mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin) (04/02/91)
Bernie Cosell's posting seems to me to be an excellent articulation of the anti-privacy position (which he makes a point of saying he does not necessarily share, by the way). I believe that John Gilmore's speech at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in San Francisco last week addresses at least one of the anti-privacy arguments. John pointed out that we live in a society in which each of us breaks laws, knowingly or unknowingly, all the time. The easy accessibility of personal data makes it easy for the government to exercise its discretion to prosecute us or otherwise make our lives miserable. It may well be that privacy is "just a cloak for illegal activity"-- the illegal activity that, as fallible human beings, we cannot help engaging in. --Mike -- Mike Godwin, (617) 864-0665 | "You gotta put down the ducky mnemonic@eff.org | if you wanna play the saxophone." Electronic Frontier | Foundation |
learn@gargoyle.uchicago.edu (William Vajk ) (04/02/91)
In article <1991Apr1.180311.5557@eff.org> Mike Godwin writes: >It may well be that privacy is "just a cloak for illegal activity"-- >the illegal activity that, as fallible human beings, we cannot help >engaging in. Current events have, alas, limited my reading time of late so I've only managed to get about 1/4th of the way through _Privacy, Studies in Social and Cultural History_ by Barrington Moore, Jr. (M. E. Sharpe Inc, Armonk, N.Y. but distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Hello Bennett old pal......1984) I fear the view held by most classicly "law & order" oriented folks dismisses a lot of human nature and human needs with the irrereverance of citing irrelevance. Moore explores privacy issues in several frameworks. He studies the anthropological perspectives, practices in classical Athens, in the Old Testament, and ancient Chinese conceptions of public and private. Ultimately Moore draws in the Great American Dream, the little house with the picket fence, as a bastion of privacy which has been the dream of many. Ultimately, it is this sort of feeling for need of privacy which is demolished when investigations are undertaken. The American response, historically, has been to defend the individual's right to such privacy unless events of overwhelming importance to the state mandate a breach of the promise made to the individual by the Constitution. The legal aspects are not taken lightly. The laws, generally speaking, establish the limits of appropriate behavior for the government when dealing with citizens in an investigatory mode. Sometimes, in spite of the best efforts of the state, events conspire with temperaments with results which exceede the mandated limits. There are two approaches to understanding the human desire for privacy. The first is to be an armchair philosopher, not taking the time or trouble to understand beyond some narrow "within arm's reach" data. The second is to give some real thought and consideration to the problems, understanding that anything about the human being which has cross cultural manifestations doubtless has multiple reasons for being. For those of you who wish to delve a bit more deeply into several of the issues relating to privacy, I offer the following little bibliography as highly recommneded reading (please feel free to add your favorites): ============================================================================= The Mind Managers, Herbert I. Schiller, Beacon Press, Boston, 1973 The Age of Attila (op), C. D. Gordon, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1972 Utility and Rights, R. G. Frey, University of Minnesota Press, 1984 Essays on Freedom and Power, Lord Acton (any number of paperback versions...) Controlling Unlawful Organizational Behavior, Diane Vaughan, Univ of Chicago Press, 1983 The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, (any number of paperback versions...) =============================================================================== I don't deny the concept that we all violate laws, mostly inadvertantly. But I strongly oppose the notion that such human behaviors result in anything more than yet another reason for desiring privacy. Bill Vajk | Fundamental to our way of life is the belief that when | information which properly belongs to the public is | withheld by those in power, the people will soon become | ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who | manage them, and --eventually--incapable of determining | their own destinies. | | - Richard M. Nixon, 22 November 1972
karn@epic.bellcore.com (Phil R. Karn) (04/04/91)
