taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (11/17/86)
"The Rise of the Computer State"
"A Chilling Account of the Computer's Threat to Society"
David Burnham
Vintage Books, 1984
273 pages
With our headlong rush into the computer age are we really keeping
our eyes open for the dangers of information? Are we really aware of what
is going on behind the closed doors in the government? And what of the
records of systems like Minitel in France or Qube, an interactive cable TV
system in the US? It is David Burnham's belief that we are already at a
significant turning point in the integration of computer technology into
our society and we're not even watching.
As Alan Barth wrote; "The price of liberty is always vigilance against
constituted authority, against the force of order."
As with any story we need to begin at the beginning, and Burnham
begins with a discussion of Charles Babbage, Ada Augusta, The Countess of
Lovelace, and others of their ilke. Next is an introduction to the
potential benefits that centralized computer systems and information
can offer our society. But the potential dangers rear their heads and
we must consider the possibilities of misuse of even the most seemingly
innocuous information. Consider the example of "behaviourscan", used
experimentally in Massachusetts. The system monitored what TV the various
household members watched and received data from the local supermarket on
what items were purchased by the family. The two were correlated and TV
commercial sponsors were then sold the information about the effectiveness
of their advertising campaigns.
Next we learn the current technological systems used to keep a
tight surveillance system active. This is where the problem of what is
freedom, how much privacy are we and should we be allowed and so on are
discussed in earnest. It is Burnhams contention that we are losing our
rights of privacy at a rather alarming rate (and in view of the urine
analysis laws recently passed, we have a dramatic example of this). He
cites examples of political machinations by Presidents Johnson, Nixon,
Carter, Ford and Reagan to give the government more power and control
over the central data bases. An example that, on a pessemistic day, will
come as no suprise, is that it seems common practice for a U.S. President
to use the Internal Revenue Services' confidential tax return records on
opponents for political gain, even though this is expressly prohibited in
the Charter of the I.R.S.
We continue with a discussion of the various data bases being
built around the world and the potential good and bad uses of them. A
fine example is, as pointed out above, the Minitel system used by a
significant percentage of the French population. The central database
of Minitel contains such information as what flights people ask for information
on, what information they read from the newspaper, and copies of all their
electronic mail with others. This information is currently considered
private, but it wouldn't be, I suspect, too hard to convince the French
government to release bits of it. Even with the removal of individual
names geographic-based information, especially when a census report is
utilized too. The amount of information available is really quite
staggering, as Burnham points out - not only are institutions like the
Internal Revenue Service collecting information, but the F.B.I. is, the
C.I.A. is (they can now work withing the US borders, previously prohibited,
to monitor potential 'troublemakers' using sophisticated tools and by
tagging them as potential criminals in the NCIC) and many other government
agencies. The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer system, run
by the FBI, shows some of the potential dangers of databases - in the last
few years the president has authorized the use of the NCIC by the CIA and
FBI for keeping track of potential criminals, versus its initial charter as
a central database of criminal conviction records. Is this change significant?
Burnham feels it is and I agree - we've moved from "innocent until proven
guilty" to "innocent until proven guilty unless we think you're suspicious".
With the overall quality of data in the NCIC (extremely low) it seems quite
likely that there have been numerous cases of people added to the system to
be monitored and then been arrested and harrassed. This is a direct violation
of one of the cornerstones of our free society, which is what makes it all the
more alarming - the freedom to speak out against the government.
The book gets even more interesting with the section immediately
following - on the National Security Administration (the NSA). The NSA
was created by presidential decree in the 1950s for two purposes: first
is to attack the communications links of other countries searching for
valuable information, and secondly to protect the US communications
systems from monitoring by spies of other nations. In the 35 years since,
they have managed to keep a very low profile while receiving the largest
budget of any governmental department. They employee over 120,000 people,
(6 times that of the FBI) according to Burnham, and monitor ALL overseas
communications traffic, be it telegram, telephone, letter, or electronic.
The power of the NSA is really much more - since they must monitor all
communications, they are quite involved in cryptography. Indeed, they are
sufficiently interested that they are the only legal source of funding for
research in the area in the United States. They also control the National
Science Foundations research group in this area. An idea of the level of
technology that the agency has can be found through the 'ferret' system.
This system managed to intercept a phone call from Nikita Khrushchev giving
orders from the mobile phone in his limosine while hundreds of miles above
in space.
"The Rise of the Computer State" completes with chapters on
Values, the function of the law in this sort of environment, the rather
poignant question of Can Anything be Done? and finally an alarming future
that he feels is possible if we don't tread carefully. The book ends with
a selected bibliography.
Again, this is strongly recommended.
-- Dave Taylortaylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (11/20/86)
This article is from well!mandel (Tom Mandel)
and was received on Thu Nov 20 02:55:54 1986
Nicely written review of _The Rise of the Computer State_, Dave. My
main comment is not so much about the thesis of the book, which is
hard to refute and is probably accurate, but rather about the remarkable
lack of concern *most* of the population has regarding what one might
term "information privacy."
Certainly, there are many individuals and several concerned
interest groups worried about the increasing incursions on privacy due
to computers, sophisticated telecommunications, and increasingly
ubiquitous and interconnected databases, both commercial and government.
This has been an issue that has long been discussed in this and more
traditional media. But what continues to be noteworthy, as far as I'm
concerned, is that this is apparently *not* a pressing issue for most of
the public. Often it is only when a particular abuse occurs -- for
instance, an erroneous credit report on a person -- that that person
gets upset about the invasion of privacy.
In general, rather than being concerned about new kinds of
invasion of privacy, most citizens seem rather complacent about this
development. I would like to ask others in this modgroup why they think
this complacency exists.
Tom Mandel
ARPA: mandel@sri-kl.arpa
UUCP: {ptsfa,hplabs,lll-crg,hoptoad,apple}!well!mandel