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

by David Brin

  It is still a dangerous world. The forces that crushed every other brief renaissance in history are always at work, those “other enemies” of freedom that so many people seem to forget about. They would return us to a social order shaped like a pyramid, the “natural” structure of human society, that dominated every major culture for thousands of years. Avoiding this fate will depend on our nurturing two apparently contradictory traits, tolerance and boisterous individualism, together with the notion that history does not have to repeat itself.

  Children can learn from the mistakes of their parents. Or else, why bother?

  Above all, we must learn to stop dismissing our fellow citizens as mindless sheep. They can be frustrating, even silly sometimes. But they deserve better than contempt from the members of an elite—including whatever elite you, the reader, consider yourself to be a member of. Sometimes the people may even surprise you, as they continue to become more practiced in the arts of citizenship.

  The old saying “love of money is the root of all evil” was never con-

  vincing. There have always been counter-examples. But replace

  “money” with “secrecy” and you get an interesting aphorism.

  Though secrecy does not always cause evil, one would be hard put

  to name any great evil that was not made worse by it.

  M. N. PLANO

  There are those who say that they cannot choose openness, because their enemy (usually government) is so horrible and oppressive that skulking secrecy is the only recourse for staying free. To this plaint I can only answer—We’ll miss you at the negotiating table. Your input, insight, and even your dark suspicions, would have been helpful. But go play games with secret decoder rings, if you want. Nobody’s going to chase you down and force you to join.

  What negotiating table?

  Why, the one where we talk about transparency, of course. You didn’t think I would start lowering my own walls and barriers without getting something in return, did you? If the government says it needs new powers of sight in order to protect us, we should not spurn the requests of skilled and dedicated professionals without a hearing. On the other hand, we should make government come begging deferentially, and extract something in return each time. New kinds of supervision. New guarantees of openness. Snap inspections by teams of randomly chosen citizens! A fully numbered inventory of secret documents! New measures to keep us confident that government is still our loyal dog, and not the wolf that all too many others have become.

  This is, simply, the method we have been using all along to stay free. Nor is the principle limited to official authority. Whenever anyone asks for more openness from you, it is perfectly reasonable to demand that it be reciprocal. That is what the tussle of accountability is all about. It is why city number two will always be so much noisier than city number one—and so much freer.

  Again, the cameras are coming. You can rail against them, shaking your fist in futile rage at all the hovering lenses. Or you can join a committee of six billion neighbors to control the pesky things, making each one an extension of your eyes.

  Everything on the Web is ultimately about trust.

  NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE

  We must never forget that the human heart is at the center of the technological maze.

  STEPHEN BARNES

  THE FLOW OF INFORMATION, THE FLOW OF LIFE

  All right, let us suppose something truly amazing happens, that we citizens resist the inveigling, siren calls to vote in a myriad so-called privacy laws and instead choose to embrace accountability. In the village, it wasn’t fear of retribution, per se, that kept you from behaving callously toward your neighbors; it was the sure knowledge that someone would tell your mother, and bring shame to your family. Tomorrow, when any citizen has access to the universal database to come, our “village” will include millions, and nobody’s mom will be more than an e-mail away.

  Soon, that fellow who laughed on the freeway as he cut you off, nearly causing a chain collision, may not be able to hide behind a shield of anonymity anymore. The kid who swipes an apple from a shouting fruit vendor can expect to get a call on his wrist phone before he runs more than a block away. Would-be burglars will have to be awfully clever, when cheap video cameras in any home automatically alert the police and then track the fleeing intruders down the street. True, a con artist may be able to look up facts about your finances, but that intrusion will be outweighed when you call up her rap sheet while she’s just getting started with her irresistible sales pitch.

  Perhaps the word reputation will regain some of its former meaning as one of a person’s most precious assets, the way we can tell if some stranger is worthy of our trust.

  Will we wind up having to choose between privacy and freedom? This is one of the most vile dichotomies of all. And yet, in struggling to maintain some beloved fantasies about the former, we might willingly, even eagerly, cast the latter away.

  It doesn’t have to come to that. I think and hope we can have some real privacy, as a benefit and product of liberty. As I’ve tried to say repeatedly, a free people will be able to demand some—assuming we truly are free.

  Transparency is not about eliminating privacy. It is about giving us the power to hold accountable those who would violate it. Privacy implies serenity at home and the right to be let alone. It may be irksome how much other people know about me, but I have no right to police their minds. On the other hand I care very deeply about what others do to me and to those I love. We all have a right to some place where we can feel safe.

  After all these pages playing the contrarian, I actually retain a fair amount of pragmatic skepticism aimed in all directions. Until I see that it really works as advertised, I’d be happy to have transparency move ahead in baby steps.

  But I am sure of one thing. People of bad intent will be far more free to do harm in a world of secrets, masks, and shrouds than in a realm where the light is growing all around, bit by steady bit.

