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

by David Brin

  192 ... measure would also help defend against illicit key° collection by invading hackers ... Especially if one of the five key escrow sites was forbidden to be in electronic contact with the outside world. Multiple cache sites would also help against the many nonelectronic “bypass” methods of spying discussed in chapter 9.

  192 ... officials were slow to propose ... This alternative, sometimes called “trusted third party encryption,” in 1996 became the official approach pushed by the United States for international adoption by leading nations of the OECD. While this step is an improvement in principle, it has not increased the degree of trust between government officials and outside groups. As of this writing, a consensus seemed unlikely.

  195 ... Edward Teller, helped lead a persuasive campaign ... Few could have been more surprised than this author to discover, while researching this book, how influential Teller was during the early Cold War, as he repeatedly campaigned against yielding to the temptation to solve security problems by stifling information flow.

  196 ... all too many blunders and betrayals ... To scale the difference in levels of error that are tolerated in an open versus a closed society, think about taking a sip from almost any river in the United States, and comparing the taste to a sample from any waterway in China or Russia. Yet there is an ironic corollary to this difference between a system of noisy, adversarial accountability and one based on hierarchical “management.” Citizens of an open society may worry much more about water quality, and perceive it as a greater problem, because error-correcting confrontations appear frequently in the news (but are suppressed in closed societies). In the words of Barry Fulton, “It seems to me that the new technologies can simultaneously ensure that government does not become abusive and, through normal revelations of day-to-day incompetency and deceit, create a public opinion of distrust. Is this a paradox of the new technologies? Does shining a light into the corridors of power build or destroy trust?”

  196 ... worst U.S. government scandals, ... took place in circumstances where secrecy prevailed over accountability ... In 1953, during the Cold War, the U.S. Army apparently sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide (a mock biological warfare agent) near a school in Minneapolis in order to simulate covert biological attacks. The students in the school were never told about the testing or its possible harmful effects. Several of these students’ children have been born with birth defects allegedly resulting from the testing.

  Investigations reviewing the history of government-sponsored atomic experiments have found that because debates over the need for human experimentation and the policies that should govern it were kept secret, many contractors and university researchers were apparently unaware of legal and ethical concerns surrounding the experiments they were paid to conduct. For example, Charles E. Wilson, secretary of defense during the Cold War era, directed that human radiation experiments should be conducted by following the strict code of medical ethics that emerged from the postwar Nuremberg trials, but then marked the file containing this directive “top secret”

  Under the Verona Project, several Soviet codes were said to have been cracked following World War II. President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson were not informed of the project or its results. Data were kept secret by J. Edgar Hoover, giving him power to wrongly accuse many officials of being Communists. (See Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, Bombshell: The Secret Story of Ted Hall and America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy [New York: Times Books, 1997].)

  196 ... a curse of human nature makes every leader want to keep secret plans ... According to a June 1994 report by ABC News, more than 32,000 U.S. government employees were still engaged primarily in keeping secrets, at a direct cost to the taxpayers of $2 to $3 billion annually (not including hidden CIA and NSA expenditures), plus an added $14 billion or so paid to defense contractors for secrecy-related activities.

  197 ... passed on this belief to some key elements of the American establishment ... To those familiar with Teller’s checkered history during and after the Manhattan Project, as well as his reputation as a dogged Cold War friend of right-wing causes, this portrayal may seem strange. Yet so convinced was he of the self-defeating nature of secrecy that he often floated the notion of eliminating all document classification within the federal government, even nuclear weapons blueprints! In fairness, we should note that Teller enjoyed provoking a reaction, and exaggeration is a useful rhetorical device for getting your point across. Still, this mind-boggling suggestion will be worth recalling later, when we discuss “dangerous” physical technologies.

  In a surprising example of “Tellerite” openness, the NSA’s technology transfer program has the purported goal of helping companies spin off commercial products and processes from the agency’s extraordinary pool of technical expertise. One impetus for this program was a Clinton administration mandate to find new and more efficient ways of doing business. Another stated motivation was the agency’s growing concern about the potential vulnerabiliy of government and private industry computer networks to acts of terrorism or sabotage. Opening systems to criticism is seen as safer, in the long run, than keeping them secret. Naturally, this is seen by the agency’s critics as a minuscule step, and possibly no more than a public relations ploy. In light of the NSA’s past history, those critics may be right.

  198 ... traffic analysis, that is, drawing conclusions from patterns of communication flow ... Crypto-advocates are quite aware of this chink in the armor of encrypted secrecyfor-all. Fear of traffic analysis by government agencies underlay the original motivation for anonymous remailers, which pass messages back and forth in encrypted form, mixing them thoroughly before sending them on to their destinations. But they are only partly effective. What is lacking so far is a similar technology for stream connections on the Net. One proposal, called PipeNet, would be like a remailer but for direct connections. In conjunction with off-the-shelf technologies like Internet Phone, users could make encrypted telephone calls on the Net, with the data intermixed with other data en route. Technically, it is much more challenging than remailers, but this is the direction in which the cypherpunks want to go. See “The Problem of Extortion” for an appraisal of how this technology might affect a world in which people can harm one another with almost pure anonymity and safety from detection.