In article <1991Apr1.180311.5557@eff.org>, mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin) writes: |> [...] John [Gilmore] pointed out |> that we live in a society in which each of us breaks laws, |> knowingly or unknowingly, all the time. The easy accessibility |> of personal data makes it easy for the government to exercise |> its discretion to prosecute us or otherwise make our lives |> miserable. I believe that it is always possible (though not necessarily easy) to draft a law to address a truly legitimate compelling public interest in a way that does not violate fundamental Constitutional guarantees. True, a few unconstitutional laws do get overturned from time to time, but the real problem is with the many more bad laws still on the books. In my opinion, the importance of the Fourth Amendment's implied privacy guarantees comes from the fact that most of the bad laws attempt to protect people from themselves, or involve consensual private conduct with minimal externalities. By making someone's home and property off-limits to government "fishing expeditions" and setting probable-cause requirements for search warrants, most of these bad laws are rendered essentially unenforceable. This at least limits the damage they can do until they can be overturned. The classic example is the law in various states against sodomy and/or fornication. As long as the parties involved are consenting adults and keep their activities private, the government has no way of going after them even though their activities may technically be illegal. Gambling and prostitution are other possible examples. Another (admittedly more controversial) example is the private use of illegal drugs by adults. Although the people who use them may well be guilty of extreme stupidity, I see no justification for making ANY activity illegal unless it has a significant effect on unwilling or legally incompetent parties (e.g., driving while intoxicated, giving drugs to minors). Governments are supposed to protect people from each other -- not from themselves, with the possible exception of minors. Unfortunately, the latter role is significantly interfering with the former. Anyway, a big challenge to us computer privacy experts now is to find ways of keeping the government from using computer technology to collect information (e.g., videotape rental records, magazine subscriptions, telephone call records, shopping receipts, etc) and then digesting that information en masse to uncover private, technically illegal activities. Although much of this information could have been gathered and processed manually without computers, the ease with which computers can do the job may result in a qualitative change in the enforceability of a truly bad law. Granted, it would be best to work for the abolition of the bad laws to begin with. But as a technologist, I think the most effective near-term solutions will be based on technology. And the most effective strategy here will be to keep the information out of the hands of the government to begin with, since it is clear that you cannot control the information once they get it. Phil
cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) (04/04/91)
How about if private actors gather the personal information and GIVE it to the government, either for a fee or out of the goodness of their hearts? Anything wrong with that? Bob Jacobson --
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (04/04/91)
No, we can limit the government any way we wish. Naturally if we forbid them to collect information on us, we can also forbid them from buying it or using it from private sources. There are lots of things that the government can't do that private citizens can (and vice versa). Nothing new here. I am all for putting as much restriction on the government here as seems necessary. It has no fundamental rights, unlike us. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) (04/05/91)
mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin) writes: }Bernie Cosell's posting seems to me to be an excellent }articulation of the anti-privacy position (which he makes a }point of saying he does not necessarily share, by the way). Indeed! :-) I now understand a bit better about being a devil's advocate: to do it effectively, you really have to not keep disclaiming everything you write [so that it will read persuasively.. you ARE supposed to be defending the other side, right?] On the other hand, it becomes easy for people jumping onto the thread [especially with excerpting] to *put* you on the other side of the fence... I'll disclaim here, just once: I am almost fanatically pro-privacy. I've argued and debated it both on the net and in various other forums for years. But basically, I think we've lost! I'll respond some to the thread [maintaining the d-a position, on the whole], but as I hope you'll see, the arguments _for privacy are mostly very subtle and often just hypothetical; by contrast the arguments _against_ privacy can be very seductive, practical, easy to grasp. Is the 'common man' better or worse off if the police can track every movement of every person? Imagine that you could have "knocker ID"? How about being able to buy an 'intrusion monitor', and in the unfortunate event that your house was burglarized, you could just check the "presence logs" and read out the IDs of every person who set foot on your property. Would you run to embrace it? [think of it as the next step in ensuring the 'privacy' of your home after the world becomes comfortable with caller-id --- answering the phone [and hanging it up] is baby stuff: how about doing something about that person at the door before you REALLY commit yourself by opening it?] Well, arrayed against the philsophical arguments about potential abuses of such "people tracking", one will have to do something the constant pressure of the seductions of such a scheme: just as folks who think they get too