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But the information flow works both ways, Brin said. To prove his point, he laid out
this paradox: "In all of human history, no government has ever known more about its
people than our government knows about us. And [yet] in all of human history, no
people have ever been anywhere near as free."
W I R E D N E W S
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Big Brother Is Your Friend
by Chris Gaither
BERKELEY, California -- The omnipresent cameras are coming, says science fiction
writer David Brin. The question isn't when, but what they'll be pointing at.
Surveillance cameras will be perched on every lamppost and windowsill, beaming the
minutiae of daily life to police headquarters. Street crime will plummet, Brin says.
See also: First Amendment? Not on the Job
After all, look at the low crime rate in Britain, where watchful bobbies have access
to more than 500,000 cameras.
It doesn't stop there in Brin's future world. Everyone carries a camera, beaming
images straight to the Internet. A cop pulls over a kid for speeding, and the whole
scene is played out in the public domain.
"What will the result be when this happens? A dramatic increase in professionalism and
in legitimate arrests, and also an incredible renaissance in sarcasm on our city
streets," Brin said at Saturday's California First Amendment Assembly at the
University of California, Berkeley. "Because nothing like this will ever change human
nature."
"Now,you may not like this image, but anybody who tries to harm you is going to get
caught," he said.
Brin, an astrophysicist and author of such novels as The Postman, painted this surreal
vision for attendees pondering whether freedom and privacy can coexist in the next
millennium, when businesses and the government will probably know more about you than
you know about yourself.
Because whether we like it or not, Brin said, the cameras are imminent. The government
already uses them as its eyes and databases as its memory.
"All you accomplish by banning them is making sure that elites have the powers of
gods, and that you don't," he said.
Take, for example, increased monitoring in the workplace, where bosses can count their
employees' keystrokes and time their bathroom breaks.
Here's Brin's solution: Turn the cameras around to the top 50 execs in the company.
Bosses can still spy on you, but you get to spy right back.
"Given a choice between privacy and accountability, all of us can be relied upon to
choose privacy for ourselves and accountability for everybody else," Brin said.
Brin's vision was not universally shared. Earlier in the day, an attorney with the San
Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation put forth the alternative solution to
what she called the rash of "data Valdez incidents that spill information out to
anyone who wants to see it."
Citing such security breaches as Microsoft's baring of millions of Hotmail accounts
and the exposure of customers' credit cards numbers on an Italian smut site,
assistant staff counsel Deborah Pierce pushed for stricter limitations of information
sharing.
She called for banks and other consumer services to curtail their creation of mammoth
personal-info databases and for Big Brother to chill out -- a view Brin would find
naive.
"We need to stop the government's current fetish for collecting more information than
it really needs," she said.
But the information flow works both ways, Brin said. To prove his point, he laid out
this paradox: "In all of human history, no government has ever known more about its
people than our government knows about us. And [yet] in all of human history, no
people have ever been anywhere near as free."
Open government, gadflies, and a vigilant press reconcile the conundrum, he said,
because, "In all of human history, no people knew as much about their government."
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W I R E D N E W S
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