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

by David Brin

  5. Poverty will not go away all by itself, or through some idealized magic of free markets. But when all the world seems “next door,” it will be impossible for the well off to escape hearing, seeing, and ultimately feeling the pain of their neighbors. They will help. The detailed methods may range all the way from person-to-person charity to collective (tax-supported) efforts, but we will help. Or else we will not deserve a better world.

  Again, this scenario is perfectly compatible with the views of many reasonable and mature “libertarians,” who see no harm in gradualism, as long as real progress is being made. But to those we saw at the beginning of this section, gleefully rubbing hands over the imminent demise of nations, this particular sketch for a “withering away of the state” lacks one vital feature that both anarchists and Marxists adore about their ideologies—a “them versus us” resentment so well illustrated by Barlow’s wonderfully vivid “Declaration of Independence.”

  In contrast, an empirical-gradualist approach, using transparency to slowly replace government with free will, suggests that we are already far along the path. Moreover the neo-Western liberal democracies that got us to this point will be essential tools for helping us travel the rest of the way. They have (so far) provided a benign environment in which we can stretch and explore unprecedented realms of freedom. These are balmy parks compared to the fear-drenched chiefdoms of our ancestors—peaceful commonwealths where we’ve been fed, clothed, and tutored, even as we dream about outgrowing them.

  Centuries ago, the inventor of modern democratic theory, John Locke, replaced mystical-Platonic justifications of power with a new model: a “social contract” in which rulers were ultimately answerable to the people. Under Locke’s implicit contract, the sole recourse of an afflicted populace was to rebel against oppressors and replace those at the top of the pyramid, a crude model, but one appropriate to an age when few could read.

  Now we may be headed for an era when the social contract will become explicit. When each of our supereducated grandchildren may negotiate fresh trade-offs of liberty and responsibility with individuals and remnant institutions in a world of sophisticated, sovereign human beings.

  If so, this utopian vision will come about only because we passed successfully through this complicated, irritating, noisy, indignant-but-hopeful era of transition. A pragmatic, gritty progression that was fostered and enabled by some of the world’s states. By governments that are occasionally oppressive, but are far more often our possessions and tools.

  In other words, our nations, which still deserve our rambunctious citizenship, some loyalty, and perhaps even our wary love.

  CHAPTER TEN

  GLOBAL TRANSPARENCY

  Spreading corruption, robbing youths of moral values, decadent clothes and sexual problems are all deviations bred by satellite television.

  LOTFALLAH ZAREI QANAVATI, MEMBER OF

  THE IRANIAN PARLIAMENT, MARCH 1995

  If you criticize, I learn, and I don’t mind how much you criticize. Feel free and do your best. This is the policy of the government. Hopefully it will be very helpful for the successful operation of the government.

  KAMAL KHARRAZI, FOREIGN MINISTER

  IN THE RECENTLY ELECTED IRANIAN

  GOVERNMENT, SEPTEMBER 1997

  During the summer of 1997, a pair of aircraft took off on simultaneous transcontinental flights, one from a Russian air force field and one from an American base. Crammed with cameras and “spy devices,” each plane crossed international boundaries to begin a long tour, photographing and probing the territory of its former enemy. Once almost unimaginable, this mission was first in a series of verification overflights, mandated under arms control agreements between the United States and inheritor states of the former Soviet Union.

  These missions are the fruition of a dream almost fifty years old, a missed opportunity for wholesome transparency that seems to be coming true at last. At the dawn of the atomic age, as the United States and the Soviet Union prepared to launch into a long era of nuclear brinkmanship, several attempts were made to avoid the looming Cold War. First came the “Baruch Plan” (named for statesman Bernard Baruch), proposing that all nations place their nuclear reactors and explosives under the supervision of a single global agency. The concept was supported (tepidly) by the U.S. government but roundly vetoed by Stalin.

  The same fate greeted an initiative made by President Eisenhower, the “open skies” proposal, an offer to exchange overflight privileges so that potential adversaries might photograph each other’s military and industrial facilities, calmly evaluating the extent of any perceived threat and forestalling cycles of escalation. Eisenhower knew that professional intelligence services routinely exaggerate any foreign menace, partly through institutional self-interest or habitual paranoia, but also as a legitimate reaction when confronting some bellicose power notoriously inclined to both secrecy and violence. Under those conditions, “better safe than sorry” always seemed a prudent policy.

  Eisenhower reasoned that full knowledge about each other’s capabilities would be better—potentially denying hawks on both sides the excuse for an expensive and hazardous arms race. Now, at the century’s close, Eisenhower’s vision seems to have revived from the grave. In addition to overflights, sophisticated satellites detect any major shift in forces, while on-site inspectors track weapons stored or destroyed. Communication among scientific and legal professionals fosters trust, interdependency, and a mutual grasp of the other side’s competence. Nuclear power plant inspections and nonproliferation agreements help delay the inevitable spread of weapons of mass destruction.

  What does all of this transparency tell us about the interconnected world to come?

