>From Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list.
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Dan Gillmor: Control freaks are winning the financial-privacy battle
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist
News and views, culled and edited from my online eJournal
(www.dangillmor.com):
PRIVACY WRONGS The drive to kill all privacy in financial dealings and
communications is nearing a conclusion. The control freaks are winning, and
your privacy is just about gone.
The imminent signing of the Homeland Security bill, a governmental
reorganization with many anti-privacy provisions, is just one more blow. It
follows last year's ill-named USA Patriot Act, which shredded civil
liberties in its zeal to give law enforcement and security people every tool
they needed to investigate terrorism threats. As usual, key provisions have
had no debate or scrutiny.
Meanwhile, a secretive court has sided with the Bush administration --
easily the most hostile to liberty in our lifetime -- in greatly expanding
law enforcement's surveillance capabilities. The decision blows new holes in
what was left of the Fourth Amendment, even as it pretends to support
constitutional rights.
More alarming yet, and also with the full support of the administration,
former National Security Adviser John Poindexter is pushing ahead with a
plan to scoop all of our electronic communications, financial transactions
and more into a huge, linked collection of databases. This is police-state
stuff. (Poindexter, you'll recall, was convicted of several felonies in the
Iran-Contra scandal. He got off on what conservative critics of the legal
system like to call a technicality and what civil libertarians like to call
basic constitutional rights that protect us all.)
There will be gross abuse of these new powers. There is no recorded case in
history where governments got more powers and didn't abuse them. But it
seems there's too little organized constituency for privacy or liberty these
days.
Corporate interests don't really believe in privacy, anyway. As these
databases grow, business will be given access to the information, or much of
it, to feed its marketing hunger. Increasingly, government exists to please
corporate and police interests, and as those converge, everyone -- everyone
except people who care about liberty -- will be happy.
The word ironic is insufficient to describe the renewed assault on privacy.
No government in recent history has been more secretive in its own dealings
than this one -- and the administration is pushing for new rules to hide
what the government is doing with your money and on your behalf. The
Homeland Security bill includes many new limitations on public access to
government records.
Simultaneously, but not coincidentally, the administration has tried to
water down rules to make public companies more transparent in their
financial dealings. Privacy rights are for the rich and powerful, not the
rest of us.
The government reorganization almost failed in the Senate when those pesky
Democrats tried to remove some slippery provisions, inserted without debate
in the House, that did special favors for Republican campaign contributors.
The most egregious of these could stop efforts to deter American companies
from setting up offshore mail drops and call them headquarters to duck U.S.
taxes.
The majority party apparently believes it is patriotic to be a tax cheat --
and this in a professed time of war when security spending is rising through
the roof, tax revenues are plummeting and huge budget deficits have
returned. This isn't patriotism. It's economic treason, but it's the way
things work these days.
HACKERS AND LIBERTY
Liberty is on the decline in America but may be on the rise elsewhere.
A collection of activist hackers is about to release software designed to
thwart governmental censors of the Internet. The pro-democracy Six/Four
project from Hacktivismo (http://hacktivismo.com/) is a potentially valuable
step to protect political dissidents and other people who have the quaint
idea that their access to information shouldn't be thwarted by
government-run firewalls in places like China and Saudi Arabia.
The technical details provided by the Toronto-based project are too
complicated to discuss here. But the basic idea is to use the Internet's
decentralized nature in a way that lets people create anonymous, secure data
tunnels from here to there and everywhere. If this works, governments will
be harder-pressed to prevent their people from communicating freely and
seeing online material that, for whatever reason, is considered
objectionable.
In a novel but possibly futile gesture, the activists and their legal
advisers have written a license for the software that, in theory, could make
governments liable for damages if they tamper with the code or otherwise use
it to harm human rights. The language in the draft I've seen is stern, but
I'm not clear on how anyone expects to enforce it.
Oxblood Ruffin, the project leader, says he won't be surprised if China
becomes the first scofflaw. But he also says one goal in creating the new
license, not to mention the entire effort, was to bring more public
attention to the promotion of political freedom around the world.
Growing U.S. moves to control the Internet may make the Hacktivismo projects
(Six/Four is the second) more global than anyone expected. It will be truly
ironic if these tools end up being equally vital on the continent from which
they originated.
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Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. Visit
Dan's online column, eJournal (www.siliconvalley.com /dangillmor). E-mail
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917.
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