  It was fun while it lasted, living on these city streets amid countless, nameless fellow beings, not knowing any of them unless you chose to, being able to walk away from any embarrassment or petty discourtesy, just another forgotten face in the crowd.

  It was also lonely.

  Today, you read about old folks found dead in their apartments months after anyone last saw them alive, and about children who were abused for years without the neighbors suspecting, or doing a thing about it. That won’t happen anymore when the village returns. Busybodies will gossip, but you’ll know their secrets—and you’ll be able to leave your doors unlocked. Your bedroom will be protected from snoops by electronic guardians, but most of all by the fact that voyeurs and snoops will fear being caught. Your taxes may be public knowledge, but so will every suspicious deal made by any politician or captain of finance. Anyone will be able to find out how much you paid for your nose job, or what salad dressing you buy; and your reaction will be, “Who cares?” It will be like having people know what color sweater you are wearing.

  Courtesy, at first enforced by a mutual deterrence of vision, may become a simple, comfortable habit. One that respects a world of wildly varied eccentrics. One that gives each person a little more space than he or she would have inside a mask.

  Meanwhile, you and your kids will have friends in every part of the world, whom you met through shared interests on the Net. And when you travel, those friends will pick you up at the airport with open arms, as familiar as any member of your family, even though you never met in person till that very moment.

  Perhaps, after all is said and done, most of us will even decide it’s better that way. Better to know our neighbors (in their multitudes) than to live a fiction of splendid, lonely isolation.

  Assuming we have the slightest choice in the matter.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  11 ... neo-Western civilization ... I use this term throughout the book, while leaving it intentionally vague. By one way of looking at things, the neo-West i
s a vast region that includes all the world’s constitutional democracies, at least those where freedom of expression and information are accepted norms (even if imperfectly practiced). By this standard, the neo-West would encompass most of Europe and the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, along with much of south and east Asia. In the course of this book, however, we’ll see that a stricter definition may be needed. When I speak of a shared cultural outlook based on individualism, eccentricity, and suspicion of authority, it becomes evident that even large portions of the U.S. population exclude themselves from the neo-West with attitudes that better align with older human traditions. For that reason, I see the term not as having national boundaries, but rather fluid zones where cultural assumptions about diversity and openness are strong or weak. (See the section on “Toxicity of Ideas.”)

  13 ... “Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace”... see http://www.ultranet.com/~kyp/barlow.html.

  13 Will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom? In the sardonic words of Chris Peterson of the Foresight Institute, “Freedom will get you through times of no privacy better than privacy will get you through times of no freedom.”

  14 ... much of this chapter ... see David Brin, “The Transparent Society,” Wired, December 1996.

  15 ... poking tiny holes to penetrate the “protective” curtain ... But what if it is a high-tech curtain, designed to scream when poked? Perhaps the balance would then tip in favor of belief in protection with barriers ... for a while, until new kinds of penetration are discovered. This kind of surveillance arms race will be discussed in chapters 8 and 9.

  16 ... Pericles and his allies were roundly derided by contemporary scholars ... Opponents of Athenian democracy included not only Socrates (as reported by Plato) but also the chief historian of the era, Thucydides, who was a member of the oligarchic party of Athenians.

  19 ... information on a CD-ROM that can be viewed at most police headquarters ... Shortly after California’s CD-ROM was made available for viewing at police stations, an individual began posting all 65,000 names on his Internet site, claiming that the inconvenience of the official system stymies its effectiveness. (See chapter 3, where we discuss the pros and cons of “practical obscurity.”)

  20 ... Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ... See http://www.eff.org/.

  20 ... Privacy Information Center (EPIC) ... is a public interest research center based in Washington, D.C., established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values. See http://www.epic.org/ or (202) 544-9240. EPIC also administers Privacy International, based in forty countries, which keeps an eye on government and commercial surveillance worldwide.

  21 Beth Givens, The Privacy Rights Handbook: How to Take Control of Your Personal Information (New York: Avon Books, 1997). To reach the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse call (619) 298-3396 or e-mail: prc@privacyrights.org., 5384 Linda Vista Road #306, San Diego, CA 92110.

  22 ... The Great Game of Business ... by Jack Stack (New York: Doubleday Books, 1992).

  22 ... According to cartoonist-humorist Scott Adams ... In fairness, it should be noted that Mr. Adams is also on record predicting that we will all soon be enslaved by squirrels and put to work in their nut mines. See Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

  23 ... Kevin Kelly ... expressed the same idea ... Josh Quittner. “Invasion of Privacy,” Time, 25 August 1997.

  23 ... I have no secrets myself ... John Perry Barlow is quoted in Netview: The Global Business Network Journal, summer/fall 1995. The rest of Barlow’s paragraph follows: “I am concerned with what happens when you’ve got a government that has access to very detailed, granular information about people and a lot of people who think they’re living lives of secret shame. The answer is to get rid of the secret shame. But that’s a leap we’re not going to make right away. In fact, we’re headed in the other direction.”

