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

by David Brin

  almost nothing of recognized value that is now known about

  the human past or present will ever again be lost.

  From oral folktales, to ritual dances of recondite cults, to subvariant musical themes, or conspiracy-oriented interpretations of history—however obscure or crackpot a topic or activity might be, our culture will stash it away, protect it, cherish it. This great preservation won’t be accomplished by some haughty ministry of culture, but with strangely chaotic efficiency by countless private individuals probing each dimly lit corner of human knowledge, seeking some small niche where even a “nobody” might become a world-class expert. A big fish in a small pond.

  Information wants to be free.

  POPULAR SAYING ON THE INTERNET

  Information wants you to give me a dollar.

  BRUCE STERLING

  AN AGE OF PASSIONS

  Back in the days of Charles Dickens, the word “innovation” was often used as an insult. Today on the other hand many people identify themselves by the thing that makes them feel different or special. To call someone average is to be contemptuous, implying that they are part of the despised “masses.”

  In later chapters we will explore how a civilization of aficionados might flourish, especially with some useful new tools. For instance, credibility “tags” may dog those who preach or bring us news. Predictions registries will help separate those who have good track records for being right from those whose charisma is matched only by their hot air. With alternative venues for innovation, new ideas and artworks may percolate, rising to renown by quality alone, without advertising, thus bypassing the mavens of culture who now wield such power over which artists, actors, or writers prosper, and which fail. Arenas for responsible debate could help satisfy society’s growing appetite for accountability in an era when mistakes will grow more costly and lies will become much harder to hide.

  On the other hand, the future will not lack for challenges and dangers. If nearly all valid or important wisdom from the past and present winds up being stored and valued, so will misinformation, lies, and slanderous halftruths. While ethnic crafts and amateur science promote wholesome diversity, calumnies like the Turner Diaries will also keep circulating, reproduced by cheap electronic means, infecting yet more fragile minds and egos with the same cruel madness that brought ruinous destruction to Oklahoma City in 1995.

  Of course it is by tolerating such forces, which proudly avow to hating tolerance and diversity, that our system proves its essential strength. Yet one recalls with unease the words of historian Will Durant: “Great empires often bring about their own demise through excessive adherence to their own central principles.”

  This issue will be a major focus of the next chapter. For it can be a mistake to extrapolate too much from present trends, especially when the curve you’re looking at seems to accelerate ever upward. In the long run, this time of eccentricity may be seen as a fluke—when a favored generation lived high off the earth’s remaining surplus until the consumer economy finally collapsed, leaving our grandchildren in the same state as our ancestors, harassed by immediate perils, fearful and intolerant, with no free time to spare from the incessant struggle to survive.

  That may happen, but I am betting we’ll pull off a chain of miracles. Barring something unforeseen, we may see a flowering of commerce, information, creativity, and ideas. An age when even the most august expert will have to keep looking over his or her shoulder, as hordes of wellinformed citizens catch every undotted “i” or missing minus sign. A time when bureaucrats and committees will lose much of their authority, because countless tasks will be augmented—or even taken over—by voluntary associations of passionate devotees.

  The next one hundred years may come to be called the “century of amateurs.”

  If so, it will happen because we made it possible for many hopeful new trends to continue.

  Because we unleashed the full range of human potential into a transparent society.

  CITIZEN TRUTH SQUADS

  One of the pastimes most peculiar to the nineties is amateur sleuthing. We are all familiar with examples of private individuals videotaping some newsworthy event—from natural disasters and crimes in progress to rogue cops in the act of harassing citizens. The new genre of “reality”-based television has created an ever-hungry market for interesting footage, while other captured images go straight to the Web, circulating without aid or interference by professional media experts. This trend is bound to multiply in the future. Or, as humorist Scott Adams put it, “Thanks to the ubiquity of video cameras and the Internet, every citizen will be a reporter.”

  We have already seen how human rights groups are providing equipment to dissidents and activists overseas, to record and combat abuses of state power. In the section “Guarding the Guardians” in chapter 6, we will discuss efforts under way in America and other Western nations to make sure that police authority becomes difficult to abuse.

  But video serendipity only brushes the surface of a phenomenon that has major long-range implications. Take, for example, just a few of the sophisticated amateur truth squads that have sprouted on the Internet to collect or correlate both facts and innuendos, sometimes bypassing or even refuting more official sources. • Both ad hoc and established consumer groups have started to use the Web to expose a new generation of scams and con artists (www.scambusters.org), reveal fraud (www.fraud.org), or provide archives of consumer information (www.ConsumerReports.org).

  • G-TWO (Get the Word Out) is a grassroots Internet service developed by Eric Nelson, a San Diego State University premed student and Marine Corps reserve staff sergeant. “I like to uncover that which is hidden,” says Nelson, who relies exclusively on open-source, unclassified material. When rebels took over the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Peru in December 1996, an e-mail request went out over several computer networks requesting photographs and a floor plan of the residence where hostages were being held. The information was available ten minutes later.