  In 1983, Michael W. Doyle commented on the common observation that democracies almost never wage war on one another. Understanding the reasons for this phenomenon may be crucial to our hopes for preventing devastating conflict in the next generation. Which attributes of democracy foster this essential trait of mutual nonaggression?

  One thesis has been that peoples with more than a certain level of wealth have too much stake in the status quo to willingly risk their comforts in military strife. This contemptuous postulate has been popular among aggressive despots, from Hitler to Saddam Hussein, but the assumption proved delusional each time the citizens of democracies turned to shoulder sacrifices in defense against hostile tyrannies, just as Athenian citizen soldiers dealt capably with macho-fanatic Spartan professionals for more than a hundred years.

  Putting forth a related notion in the Atlantic Monthly, Robert D. Kaplan supported the “assertion that prosperous middle classes arise under authoritarian regimes before gaining the confidence to dislodge their benefactors.” In other words, dictatorships create the economic well-being that later leads to democracy. While there certainly are examples of this phenomenon, Kaplan’s argument ignores the fact that some great democracies, especially the United States, lifted themselves out of initial primitiveness and poverty by their own bootstraps, while simultaneously working out the kinks in a deeply flawed but steadily improving democratic system. It is facile to pick and choose examples, giving tyrants credit for fostering the roots of freedom, just because a few egomaniacal overlords were a little less malignant than the rest.

  In contrast, mainstream economists (as we saw in chapter 1) often attribute war to faulty information flows, that is, one side being unable to estimate properly the other’s capabilities and resolve. Since democracies are far richer in information, and have a diversity of contrasting opinions to point out glaring policy errors, it is believed that the basic logic of markets enables such nations to hammer out their differences through negotiation long before they reach an obstinate breakdown or the recourse of war.

  The same idea manifests in social-psychological terms, since it is difficult to demonize and dehumanize an adversary population enough to justify slaughter, if they appear frequently on your streets as tourists, exchange cultural symbols and memes, and are de
fended by their friends in the local open media. Such exchanges also help to clarify the other side’s intent, which can be even more important than mere strength of military forces. (For instance, the United States never worried about nuclear weapons held by Britain, whose designs toward America were verified, on a myriad levels, to be benign.) According to political scientist Michael Byron, accumulated evidence suggests that the dispersed availability of information and communications technologies can be far more relevant than levels of income for predicting a nation’s degree of democratization. Hence there are strong reasons to make the fostering of open-knowledge systems a matter of paramount international policy.

  Of course it is no longer a bipolar world. Non-Western nuclearcapable states refuse to enter the new era of transparency, perhaps because they feel it unwise to let potential adversaries see their unreadiness for war. National pride propels prickly Third World leaders to defend secrecy staunchly in the name of “national sovereignty,” while some national elites may also fear that releasing budgetary details would reveal skimming and graft.

  Yet another logic underlies the imperative toward secrecy, one that was adhered to for many years by Soviet planners: As open societies, America and Western Europe cannot prevent our spies from crossing their territory, reading their free press, learning almost anything about them. But the West must expend great effort and expense to learn just a fraction of our vast store of secrets. Knowledge is power, so we will eventually win.

  As we discussed in chapter 1, this reasoning was fallacious, but overwhelmingly tempting. Many factors helped America and the West evade the “pitfall of security.” All political wings can claim some credit, from civil libertarians to cold warriors such as Edward Teller, who understood that openness promotes creativity, eventually outclassing secrecy every time. Henry Kissinger wrote that the existence of nuclear weapons called for a reversal of the standard role of diplomacy; instead of concealing the national strategy, it was now necessary to make sure that potential adversaries were absolutely clear as to your nation’s intent. Hence, while intelligence remained vital, openness became equally important.

  Two essential points are worth reiterating here. 1. Strong privacy advocates appear to accept the same fallacy of security. They believe not only that masks, shrouds, and shields confer advantages on those that use them but also that those advantages can benefit the little guy, if only he imitates the maestros of secrecy.

  2. This alluring belief is also held tenaciously by many elites around the world, who pursue it as a fierce national policy. A policy that fundamentally endangers citizens of the neo-West, because it allows those foreign elites to engage in adventurous miscalculations without benefit of error-correcting criticism.

  Can such policies succeed in the coming decades? While the Soviets spent huge sums on radio jamming, and while China and Cuba continue doing so (China also allows internal distribution of only 10 carefully selected foreign films per year), no similar effort is made by Western nations to block outside propaganda. Nor would citizens in Europe, Australia, or North America put up with such an effort. Western attitudes about the relative toxicity of ideas (see chapter 5) assume that external propaganda or memes won’t threaten our populace, or society’s overall cohesion. Few listen to China Radio, but millions would scream if we were denied the choice.

  This contrast is dramatically demonstrated by the way dictators react to the Internet. If power elites find foreign radio broadcasts threatening, imagine how they see a new medium where data flows are greater, more flexible, and more difficult to monitor. We have seen how some nations seek strict control over service providers. Net idealists in the West sometimes predict that such efforts are pathetically doomed to fail, but tyranny is an old, welldeveloped form of governance that takes advantage of basic human drives. There is no guarantee that despots won’t come up with a different type of network—one that enhances, rather than diminishes, their power.

