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

by David Brin

  The Cryptos’ Error

  While many people took passionate and worried interest in the Clipper chip fiasco, others considered the outcome a foregone conclusion. I was in the latter category, taking bets back in 1994 that the “Davids” would handily defeat “Goliath” (the big bad government). In fact, the Clipper proposal was always ill fated, because a third force, the media, came down with almost total unanimity on the side of the apparent underdogs—the romantic, freedom-loving crypto advocates. For many social reasons discussed in chapter 5, any top-down, hierarchically imposed solution was doomed from the start. As we shall see in chapter 10, this overall trend is good for the survival of civilization in the risky years ahead.

  Then why focus a chapter of this book on the Clipper episode? Because it illustrates the type of self-righteous tunnel vision that might keep us from finding useful answers to some of the perils we will face in coming decades. As we have seen in the past, indignant idealism is a paramount force preventing opponents (each self-perceived as “in the right”) from working together toward pragmatic goals, such as ensuring both liberty and safety, both freedom and privacy, an optimization that we will come back to before the end of this chapter.

  This inflexible idealism, as powerful a force as government intransigence, was distilled by Eric Hughes in the Cypherpunk Manifesto.

  [Strong] privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something that one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal one’s self to the world. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for a strong privacy, but electronic technologies do. Let’s extend all those other things, the whispers, the darkness, the envelopes. We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems.

  A more reflective and comprehendible case was made by Michael Godwin, legal adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who eloquently presented a philosophical basis for Clipper enmity in the July 1994 issue of Internet World magazine.

  ... [T]he government subscribes to the reasoning of Pascal’s wager. Pascal, you may recall, argued that the rational man is a Christian, even if the chances that Christianity is true are small, [since] the consequences of choosing not to be a Christian are, if that choice is incorrect, infinitely terrible....

  This is precisely the way the government talks about nuclear terrorism and murder-kidnappings. When asked what the probabiliy is of a nuclear terrorist [using] encryption and managing to otherwise thwart counter-terrorist efforts, they’ll answer, “What does it matter what the probability is? Even one case is too much to risk!”

  But we cannot live in a society that defines its approach to civil liberties in terms of infinitely bad but low-probability events. Open societies are risky. Individual freedom and privacy are risky. If we are to make a mature commitment to an open society, we have to acknowledge those risks up front and reaffirm our willingness to endure them.

  This well-spoken appeal tugs at the idealist within. It also has strong historical underpinnings, which we will now discuss, before later focusing on the core issue raised by “Pascal’s wager,” that of trade-offs.

  Early in the Cold War, faced with dire competition from a ruthless totalitarian adversary, the United States rang with calls to clamp down in the name of national security—to restrict press coverage, conceal the defense budget, restrict citizen movements, intern dissidents, and generally take on a policy of “better safe than sorry.”

  To the surprise of many, one of the fiercest cold warriors, physicist and H-bomb coinventor Edward Teller, helped lead a persuasive campaign against this strategy of safety through obscurity. Joining Karl Popper and other civil libertarians—many of them diametrically opposed to him on other issues—Teller pressed the point that an open society only seems, at first sight, to be disadvantaged against a closed one. True, Soviet spies would learn a lot just by roaming our cities and countryside, paying dimes for magazines containing details about our production and technology, the kinds of details we could only hope to learn vis-à-vis the Soviet Union at great risk and cost. And yet, Teller maintained, this would not matter in the long run.

  It would not matter because, over time, the benefits of an open society—cross-fertilization of ideas and error avoidance through criticism—would pay off so well that it was immaterial how many mere facts the other side managed to steal. Facts don’t advance creativity, or productivity, or competence. Rather, those traits arise from the interaction of self motivated, mature adults, free to think and argue among themselves.

  True, we are learning that all too many blunders and betrayals were perpetrated in secret by U.S. officials during the Cold War, from deceptive nuclear tests and careless waste disposal to obscene contagion experiments on unknowing subjects. As we have seen, such concealed schemes are natural products of ego and human nature whenever men and women experience the drug of power. But one has only to compare these crimes and gaffes with far worse outrages that took place in the shadowy Soviet Union, to see proof of Teller’s postulate: the greater the secrecy, the more terrible the resulting cascade of horrific blunders.

  In fact, those American exceptions help prove the point! To a large degree, the worst U.S. government scandals of our lifetime—from the Tuskegee syphilis study to Watergate, from the Bay of Pigs fiasco to the Iran-Contra debacle—took place in circumstances where secrecy prevailed over accountability. In other words, they happened when our leaders betrayed the basic rules of transparency and criticism. Indeed, this insight offers perspective on the relentless litany of wretched mistakes that make up much of human history. If one accepts that a curse of human nature makes every leader want to keep secret plans and sweep errors under a rug, then the most surprising thing about an open society is not that bad things still happen. It is that such a society manages to stay open at all.