  • Tired of waiting for state officials to start posting campaign finance information on the Web, Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation collated a list of the biggest contributors prior to that state’s November 1996 elections and made the results available at www.calvoter.org. The subsequent media coverage about last-minute donations earned Alexander a James Madison Freedom of Information Award.

  • Paul McGinnis, a test engineer from Huntington Beach, code named Trader, assembles and correlates public information to publish his own detailed estimate of the Pentagon’s black budget. Meanwhile, Steve Aftergood’s “Secrecy and Government Bulletin” exposes weapons problems and cost overruns.

  • Alt.folklore.urban is the umbrella site for a cluster of news groups that specialize in debunking legends, urban and otherwise. (For instance, Procter & Gamble apparently does not pay tithes to the Church of Satan, and pet alligators flushed down toilets are not living in sewers.) There is also alt.folklore.science which debunks science myths, such as the misconception that people would explode into a cloud of red blood if exposed to the vacuum of outer space. Meanwhile, Web publications like the “Groom Lake Desert Rat” pursue every conceivable conspiracy scenario, ensuring that even refuted rumors achieve a kind of immortality.

  Taken by themselves, these private efforts at truth-descrying don’t amount to very much. But multiply them by the hundreds of others that already exist, or the tens of thousands that soon will, and they illustrate how a century of amateurs pertains to transparency. Throughout this book, we will glimpse new, alternative information pathways, some based on the Internet’s inspired chaos, that tend to bypass older structures of central command and control. These may unleash new creativity (see chapter 8), ensure accountability (see chapter 6), or even produce new forms of governance (see “A Withering Away?”).

  Or else, lacking any unifying purpose or sense of shared citizenship, this trend may worsen the centrifugal forces tearing us apart.

  One factor could h
elp determine the outcome—whether it all happens in the open, under the light.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PRIVACY UNDER SIEGE

  Individuals are sacred. The world, the state, the church, the school, all are felons whenever they violate the sanctity of the private heart.

  BRONSON ALCOTT

  Little in life is as precious as the freedom to say and do things with people you love that you would not say or do if someone else were present.

  JANNA MALAMUD SMITH

  EMBATTLED CITIZENS

  The previous chapter depicted a civilization arming itself with tools of openness, diversity, and accountability, a theme that will be taken up again later in the book. But other factors may prove critical in determining our future, for instance, whether people can maintain their spirit and morale in a technological age that keeps thrusting challenges their way. Ours is a nosy era, in which each day seems to force more intrusions—by governments, corporations, ex-lovers, busybodies, news reporters, or worrisome strangers—encroaching on our sense of serenity and solitude.

  Later in this chapter we will talk about privacy in more general terms—how it affects people personally, and how the law has (or has not) adjusted to safeguard it in the modern era. We will also broach an idea that at first may seem contradictory and counterintuitive: that “reciprocal transparency” may be our best hope to enhance and preserve a little privacy in the next century.

  But first, some context will be essential in order to grasp how many pressures are already squeezing us, even before the millennium clock turns over. The following examples offer a fragmentary cross-section of disquieting modern quandaries.

  Big Brother

  More than 1,500 employees of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service have been investigated or disciplined since 1989 for using government computers to browse through tax returns of friends, relatives, neighbors, enemies, and celebrities. Recently, President Clinton signed the Taxpayer Browsing Act, threatening up to a year in jail for anyone convicted of abusing access for personal reasons, and further oversight procedures were on the docket in late 1997. New supervision software will help enforce the ban—by surveilling employees each time they access a tax return.

  Reacting to spy scandals, such as the Aldrich Ames affair, the administration and Congress collaborated on legislation that may subject up to three million people with access to government secrets to snap inspections of their bank statements, credit histories, and foreign travel records. The initial aim, to detect those who betray their country for money, might have the ancillary effects of (1) deterring other types of corruption and bribery and (2) subjecting federal employees to a level of glaring intrusion unprecedented in modern times.

  The federal government is helping coordinate and develop new databases aimed at helping states enforce their own laws—to find parents who depart and abandon child support payments, to catch fugitives from state justice, to check backgrounds of gun buyers under the Brady Law, to track registered sexual predators, and so on. As yet, these databases are not linked, but few doubt they will be.

  The U.S. Postal Service sells change-of-address card updates to directmail marketers and businesses that correlate consumer information. Does this mean you won’t be able to escape the “junk mail catalog from hell,” even by the drastic measure of selling your house and moving away?

  While these examples seem less horrid in detail than the flagrant dossier gathering, callous break-ins, nefarious blackmailings, and other abuses performed during J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the FBI, they make up for this through their overpowering pervasiveness and the vast, correlating power of computer databases. For instance, will increased use of citizens’ Social Security numbers (SSNs) become so entrenched and universal that Americans wind up having the long-dreaded “national ID card” at last?