  Such efforts must be opposed. But how?

  Earlier we suggested that it may be a mistake to promote human rights around the world strictly in terms of Platonic essences, the sanctimonious contention that free speech and other liberties are “fundamental, sacred, and inalienable.” First, none of these statements is supportable in the context of human history. Such rights have been rare anomalies, all too easily taken away by domineering despots. They seem far from innate to cantankerous human nature. (Recall the “Paradox of the Peacock.”)

  Secondly, elites in other nations have learned how to fight back in terms of the very values the neo-West espouses. Citing the virtue of diversity, they insist that human rights campaigns are efforts at cultural imperialism, treading callously on other ethnic or national styles that merit as much respect as democracy, for example, Confucian paternalistic hierarchicalism.

  When it comes to arguments over human rights, another arrow must be added to the quiver of liberty—the pragmatic arrow of enlightened self-interest. Reiterating a point covered in chapter 1, it is essential for both governments and activists in the neo-West to explain, forcefully, that we are pushing human rights for all the world’s citizens for our own safety’s sake. Indeed, nations ruled by narrow oligarchies who ignore criticism from their own masses have a miserable record of making devastating mistakes and strategic blunders, such as adventurous wars. Wars that they will lose ... but perhaps only after wreaking havoc on the world.

  This link between human rights and legitimate self-interest is too seldom mentioned. But in fact, it is arguably the most bitter and dangerous conceptual issue separating antagonistic blocs of nations at this time, exacerbating every East-West or North-South disagreement and preventing many ancient problems from being solved the way the Cold War was.

  Of course, it is ironic to hear dictators defend their practice of sealing borders and clamping down with official secrecy, using justifications that are semantically almost identical to the irate communiques issued by encryption and strong privacy advocates. (“We have a right to control information about ourselves, to act anonymously or secretly, to put our own house in order without meddling criticism, and to resist outsiders’ definitions of accountability!”)

  If we look once again at the accountability matrix, on page 86, the reasons for this similarity become sadly apparent. They go much deeper than the superficial individualism and devotion to freedom expressed by leading privacy advocates. The grown-up world of Woodrow Wilson’s “open agreements, openly arrived at” can be viscerally far less satisfying than indignation. It takes aplomb to lay all your cards on the table, and demand that others do the same, for the sake of an abstract common good.

  As illustrated by the opening epigraphs of this chapter, our old dispute over the inherent toxiciy of ideas rages on, through every nation and society across the globe. Please recall that in chapter 5 I did not claim either side of the ancient argument could prove its case yet, nor that the “maturity thesis” would inevitably win out over a frailty-based model of human nature. The jury is still out, even though I know which side of the contest will have my loyalty during the struggle ahead.

  Those leaders who feel that they and their people will be harmed by influxes of alien knowledge are no different from ideologues who want to squirrel away troves of personal or national secrets, lest they be injured by what others know about them. Ultimately, what we are talking about is a struggle between confidence and fear.

  The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

  NIELS BOHR

  NETWAR

  Unfortunately, fear can be extremely dangerous.

  Each time another “age” began to exploit a new kind of technology or resource base (such as coal or petroleum), nations and other groups began struggling to wrest control over the critical resource. Few expect the information age to be any different. Although a major case of transnational aggression via computers has not been announced yet, numerous studies have already described plaus
ible scenarios for future strife, creating a vocabulary of terms we may see much more of in the decades ahead.

  The term cyberwar refers to knowledge-related conflict at the military level. Outcomes in future clashes may depend less on armed mass or mobility than on which side knows more. As we saw earlier, enhanced powers of sight range from spy satellites to tiny, camera-bearing robots that an infantry squad can deploy to inspect the next hedge or street. Piercing an opponent’s shrouded communications can be as important as fielding divisions. The specialists who broke Japanese and German ciphers during World War II arguably hastened victory by as much as a year, but today such breakthroughs could decide the issue in days, even hours. All the better if you can hamstring the enemy’s internal communications.

  And yes, secrets play an important role in military matters. Even openness advocate Arthur Kantrowitz endorses the benefits of temporary secrecy, as long as highly motivated teams classify information for strictly practical reasons, not as part of a creeping culture of self-justification and control. When such groups know that the secrets will eventually be scrutinized for accountability purposes, there is little reason to deny our forces the advantage of keeping enemies in the dark.

  It is also worthwhile to send selected information toward your foes. Deceptions and false leads used to make up much of this flow. They will remain important on the battlefield, as the side with better technical abilities may choose to conceal some forces, while creating “ghost” units to present a credible threat elsewhere. In recent generations, however, a new approach has been to assail your opponent aggressively with truth. During the Cold War, individuals throughout Eastern Europe came to rely on Voice of America, and especially the BBC World Service, for news and interpretation, because of their reputation for relative veracity in an age of lies. During future conflicts, this reputation may undermine an enemy’s attempts to picture Western powers as malign aggressors, thus degrading the dedicated prowess of opposing forces.