many junk calls rush to embrace caller-id, I suspect people who feel threatened in their neighborhoods will rush to embrace it, and call those of us who counsel against such dangerous toys luddites or worse. How do you make the arguments for continued, vigilant asceticism sound as persuasive as the ones for the seductions of taking advantage of some neat new toy if you can get the privacy-sissies to bend just a little, just this one time, and if things go awry we can patch it up later, Back to my Devil's Advocate role.... :-).... }.. John pointed out }that we live in a society in which each of us breaks laws, }knowingly or unknowingly, all the time.... In what way is this a relevant observation [aside that it is true]? Should we deny the police to enforce the burglary/rape/whatever laws effectively because they might use those powers to enforce parking-too-far-from-the-curb violations? Should we let muggers go free so that we don't go wild arresting people for tearing the tags off of their pillows? Why shouldn't the response to John's observation be "OK, so fix the laws, but what does this have to do with the police going after the REAL criminals?" }The easy accessibility }of personal data makes it easy for the government to exercise }its discretion to prosecute us or otherwise make our lives }miserable. This is all very hypthetical. Who gets to decide which are the bad crimes and which are the good? This discretion exists ANYWAY, and crippling the police from enforcing the laws, all of them and any of them, is pretty arbitrary: if you don't want the police to enforce some particular law, shouldn't you be making the law go away, rather than trying to so-cripple the police that they _cannot_ enforce it? Is THIS what privacy is for: to allow us to *knowingly* flout the laws? Should it be personal discretion as to which laws we use our "cloak of secrecy" to hide? What sort of society is that? /Bernie\
njacobs@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov (Nick Jacobs) (04/11/91)
In article <63587@bbn.BBN.COM>, cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) writes... [preamble omitted] >Well, I've become real pessimistic of late. Let me uplevel the >question. Discussing 'privacy' instead of the specific assault is >already one level up --- I'd like to move another level up and ask >about privacy, itself. CAN one make a case that privacy is >protectable, or worthwhile, or even means anything? > >Here are three conundrums that seem to do a pretty good job of >skewering the case for privacy, (and the more I think about them the >more despondent I get): > > 1) privacy is just a cloak for illegal activity [i.e., trading > privacy for security is a win] [other points omitted] >around the general topic of privacy, I've _never_ found a persuasive >argument to counter this. Why shouldn't police be allowed to frisk >people at random on the street? or search cars [or even homes] on a >hunch, or less? If you don't do drugs, why do you bitch so much about >drug testing? What do you have to hide, anyway? The debate always >ends up with the anti-privacy folks having specific, concrete, >immediate, seductive _advantages_ of foregoing a bit of privacy, while >the pro-privacy folk end up making vague, theoretical, philosophical, >"but what if" arguments against. For me, the question is mainly one of individual freedom from the power of the government. Who decides what is "illegal"? The government decides. Yes, in some states, homosexuals need a right to privacy as a "cloak for illegal activity" - for example. Our real difficulty is simply that for much of the period since the founding of the United States, Americans have not suffered a really repressive government. The founding fathers did an outstanding job on the Constitution; Congress and sundry Administrations have been steadily chipping away at it for two hundred years, and it's only in fairly recent times that they have made much "progress", to our cost. Lacking the experience of very repressive government, many Americans are slow to see the dangers of increasing the government's information resources. As you point out, it's always possible to point to benefits of letting Big Brother look after us more efficiently. And as you did not point out, the most influential, persuasive people in the world (the politicians - including the media) have a strong vested interest in arguing that case, in order to increase their own power. Many people think that the danger is exaggerated, that we're so very far from states like Stalin's Soviet Union or George Orwell's world that there is no need to worry. The problem is twofold. First, a government tends to increase its power exponentially; the more powerful it gets, the more capable it becomes of increasing its power further. As a familiar example, look at US history. The increase in the power of the Federal Government between, say, 1920 and now (~ 70 years) is larger than the increase in its power between its founding and 1920 (~ 150 years). Second, technology has given government the means to interfere in our lives more easily than ever before. Of course Orwell already saw this trend. And in any case, I believe that we already have oppressive government. But that's a subject in itself and off-topic. > /Bernie\ Nick