  Fingerprint systems are being used in many locales to prevent welfare recipients from filing under multiple names. Escrow and credit companies, along with many banks, now demand thumbprints to prove identity. A nationwide fingerprint clearinghouse, activated by the FBI in 1996, promises to process inquiries electronically in seconds, rather than days, meaning that use of this identification technique will no longer be restricted to dangerous felons but may spread to include us all. (We will discuss SSN abuse and fingerprinting further in chapter 8.)

  This list of concerns only scratches the surface. Nor are federal agencies the sole potential abusers of government power. Many citizens find local officials much worse; for example, one man recently won a five-year lawsuit for defamation against a former assistant police chief who allegedly used official computers to obtain facts about him as part of a personal vendetta. The problem of petty local “microtyrants” can be exacerbated by lack of attention from media and rights organizations, who traditionally focus their attention on the national level. As one expert confided, “This sort of thing is going on all the time. It’s a kettle waiting to explode.”

  Spying in the Workplace

  In countless offices, employers can monitor telephone calls, peruse e-mail messages, and even retrieve supposedly “deleted” files without an employee’s knowledge. Clerical workers are watched by diligent programs that count the number of keystrokes they type per minute and time their coffee breaks to the second. The ACLU claims that this type of monitoring violates rights, hurts employee morale, and lowers productivity. Yet, as will grow clear in this chapter, numerous courts have ruled that subordinates do not enjoy the same constitutional protection against intrusive supervision by private employers as they have against the government.

  In late 1997, a survey of 906 employers found that 35 percent conducted one or more types of close electronic surveillance on their workers. When less invasive kinds of electronic monitoring were included, the figure rose to 63 percent. Most companies employing more than a couple of dozen workers now demand a pre-employment drug test before hiring. (An estimated $1.2 billion was spent on drug testing in the United States during 1992, the latest year tallied.)

  Many corporations can access their employees’ medical records. Some use this power to cut costs by helping workers with wellness programs and exercise facilities. Others discriminate based on health, or force high-risk employees to pay higher insurance premiums.

  The Commercialization of Personal Information

  Almost any commercial action we take can provide information on our buying patterns and lifestyle choices: dialing a toll-free number, subscribing to a magazine, using a credit card, starting a business, purchasing from a catalog, donating to charity, buying a car, sending in a product warranty registration card, using frequent-flier miles for a vacation, booking a hotel reservation, using a grocery store club card, obtaining a home loan, joining a health club, belonging to a church or temple. Simply clicking on a site on the World Wide Web may wind up creating a “biography” about you. After coming home from the hospital maternity ward, a new mother is besieged by baby magazines and advertisements for infant-care goods. The purchaser of a new home automatically receives coupons from hardware stores, interior designers, and contractors. Have a serious accident, and you’ll start receiving solicitations from lawyers.

  In 1990, Lotus Corporation offered Marketplace: Households, a CD-ROM containing transaction-generated information (TGI) on the buying patterns and incomes of 120 million Americans. A firestorm of protest forced Lotus to withdraw the product, though ironically Marketplace would only have provided the same access for small businesses that big companies already enjoy. AOL, the nation’s largest private online service, confirmed that it was compiling the names and addresses of its subscribers and packaging lists with demographic information to sell to marketing companies and manufacturers. (Subscribers who do not want their names released may specify by sending a message to AOL.) Mark Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), based in Washington, D.C., says that subscribers go from “being in the AOL chat room to the AOL fishbowl.” All of this raises a question: How much of the
above do you find objectionable? How much

  of your objection is due to real, tangible harm—and how

  much of it is “on principle”?

  Solveig Singleton, director of information studies at Washington’s influential Cato Institute, considers all the fury over corporate “info gluttony” to be overwrought. “Businesses that collect data on customer profiles usually do so because they are trying to sell something. As human motives go, this is not an especially sinister one.” That is one point of view. We will hear from others in the next chapter dealing with the question of who owns information.

  The Internet makes it easy to obtain personal information about other people, such as their driving record, whether they own a house, or their marital status. According to Carole Lane, author of Naked in Cyberspace: How to Find Personal Information Online, “Most people would be astounded to know what’s out there.... In a few hours, sitting at my computer, beginning with no more than your name and address, I can find out what you do for a living, the names and ages of your spouse and children, what kind of car you drive, the value of your house and how much in taxes you pay on it.”

  The California legislature recently voted to limit access to voter registration information and the computer tapes of a Los Angeles County municipal court docket, although this type of information was always kept public in order to hold government accountable. But the new law, like many others, does little to inhibit access by major corporations. There are so many loopholes that anyone with a little know-how can skirt the provisions.