Interview: David Brin's Naked Truth About Privacy
http://www.privacyfoundation.org/privacywatch/report.asp?id=79&action=0
In a polarized environment where opinions on privacy are simplistically
reduced to �for� or �ignore,� David Brin�s concept of �The Transparent
Society� (the title of his 1998 book) is a nimble approach that appears
more relevant by the day. Brin�s cleverly-argued thesis is a spin on the
arms race code of �Trust, but verify.� For Brin, the supposed trade-offs
between liberty and security are false dichotomies that could be resolved
with, �Access, but accountability.� A scientist and sci-fi author as
well as a non-fiction writer, Brin prophetically envisioned in �The
Transparent Society� that an act such as the destruction of the Twin
Towers by terrorists would usher in a new era of government surveillance.
�The important point is that once the bureaucracy gets a new prerogative
of surveillance, it is unlikely ever to give it up again,� he wrote. �The
effect is like a ratchet that will creep relentlessly toward one kind of
transparency, the kind that is unidirectional.� Trying to prevent such
government �sight� is pointless, according to Brin, who maintains that it
is much better to seek �oversight� to watch the watchers, a pragmatic
position at odds with many techno-libertarians and privacy advocates.
Consider Brin�s response to John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, who commented on the day of the Sept. 11
attacks that the U.S. has �gradually, subtly, invisibly to most of us,
become a police state over the last 30 years. This morning�s events are
roughly equivalent to the Reichstag fire that provided the social
opportunity for the Nazi takeover of Germany.� Brin praised Barlow�s
eloquence, but wrote, �Note how Barlow propounds that everything has
happened 'invisibly to most of us'... conveying the same implicit
contempt for the masses that nearly all ideologues foster, across the
entire political spectrum. It feels so good to be one of the few who see
The Truth - a sensation relished by our own native fundamentalists,
libertarians, Marxists, free-marketers, postmodern leftists, as well as a
great many regular Republicans and Democrats, differing only in who they
credit with sight and who qualifies as sheep!� Stephen Keating,
executive director of the Privacy Foundation, interviewed Brin by e-mail
and phone on Feb. 7. PF: We're five months out from Sept. 11. What's
changed in regard to security and privacy in the U.S.? BRIN: Panic, but
not as much as some people feared. In fact, the new powers of sight
demanded and received by the FBI aren't all that awful. What bugs me
terribly is that there have been no accompanying and countervailing
powers of oversight, enabling citizen watchdog groups to observe how
these new powers of vision are used. That second half of the deal was
never offered to us. Nor did most of our protectors in the civil
liberties community even ask. PF: What concerns you more: government
surveillance trampling on civil liberties, or government's inability to
prevent terrorist attacks? BRIN: The question itself is what concerns me
most. All across the airwaves we see security mavens demanding tighter
restrictions on daily life �for our children's safety,� while civil
libertarians preach that we should accept risk and danger as a price for
avoiding "Big Brother" and protecting freedom for our descendants. In
fact, both sides are foisting a poisonous notion on us for their own
self-interest. Both groups assume a fundamental trade-off between safety
and freedom, and derive economic benefit from the fact that we swallow
this awful notion. But is such a trade-off real? I can tell you that I
refuse to even let it be a basis for discussion! Nobody tells me that I
must choose between safety for my children and their freedom. It's a
non-starter. Can we have both safety and freedom? The evidence can be
seen all around us. We are - even after 9/11 - toweringly safer and freer
than any other people in history. The two go together. All it takes is
breaking the stupid notion of dichotomies and trade-offs. PF: Let�s get
down to cases. Wouldn�t a national I.D. card be a trade-off of privacy
for security? BRIN: The average American already has one: the driver�s
license. But it�s pathetically poor at delivering security benefits.
We�ll get a national I.D. by a dozen different routes. A trusted flier
program through the airlines, for instance, will be much like supermarket
check-out clubs, at first. It will be an extra benefit for those who
undergo the inconvenience of background checks. But rapidly, like the
supermarket clubs, it will penalize those who don�t have one.
