salex@grad1.cis.upenn.edu (03/22/89)
This is an article that appeared in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer. I don't
agree with the authors conclusions, but felt that he presented a more
balanced view.
Scott
Caller ID could cut off obscene calls --- but then...
by David R. Boldt, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday March 19, 1989
The whole thing seemed reasonably straightforward. The phone company---
Bell of Pennsylvania---has proposed to offer customers a new
service that would enable them to know the phone number of the person
calling them.
This service, one of seven to be offered by the phone company under
the collective name of "I.Q. Services," had a couple of advantages,
the most obvious being that if the caller turned out to be obscene or
the caller turned out to be harassing, there would be no need to
helplessly ask plaintive questions like, "What kind of pervert are you?"
Instead, you would have the s.o.b.'s phone number right there on the
screen of this little box next to your phone. You could turn the
number over to police, who could find out whose phone it was, or, if
it was from a pay phone, where it was located, by using a "reverse directory."
If the call didn't quite make it into a prosecutable form of
harassment, the customer could call the creep back at 2 a.m. the next
night and give him a little taste of his, or her, own medicine. Or,
using another service that will be offered called "Call Block," calls
from that number could simply be blocked.
So this is a great new breakthrough in solving one of the more
bothersome problems of the modern eras, right?
Wrong, says the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is
requesting that the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission delay
action on Bell's request pending further hearings. Caller ID, says
the ACLU, "will result in widespread violation of personal privacy."
So here you have it, summed up right in one neat little package, the
reason why George Bush's campaign strategists knew that the ACLU was a
"hot button" to press in the past campaign, why one writer in The New
Republic could say that these days the ACLU had "about as much to do
with civil liberties as... AT&T has to do with telegraphs."
Now the ACLU had gone beyond defending the rights of the public to
enjoy kiddie pornography in the privacy of their homes. This time it
had completely slipped its tether and was seeking to secure the
constitutional right {\it to complete an obscene phone call.}
Columnist Mike Royko, along with a host of radio talk show hosts, was
quickly on the case. "Through a strange twist of logic," Royko
recently wrote, "the new service is being called an invasion of the
privacy of those who make the phone calls... Maybe my logic is
cockeyed, but it seems to me that the person whose phone rings has a
first option on privacy and freedom from jerks." Royko argues that
the new service is no different from having a peephole in one's front
door to see who's there. (With Caller ID the number of the caller is
displayed while the phone is ringing.)
That all seemed to make a fairly cut-and-dried case of aggravating
wretched excess of the part of the ACLU. So I called Barry
Steinhardt, executive director of the Pennsylvania ACLU, to ask why he
had gone out of his way to prove everyone's negative stereotype of his
organization.
At that point the plot began to thin. First of all, Steinhardt said, he
hadn't gone out of his way to attack Caller ID; the phone company had
asked him for his opinion. Secondly, there was a matter of law.
Caller ID, as nearly as Steinhardt could see, was a direct violation
of a new section of the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Surveillance Act.
The phone company says this isn't the case, and frankly it's probably
best to let the two sides wrestle this out in court. Steinhardt
actually has some more compelling arguments to make.
First, he notes, there is the matter of people with unlisted phone
numbers whose number would now suddenly become known to anyone they
called who had Caller ID.
Next there were a whole bunch of special cases in which someone might
not want the person called to know his or her number. One example
might be a doctor whose calls are screened by an answering service,
and who doesn't want his patients to have the capacity to bother him
at any hour of the day or night.
And how about the case of a battered woman, who for some reason must
get in touch with the man who is battering her, but who would just as
soon not let him know where she is?
Then what about the various "hot lines" whose callers need to count on
confidentiality---numbers to call for information on AIDS, for
example, or to report instances of child abuse?
What's more says Steinhardt, he is certain that a major client of
Caller ID will be companies who will record the numbers for future
use. A person calling an applicance store to check the price on a
refrigerator could find himself or herself getting a computer-generated
call for every appliance sale that occurs in the area.
There it was---the archetypal ultra-liberal bias---a belief that
anything on which someone can make a profit is, ipso facto,
{\it evil.} Come on, Barry, what about weighing the aggravation of getting
a few commercial messages over your phone against the advantage of
doing something about the 450,000 reported cases of telephone
harassment that occur each year in the state of Pennsylvania?
Steinhardt's answer is that another of the new services being offered
by the phone company would thwart annoyance calls as effectively as
Caller ID, with no threats to any innocent person's privacy. It's
called "Call Trace."
With Call Trace, the recipient of a an unwanted call can hang up,
punch in a three-number code and the number of the caller will be
printed out at the annoyance call department of the local telephone
business office, which can pass it along to the police.
Steinhardt concludes that Caller ID is another example of how
"encroaching technology strips away our privacy layer by layer."
Personally, if Caller ID is offered, I plan to get it, for several
reasons. I'm not afraid to let people have my phone number. I get a
lot of nut calls (a few of them from people who don't identify
themselves). Finally, none of the problems that Steinhardt warns
about appear to have become real problems during the market tests of
Caller ID in New Jersey (not yet, anyway).
Just the same, I think the questions Barry Steinhardt and the ACLU have
raised were worth considering. And I'm even glad they raised them.
{\it David R. Boldt is editor of the Inquirer Editorial Page.}