  Teller’s role in this (relatively) happy outcome was mixed, to be sure. Much of his activity took place against the backdrop of the infamous McCarthy era in which Teller’s record was spotty. Moreover, many idealistic civil libertarians fought for the same goals—openness and free speech—that Teller preached. But it is worth noting that, while those others did it largely for idealistic reasons, the pragmatic Teller appreciated transparency for its utilitarian value. The chaotic brilliance of a free people was simply a more effective war-fighting tool, in the long run, than the tempting strategy of suppression. He saw openness as a vital weapon to help his side achieve victory, and convincingly passed on this belief to some key elements of the American establishment. In the end, Teller’s case was proved. The society that chose to embrace the risks of openness prevailed.

  Reality Check

  Now at first sight this lesson from the recent past seems to support the crypto-advocates’ position. Regarding the Clipper chip and related proposals, we appear to face on the one hand, a temptation to let government take on authoritarian powers “for our own good” and, on the other, a courageous decision to accept risk in exchange for the benefits of freedom. Unfortunately, this analogy fails on several levels.

  First, reflex anti-authoritarian slogans about Big Brother paint over the fact that this time it is the government arguing for a little more accountability (albeit tepidly, ineffectually, selectively, and only in their own favor) by letting the FBI see through a few designated masks. Meanwhile, it is the purported civil libertarians who seem to be proclaiming a universal moral right to conceal and deceive, extolling a world filled with veils, facades, and subterfuges. In other words, although it was dangerous and wrong for the government during the Cold War to obscure its schemes from criticism and sweep mistakes under a blanket of s
ecrecy, it is apparently just fine for megacorporations, criminals, and individual connivers to do so in the 1990s and beyond.

  The preceding paragraph may be difficult to grasp, at first reading. That is because we tend to focus habitually, perhaps reflexively, on the players in a drama, rather than on their behavior, which can swing rapidly from pro-openness to pro-secrecy whenever the perceived advantage seems to shift. (Recall the “accountability matrix” on page 86.) The trick is to consider who, in a given situation, wants more information and accountability to flow, and who wants less. During the Cold War there was a constant danger of government maintaining too much secrecy. In the Clipper debates, it is government officials who have sought a net lessening of shadows where schemes can hide. Their proposals, while self-serving and sometimes even hypocritical, favor a narrow kind of increased visibility. Meanwhile, their opponents find themselves arguing in favor of secrecy! Because it is government asking for more openness, they assume that openness must automatically be dangerous or bad.

  And so we return to one of this book’s central dilemmas: whether we have retained our freedom till now by weakening government, or by assuring ourselves the power to hold government accountable. The first view—that keeping official authority weak and blind means it cannot harm us—sounds logical. Alas, the logic has three basic flaws: 1. Weak governments can reverse this situation in a flash, whenever an emergency gives some charismatic leader an excuse to claim new powers. From Caesar to Napoleon to Lenin to Mussolini to Hitler, this has been one of the classic methods of creating an instant dictatorship out of a formerly feeble central authority. Few modern governments were ever as weak or “blind” as 1788 France, 1917 Russia, 1926 Italy, or 1933 Germany. Yet, governmental blindness is what strong privacy fans recommend.

  2. It assumes that government is the only major threat to freedom, when in fact the government’s tools may be needed to stave off other dangers. (Recall “An Open Society’s Enemies” after chapter 4.)

  3. Logical or not, it bears almost no correlation to the practical way we have actually pulled off the feat of retaining freedom all these years, a point we will reinforce throughout this book.

  The accountability approach suffers from none of these flaws. It enables the people to retain control over their officials, even during a crisis. It deals with all threats, not just the one that some activists choose to fixate on. And, above all, it is what works.

  Is government the only potential nest of oppressors we should be worrying about? Beyond the examples discussed so far in this book, of corporate data abuse or secretive cheating, consider the way organized crime is turning high-tech. For instance, when Colombian police and U.S. drug enforcement agents recently raided the Call headquarters of one narco-mob, they discovered sophisticated signal-scanning equipment capable of intercepting telephone calls throughout the region. An IBM mainframe stored the telephone records of millions of Cali residents and routinely sought potential government collaborators by correlating numbers dialed with those of the Ministry of Defense or the U.S. Embassy. Widespread use of personal voice encryption would have done nothing to thwart this devilishly simple technique, which is an example of traffic analysis, that is, drawing conclusions from patterns of communication flow without actually having to read the messages themselves.

  Drug kingpins now fly jets equipped with signal interceptors that monitor the routes of patrol craft. Gambling emporiums combine computers with overhead cameras to correlate the betting patterns of private wagerers and adjust conditions to the house’s advantage. Whether or not you agree with today’s drug or gambling laws, that question is orthogonal to the problem of amoral men creating empires of power based on unaccountability, manipulative cheating, violence, secrecy, and the creation of multitudinous victims—a process made no more palatable because it is done outside official government.