  200 ... paradox is one of an infinite number ... Bruce Sterling poses another delicious “false logical chain”: FREE SPEECH ∼ LITERACY ∼ GOVERNMENT EDUCATION FOR ALL ~

  UNIVERSAL INDOCTRINATION ∼ TYRANNY.

  Cute. Again, the flaws are right there in the equivalence signs. This sort of thing explains why many people are turning away from the seductive ideologies that have spread so much ruin during this century. Logic is just a tool, a first step on the road to learning from the universe. Logic is not an excuse to yammer at the cosmos, telling it the way things ought to be.

  205 ... Out of every 100 felonies committed in the United States ... Crime statistics organized by Bryan Vila of the University of Wyoming, from figures released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

  206 ... tipping the “deterrence equation” ... One reason for relatively low conviction and imprisonment rates is now ascribed to reluctance on the part of many juries and judges to enforce draconian and life-ruining sentences against those who are caught abusing illegal drugs, often harming nobody but themselves.

  206 ... precedents support exactly this direct, rather than inverse, trade-off between security and freedom ... In fact, the best example of low fear levels coinciding with freedom happens to be ... again ... us. This is masked by omnipresent ululations about crime that spill across the media. But in fact, many parts of the United States, Canada, Australasia, and other areas of the neo-West are currently experiencing rates of violent crime that are much lower than our ancestors faced in the towns and villages of Europe, Asia, or Africa. Per capita comparisons are masked by the fact that Americans hear about crimes that take place all across a major continent filled with a third of a billi
on people. And yet, deep inside, we know that things are actually pretty good. People mostly walk and drive with a daily confidence reflecting a general atmosphere of tolerance that would surprise people from almost any other era in history. A confidence that allows us to indulge in a national and civilizationwide passion for self-criticism, constantly reminding each other of our faults and measuring not the progress we’ve made, but how much farther we have yet to go.

  207 ... public demand for action could result in Draconian measures ... Bruce Frankel, “New Sides to Old Debate on Surveillance,” USA Today, 25 April 1995, Al. After the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings, officials called for an expansion of the government’s power to investigate domestic groups. As it happened, the actual scope of new legislation was very minor. This article goes on to discuss how in the 1970s, FBI agents began returning their domestic cases marked “Closed” because of their own personal hostility toward politically motivated intelligence work. It also gives a brief listing of other democracies facing terrorist threats who have given the police much broader powers.

  210 Professionals need space... The National Academy of Sciences, on being told all advisory committees must hold open meetings, responded by threatening not to hold any.

  211 ... No pseudonym will hide your true Internet identity ... Cypherpunks naturally disagree. While they admit that simple pseudonyms can be hacked and traced, there are methods that “will be beyond the reach of even a first-rate hacker.” The simplest proposed technique is to send e-mail from throwaway accounts, using a different one each time, going through anonymous remailers, and signing the message with your pseudonym. The disadvantage of this technique is that no one can send a message back to you. If a message can get to you, often a motivated hacker can do so as well. The problem with all of these methods is not their theoretical effectiveness, but the fact that they depend on several steps being perfectly reliable (for example, honest management of the anonymous remailer) and on an absence of “lurker” or “sniffer” spy programs at numerous vulnerable junctures along the way. It seems odd, on the face of it, for cypherpunks to put so much faith in abstract networks and unknown sysops whose best-advertised trait is a love of masks and unaccountability instead of trusting the larger civilization around them, in which the weapon of light is so much more effective than any disguise.

  214 ... cyber-reality’s ability to reproduce the erotic atmosphere ... Dorian Sagan, “Sex, Lies and Cyberspace,” Wired, January 1995. Sagan goes on to say, “Yet these masks work only if they are not true lies—that is if they accentuate the truth. On AOL, I understood more fully than ever before the origin of our word ‘person.’ Before the Latin persona-, meaning role, the word was the Etruscan phersu, or actor’s mask.”

  215 ... anonymity can be used to serve social, as well as anti-social ends ... Personal correspondence to the author dated July 25, 1994, concerning deliberations with EFF officers Jerry Berman and David Johnson, about a proposed EFF official position on anonymity. The memo outlines why Godwin believes the EFF should not endorse any legal scheme that penalizes anonymity. He provides six arguments in support of anonymity and alternatives to a legal regime that discourages anonymity. See also “Who Was That Masked Man?,” Internet, World, January 1995, 22—25. This article debates whether or not anonymity should be preserved or outlawed, concluding that, despite problems with anonymity, it should be preserved as an online option.