  25 The Witness Program was conceived in 1992 in partnership with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, musician Peter Gabriel, and the Reebok Foundation. Transparency International, based in Germany, has national chapters all over the world. See http://www.transparency.de/.

  28 ... erase “nonpersons” from official history ... For a guided tour of Soviet photographic fakery, see David King, The Commissar Vanishes (New York: Metropolitan, 1997), which is simultaneously hilarious and chilling as the reader sees what can happen when one clique takes control of a society’s “consensual reality.” George Orwell’s vivid, terrifying “Ministry of Truth” was based in part on this notorious activity. His nightmare regime in Nineteen Eighty-Four believed that “falsification of the past ... is as necessary ... as the work of repression and espionage.”

  28 ... “pedigree” of their photographic evidence ... Several quotations in this section were taken from interviews with James Cameron, Ken Burns, and others on ABC Nightline, September 1997.

  31 ... members of an empirical civilization ... Once again we see the influence of Plato in all the hand wringing over the “end of photography as proof.” What we are witnessing is the end of photography as perfect proof. The Platonic impulse is then to deny that a flawed tool has any further usefulness. But when photographic deceit can be canceled out by other cameras, we wind up with a situation pragmatists can cope with.

  CHAPTER 2

  34 ... extensive physical rights-of-way ... Because they already own extensive rights of way, across the country and into most American homes, natural gas companies bid fair to become huge players in the information age, simply by stringing tiny fiber-optic cables alongside already existing lines. The same holds for railroads—one created a subsidiary called MCI. Their chief competitor in the short term will be cable television operators, whose “cable modem” capabilities may dominate the field in the immediate future.

  34 ... new era of wireless communication ... A consortium led by Motorola is creating the “Iridium Project,” whose sixty-six low-orbiting satellites will offer worldwide digital telephony service. Another group, Teledesic, involving Microsoft and McCaw Communications, has the more ambitious aim of using hundreds of satellites to transfer data, and even real-time video, between millions of users all over the globe.

  37 ... midwifing something that might ultimately distribute authority ... Part of the reason may lie in long-standing U.S. military doctrine, which has for generations trained junior officers to exercise initiative, if necessary operating for long periods without orders. Another factor we will discuss later may have been a strategic decision to avoid the debilitating “fallacy of security.” Warned in advance by some of the best minds in the West, the right people may have understood that stifling the flow of information applies a tourniquet to the limbs of a free society, hampering the virtues that give it strength. If this is true, it runs diametrically counter to everything we are taught to believe about officious and obtrusive bureaucrats.

  37 ... the chief “designer” ... According to John Gilmore, “Paul Baran vastly underestimated the difficulty of routing the messages. Breakthroughs are needed (at each stage) to get a system that is robust and scales to the whole planet. Today’s Internet is fragile and maintained by intense human effort.” These problems will have to be dealt with in the next generation of networks.

  37 ... the post-Darwinian principle of “pre-adaptation” ... Comparing the Internet to organic life has one further, intriguing implication—that artificial intelligence may be far more likely to evolve out of an ecologically based network than from any specific “drawing board” approach. This is reminiscent of theories proposed by MIT Professor Marvin Minsky in his 1990 book Society of Mind.

  38 ... system of address designations ... Outside the United States, computer ISPs are usually denoted with addresses ending in the initials of their country of origin. Some North American computers also use this kind of nomenclature, such as the popular service called “t
he Well” whose address, well.sf.ca.us, tells network message handlers to zero in first on the United States, then California, then the San Francisco area, and finally a computer called “Well.” Most other American access points are grouped into one of six “domains” with the respective trim abbreviations gov, mil, edu, org, com, and net.These abbreviations stand for government, military, educational institution, organization, commercial entity, or network gateway for other networks. More domains are planned, as the initial niches are filled at a rate many times faster than the originators ever envisioned. The most interesting thing about this system is how little bureaucracy is involved. A small commercial service is allowed to franchise out domain names for a small fee on a first-come, first-served basis.

  39 ... author Vernor Vinge ...For more on the “singularity” see Vinge’s novel, Across Real Time (New York: Baen Books, 1986).

  42 ... a long, hard road getting here ... I have long been amazed that some people seem driven to claim that our varied ancestors (whether European, African, Native American, etc.) were in many or all ways better, wiser, smarter, and more honorable than we are, as if this somehow honors their memory! In fact, that is not a tribute. Nothing would more horrify decent people of any age than to be told that their descendants would turn out worse than they were. It basically means that all their struggles and hopes were in vain. The best and noblest of our predecessors would have wanted us to exceed them—just as we dream fondly that our grandchildren will be better than we are.