Biometric-based I.D. cards for everybody are coming. Squint, look ahead
50 years and honestly tell me you can envision a world where such things
are not simply assumed. The important factor is not whether such cards
exist, but whether they are a tool for robbing us of things we want and
need. PF: Some would say that just the existence of a national I.D. card
system is problematic because it assumes a centralized database. BRIN:
The database need not be centralized. What if you could offer dozens of
competing cards? This kind of imaginative approach isn�t even discussed,
so anxious are the leading civil libertarians to cry out against cards on
basic principle. It�s a failure to examine whether it�s possible to
eliminate the harmful effects while accepting the good. PF:
�Transparency" in Germany has come to mean intense scrutiny of government
surveillance activities, with strong data protection and banking secrecy
laws. A recent New Yorker article claims that also made Germany a good
staging area for terrorists. Your thoughts? BRIN: The problem lies in
how the question is parsed. I cannot believe how many sincere civil
libertarians have actually convinced themselves that freedom is best
preserved by blinding government. That has nothing whatsoever to do with
how we acquired our present liberties. Government power is kept in check
by stripping the powerful down and subjecting them to scrutiny in the
application of their delegated power, so that abuse of the power can be
caught and rapidly dealt with. We are protected by enhancing our ability
to see them, not by reducing their ability to see us. The proof, again,
is all around us. In all of history, no government ever knew more about
its people than ours does - and no people have ever been so free. The
apparent paradox is just an illusion, clarified when we add a third fact:
no people ever knew more about their government. In Germany they are
rightfully concerned about the lessons of their past, so there are extra
measures in place to restrict government power. I approve of this in
principle. But they are the wrong restrictions. We should worry less
about what our servants know than about what they do. That's what keeps
them our servants. PF: You wrote in �The Transparent Society� that,
�Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises
might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were
refused because each side was so busy self-righteously being right.�
What�s your view today? BRIN: When the government pursues new
surveillance powers, our habit is to kick and scream and moan and then
watch helplessly while they get what they want, as when something bad
like 9/11 happens. A far more effective technique is to demand fierce
accountability measures in return for granting our servants the tools
they claim they need. That�s how to keep both safety and freedom.
Actually, I�m surprised at how little [Attorney General John] Ashcroft
asked for after September 11. Maybe he judged the mood of the American
people, which has been remarkably calm and free of panic. Maybe he�s
waiting for the next shoe to drop. Then we might get a national I.D.
card, without the ability for oversight. PF: What would that oversight
look like? BRIN: There�s a whole shopping list we could ask for. The
creation of a true office of the Inspector General of the United States.
It doesn�t exist. In each department, the inspectors report to the
cabinet secretaries that appointed them. It�s incestuous, as ridiculous
as Enron hiring their accountants to be consultants. Autonomy would help.
That�s just one example. This is actually an old approach! Every time
our government has demanded new powers of sight, we have sought new
powers of oversight, such as the Freedom of Information Act and open
meetings laws. Inevitably, they turn around and try to eviscerate the
measures we�ve taken. We need not get angry about it. We should refuse to
let our leaders wallow in the assumption that this republic is theirs.
It�s not. It�s ours. Another idea would be citizen overseers who have a
right to walk in any door. PF: You are critical of privacy advocates.
Why? BRIN: The world is a better place for having them in it. Their
indignation helps to catch abuses by the particular power centers they
are tuned to look at. But the last thing they would ever do is to look at
themselves as a power center. I just wish they weren�t so contemptuous of
the masses. If they weren�t, they would notice that people are very
sensible. And what people really want is to be empowered to catch the
Peeping Toms, to hold accountable any elite that might abuse power,
whether corporate or governmental or individual. They are getting these
tools through the very technologies that privacy advocates fear most,
such as video cameras. The number of cameras in private hands is
expanding vastly compared to the number owned by government. There�s an
incredible Luddite tendency that binds our intellectual aristocracy.
People are profoundly more empowered by technology than hindered by it.