  215 ... ruled that anonymity can be somewhat justified ... As in other privacy matters, the courts have been vague, sometimes contradictory, and always contingent in discussing when anonymity must be protected. For instance, a woman in Ohio was arrested for handing out fliers about a tax increase. Supposedly, her pamphlets were in violation of Ohio’s election laws, which require a person’s name and address on all leaflets (McIntyre v. Ohio). This incident has led many lawyers to confront the conflict between the First Amendment and the political disclosure laws of most states. In the already cited 1960 case Talley v. Los Angeles (a discrimination case) the Supreme Court said, “Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all.” However, the Court later moved away from this view in the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, when it upheld most of the disclosure requirements written into the new federal elections law in order to ensure accountability and prevent corruption. Dissenting in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia castigated the generally dishonorable aspect of concealed identity: “It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of anonymity.” He argued that to create legal protection for anonymous communication, absent a clear reason to expect threats, harassment, or reprisals, is a “distortion of the past that will lead to a coarsening of the future.”

  216 ... lack of any clear consensus ... As an experiment, the reader might try polling his or her friends. Ask (in a carefully unbiased way) whether anonymity should be protected on the same basis as free speech; then note any significant difference, on average, between the answers given by women and those given by men. While unscientific and subjective, the trial may be revealing.

  216 ... Debating over the best placement along a spectrum ... A quirky analogy was suggested to me. Free speech is like Vitamin C: you know that too little can kill you, while too much will scarcely do much harm. Anonymity, on the other hand, is like a dangerous, potentially addictive, and toxic drug. It has special uses, but no one doubts that an overdose can kill a patient. Even most strong privacy adherents do not deny this. They simply believe that the crossover between benefit and toxicity is a rather high dose.

  217 ... Which “eccentric” is more likely to be let alone? ... Again, we turn for a colorful illustration to the irrepressible John Perry Barlow (Netview, September 1995): “I come from a town in Wyoming where everybody knows everything about everybody all the time. But there you have a kind of exemption with your privacy because they know you: you may be a weirdo, but you’re their weirdo. What’s happening now is something really different—you leave a slime-trail of bits wherever you go in the modern world. And somebody can come along behind you and sweep up all those bits and create a data puppet of you that has every aspect of yourself, including your sins and peccadilloes and secret shames, but does not have the exonerating quality of being anyone’s weirdo.” Barlow reluctantly concludes that secrecy will be necessary in the future, because his first choice for a solution seems unlikely. “The answer is to get rid of the secret shame. But that’s a leap we’re not going to make right away.”

  In his 1993 book The Costs of Privacy (New York: A. DeGruyter), Steven L. Nock made a case that modern privacy is a response to the fact that so many strangers surround us. In our old villages, we knew the reputations of almost everyone we encountered. But today we must replace that knowledge. We do this by trying to learn more about strangers, while trying to conceal from them information about ourselves. The result is a surly arms race of scrutiny. “Privacy grows as the number of strangers grows. And since strangers tend not to have reputations, there will be more surveillance when there are more strangers. Privacy is one consequence, or cost, of growing numbers of strangers. Surveillance is one consequence, or cost, of privacy.”

  218 ... make encryption ubiquitous ... Quoted by Todd Lappin, “Cyber Rights in Fantasyland,” Wired, November 1996. The quotation continues: “Right now it’s too easy for government and citizens in general to feel threatened by encryption, because most people don’t have it, don’t use it, and have only a vague sense of what it is. Once it becomes so commonplace that everyone just assumes that their phone calls and e-mail are encrypted—only then will we have a buffer against people who feel threatened by individual citizens having access to that kind of privacy.”

  218 ... profiled in a gushing article ... Josh McHugh, “Politics for the Really Cool,” Fortune, September 1997, 172.

  218 ... self-described cyber-libertari
ans ... Not to be confused with more moderate libertarians, such as those at the Cato Institute, who hold to principles of consensus building and gradualism (see “A Withering Away” at the end of chapter 9).

  221 ... just for the fun of it ... There is, at present, nothing illegal about innovative games of “counter spy” being played by hobbyists, as long as no directly fraudulent crimes occur. Even the Clipper initiative would have had no effect on bands of intellectual T-cells practicing their anti-tyrant skills with other technologies, “just in case.”

  223 ... interpretation of the U.S. Constitution ... See Mike Godwin, “Government Eavesdropping (Thinking Clearly About Digital Telephony),” Internet World, September 1994, 93—95.

  223 ... assumption that there exists a direct link between tyranny and efficiency ... For instance, the vaunted industrial capabilities of Nazi Germany were actually less than any of its major enemies, even though it had a head start gearing up for war. Hitler’s rush to start hostilities, in 1939, and then his schedule for attacking the Soviets, in 1941, were both pushed ahead by the fact that Britain, and later the Soviet Union, once alerted to the danger, began catching up and would soon outstrip German war production. The greatest producer by far was the United States, even on a per capita basis. And yet a wretched myth persists about horrible dictatorships: “They were awful, but you gotta admit, they were efficient.” See John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1940), and Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).