  Most people by now know about the existence of overseas banking havens. At first glance, they seem quaint institutions that help a few eccentric millionaires evade the widely reviled IRS. It all sounds a bit romantic and harmless—until you start tallying up the numbers, and realize that the shortfall in taxes evaded by some billionaire cheater is then made up by increasing rates on middle-class citizens. Earlier estimates of secretly sheltered funds used to range in the hundreds of billions of dollars, but now such modest numbers seem naïve. Poor nations have been especially victimized by their own elites, who squirreled away close to half a trillion dollars since the 1960s—more than the total economic aid that the U.S. gave to the Third World in all that time, possibly making all the difference between potential advancement and the reality of grinding poverty.

  And yet, that could be just the beginning. It seems that “haven” banks are now forging alliances with members of the new techno-elite. For instance, self-proclaimed libertarian Vincent Cate moved to tax-free Anguilla not long ago to start Offshore Information Services Ltd., a company aimed at helping companies set up Internet business accounts in a secrecy-friendly country. “I believe that if there is widespread use of encryption, the Internet is going to drastically change society,” said Cate, who subsequently hosted a conference of eighty fellow aficionados in Anguilla, where they schmoozed with bankers and discussed how financial cryptography would help protect secret transactions for the world’s mightiest financial power brokers, masking them from the glaring light of inspection by society at large.

  When the tiny island nation of Seychelles passed a law allowing anyone with $10 million to buy extradition-free citizenship, several of these radical techno-anarchists expressed both approval and blithe amusement, preferring to forge shields made of bits and bytes, rather than mere miles. “Encryption is to the Information Revolution what the Atlantic Ocean was to the American Revolution,” commented one enthusiast. “It will render tax authorities as impotent in projecting their power as the ocean crossing did to King George.”

  Are some advocates of strong privacy selling out? Or are they really unaware that dangerous evil can fester and grow outside government? If they are unworried about drug kings and plutocrat tax cheats, what will they say when kidnappers begin using unbreakable codes to make untraceable demands, taking ransom payments in perfect, encrypted security? (See “The Problem of Extortion,” after chapter 7.)

  True, the greatest villains of the twentieth century, such as Hitler and Stalin, used state agencies as their chief tools for committing terror across the globe. But the vast majority of other human cultures were ruled by the arbitrary whims of conspiratorial cliques that scarcely resembled government as we know it.

  Do crypto-advocates actually believe this ancient threat is over?

  MORE “ESSENCES”—MORE ERRORS

  In almost any language it is possible to make simple statements that seem true all by themselves but can lead to huge mistakes when they are strung together, one after another. Plato illustrated this in his Dialogues, using the assumed voice of Socrates to construct chains of “logic” that lead the reader to so-called inevitable conclusions. In many cases these inferences were later decisively disproved by science. Yet Plato’s heirs continue to erect ideologies based on chains of “if ... therefore” statements and specious comparisons.

  When it comes to the debate over strong privacy, we often see cavalier assumptions of equivalence between properties that are actually quite distinct. For instance, there is a presumption that “privacy” and “anonymity” are close relatives, sometimes treated almost as equivalence twins. The same unquestioning acceptance goes to conflating privacy with freedom, as if they were two sides of the same coin (for example, in the phrase we saw earlier, “Individual freedom and privacy are risky”).

  Let us take a series of these pairings, with ~ standing for a rough equivalence between two concepts, and string them in a row to get an interesting Platonic chain.

  OPENNESS ∼ FREEDOM ∼ PRIVACY ∼ ANONYMITY ∼ SECRECY

  What? Taken as a whole, the chain makes no sense! It is an oxymoron. A classic case of Or
wellian Newspeak. The incongruity gets even better if we add two more “obvious” equivalences, one at each end.

  ACCOUNTABILITY ∼ OPENNESS ∼ FREEDOM ∼ PRIVACY ∼

  ANONYMITY ∼ SECRECY ∼ UNACCOUNTABILITY

  This paradox is one of an infinite number that can be generated with old-fashioned logical reasoning. Ever since Bacon and Galileo, pragmatic science has been hobbled or blocked by such rhythmic mantras, the hypnotic tools of people who believe they can “prove” something by laying indisputable statements in a row. Of course, the trap always lies in the term “indisputable.” In this case, something is clearly wrong with some (or all) of the equivalence signs shown. Even when two ideas have some overlap, or a lot in common, that is a far cry from concluding that they are the same thing.

  Later, we shall discuss flaws in the equivalence between “privacy” and “anonymity.” But for now, let’s return to another ill-matched pairing—the all-too-common, all-too-automatic equating of freedom with privacy. This equivalence is accepted widely, at all ends of the political landscape. Yet as we saw in chapter 3, there is no intellectual or functional justification for an identity-postulate between two such fundamentally different concepts, no matter how often they are uttered in the same breath.

  WE CAN PRESERVE PRIVACY