criticism has always been what human beings,

  especially leaders, most hate to hear.

  This ironic contradiction, which I will later refer to as the “Paradox of the Peacock,” has had profound and tragic effects on human culture for centuries. Accounts left by past ages are filled with woeful events in which societies and peoples suffered largely because openness and free speech were suppressed, leaving the powerful at liberty to make devastating blunders without comment or consent from below.

  If neo-Western civilization2 has one great trick in its repertoire, a technique more responsible than any other for its success, that trick is accountability. Especially the knack—which no other culture ever mastered—of making accountability apply to the mighty. True, we still don’t manage it perfectly. Gaffes, bungles, and inanities still get covered up. And yet, one can look at any newspaper or television news program and see an eager press corps at work, supplemented by hordes of righteously indignant individuals (and their lawyers), all baying for waste or corruption to be exposed, secrets to be unveiled, and nefarious schemes to be nipped in the bud. Disclosure is a watchword of the age, and politicians have grudgingly responded by passing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), truth-in-lending laws, open-meeting rules, and codes to enforce candor in real estate, in the nutritional content of foodstuffs, in the expense accounts of lobbyists, and so on.

  Although this process of stripping off veils has been uneven, and continues to be a source of contention, the underlying moral force can clearly be seen pervading our popular culture, in which nearly every modern film or novel seems to preach the same message—suspicion of authority. The phenomenon is not new to our generation. Schoolbooks teach that freedom is guarded by constitutional “checks and balances,” but those same legal provisions were copied, early in the nineteenth century, by nearly every new nation of Latin America, and not one of them remained consistently free. In North America, constitutional balances worked only because they were supplemented by a powerful mythic tradition, expounded in story, song, and now virtually every Hollywood film, that any undue accumulation of power should be looked on with concern.

  Above all, we are encouraged to distrust government.

  The late Karl Popper pointed out the importance of this mythology in the dark days during and after World War II, in The Open Society and Its Enemies. Only by insisting on accountability, he concluded, can we constantly remind public servants that they are servants. It is also how we maintain some confidence that merchants aren’t cheating us, or that factories aren’t poisoning the water. As inefficient and irascibly noisy as it seems at times, this habit of questioning authority ensures freedom far more effectively than any of the older social systems that were based on reverence or trust.

  And yet, another paradox rears up every time one interest group tries to hold another accountable in today’s society.

  Whenever a confliet arises between privacy and accountability,

  people demand the former for themselves and the latter

  for everybody else.

  The rule seems to hold in almost every realm of modern life, from special prosecutors investigating the finances of political figures to worried parents demanding that lists of sex offenders be made public. From merchants anxious to see their customers’ credit reports to clients who resent such snooping. From people who “need” caller ID to screen their calls to those worried that their lives might be threatened if they lose telephone anonymity. From activists demanding greater access to computerized government records in order to hunt patterns of corruption or incompetence in office to other citizens who worry about the release of personal information contained in those very same records.

  Recent years have witnessed widespread calls to “empower” citizens and corporations with tools of encryption—the creation of ciphers and secret codes—so that the Internet and telephone lines may soon fill with a blinding fog of static and concealed messages, a haze of habitual masks and routine anonymity. Some of society’s best and brightest minds have begun extolling a coming “golden age of privacy,” when no one need ever again fear snooping by bureaucrats, federal agents, or in-laws. The prominent iconoclast John Gilmore, who favors “law ‘n’ chaos over law ‘n’ order,” recently proclaimed that computers are literally extensions of our minds, and that their contents should therefore remain as private as our inner thoughts. Ano
ther activist, John Perry Barlow, published a widely discussed “Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace” proclaiming that the mundane jurisdictions of nations and their archaic laws are essentially powerless and irrelevant to the Internet and its denizens (or “netizens”). Among the loose clan of self-proclaimed “cypherpunks,” a central goal is that citizens should be armed with broad new powers to conceal their words, actions, and identities. The alternative, they claim, will be for all our freedoms to succumb to a looming tyranny.

  In opposing this modern passion for personal and corporate secrecy, I should first emphasize that I like privacy! Outspoken eccentrics need it, probably as much or more than those who are reserved. I would find it hard to get used to living in either of the cities described in the example at the beginning of this chapter. But a few voices out there have begun pointing out the obvious. Those cameras on every street corner are coming, as surely as the new millennium.

  Oh, we may agitate and legislate. But can “privacy laws” really prevent hidden eyes from getting tinier, more mobile, and clever? In software form they will cruise the data highways. “Antibug” technologies will arise, but the resulting surveillance arms race can hardly favor the “little guy.” The rich, the powerful, police agencies, and a technologically skilled elite will always have an advantage.

  In the long run, as author Robert Heinlein prophesied years ago, will the chief effect of privacy laws simply be to “make the bugs smaller”?

  The subtitle of this book—Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?—is intentionally provocative. As we’ll see, I think such a stark choice can be avoided. It may be possible to have both liberty and some shelter from prying eyes.