PF: Who else holds your views? BRIN: George Soros. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, who wrote a small book titled, "Secrecy," leaning in the same
direction. Witness.org, which every year buys up thousands of last year�s
obsolete video cameras to send overseas to activists in the third world.
Whistleblower.org, which pushes for legislation that will further protect
people who reveal the conspiracies of elites. In fact, though, those who
preach freedom-through-accountability are still rare.
Freedom-through-secrecy is by far more common. In the movie �Men in
Black,� Tommy Lee Jones�s character says, �A person is smart. People are
stupid.� Cute, but it�s exactly the opposite. The aggregate of people in
a given community will catch the local thugs and power abusers through
small acts of revelation and investigation. It�s the aggregate that�s
wise. Alexis DeTocqueville was touring New England. He attended town
meetings and was appalled by the screaming and the indignation. He wrote
a typically French sneer about how silly and asinine everyone had been
that evening. Then, in the middle of the night, he sat bolt upright in
bed and murmured to himself, �Mon Dieu! They are governing themselves.�
We are blinded by an American character trait, which is to feel contempt.
College sophomores are regularly asked every year, �To what do you
attribute your beliefs? Almost universally, they say, �I believe what I
believe because I�ve evaluated the evidence. My idiot opponent got their
evidence because of flaws in their character.� This blinds us to the fact
that the aggregate of our fellow citizens has somehow made a pretty good
and wise civilization. PF: How does that observation play into the
post-Sept. 11 environment? BRIN: In the 20th century we came to rely
ever more on professionals. We are not going to turn around that fact. I
just finished attending a conference on bio-terrorism. Dangers are going
to increase at a rate at which the experts cannot keep up with. The only
way we�ll have a chance is if individuals, by holding their immediate
environment accountable � by handling some of it ourselves - help the
thin line of professionals. What happened on Sept. 11 was a failure of
doctrine, in that pilots and personnel on airlines were told to be
passive, to accommodate terrorists if they struck. The doctrine was
revised and changed by an ad hoc committee of a dozen Americans rebelling
on Flight 93 within one hour of attack. No FAA, no Senate Committee. It
was done by an ad hoc committee. And no one has questioned the
committee�s decision. That�s power. Performed by amateurs. PF: Any
thoughts on that philosophy in Afghanistan? BRIN: I would have dropped
several million cheap cell phones that use relay sites. Equip them with
cameras. We could have gotten real-time images. The ideal weapon against
dictators. No bleeding-heart objections if we bomb Iraq with cell phones!
PF: VeriChip and other companies are pitching the benefits of trackable
chip implants. Would you, or your children, get chipped? Why or why not?
BRIN: In theory, until age eight when a child is capable of finding her
own way home, there may be some benefits to chipping, as creepy as it
sounds. But I also believe in graduated civil liberties for children.
Teens need a sense of being able to get away. Really away. For myself, I
would not be the first. And I would not like to see some closed agency
being involved in this process. PF: You write that, "When people feel
safer, we will worry less about what others know about us." Explain.
BRIN: Some �privacy advocates� neglect ever to rank their privacy
concerns along any kind of scale. To them, it's just as harmful for a
supermarket to know what salad dressing you bought as it is for a
convicted abuser to know the location of the battered wives shelter. But
this is obviously absurd. The public, in opinion polls, shows time and
again that common people understand a hierarchy of privacy needs based on
real or plausible harm that a piece of information might do. I am
actually a privacy moderate and do see many areas in life where some
kinds of personal secrecy are called for. I just believe we'll all be
able to enforce our own privacy much better if those few important
secrets are kept in a general ambiance of accountable openness, one in
which there are very few Peeping Toms because of a high probability that
they'll get caught. Privacy will be better protected in a generally open
environment. PF: What is the strangest, or most provocative, reaction
you've gotten to "The Transparent Society"? BRIN: It's not so much
strange as sad. I get indignant denunciations from people who do not read
the book and claim that I oppose privacy. In fact, I see privacy and
freedom as among the most important of all human values. History shows
that we got them by increasing the amount that each of us, as a sovereign
citizen, knows. We did not get them by frenetically trying to police what
other people know.
