The Transparent Society

by David Brin

  226 Even when it comes to tending the earth ... There is a long-standing myth that other cultures were better environmentalists, simply because they lived closer to the land, and because our present world civilization seems so rapacious toward natural resources. But these differences diminish when today’s environmental damage is divided up among the population on a per capita basis, and when careful analysis is made of past depredations against the earth, committed by supposedly nature-loving clans and tribes. John Perlin’s A Forest Journey (New York: Norton, 1989) makes it clear that there is nothing new about short-sighted exploitation of resources, since people are driven more by near-term hunger than by long-term husbandry. What is relatively new is a widespread and growing consciousness of environmentalism among today’s well-educated world population. An awareness that shows real signs of becoming powerful and habitual in the years and generations ahead. The key element appears to be a low level of ambient fear. When individuals are fearful, the environment never scores high on any scale of concern. It is when individuals can pause and think beyond near-term concerns that they begin pondering posterity.

  THE PROBLEM OF EXTORTION

  228 ... those warnings that are backed up by a credible track record ... Consider the following innovative criminal scheme, an interesting turn on the old “stock market expert” swindle. An extortionist sets up one thousand assumed names and uses them to send death threats to a million people. After a year, he checks on who has died of natural or other causes. (He did nothing to induce any of the deaths—at least not directly.) Out of his one thousand encrypted aliases, the crook keeps the one hundred that had the best prediction records—the highest death rates. He then makes a second round of threats. Again a year passes and he checks which aliases are associated with the highest natural death rates, culling the ten most successful names. A year after that he is left with just with a single alias. But that one name by now has a fearsome reputation for success at targeting people for mysterious death! He then posts a final threat. Using the final name and its dreaded encrypted calling card, he demands payment of $1,000 in untraceable ecash from a million suckers in exchange for allowing them to continue living—a cheap price to most folks. For the cost of a few cleverly spammed e-mail messages, and without ever carrying out a single traceable physical act, he becomes a billionaire!

  Fortunately (but alas for those of you considering pulling this scam), there are several decisive flaws to the plan. Readers are invited to figure them out.

  CHAPTER 8

  231 ... on its way to becoming the most frightened ... A. Wildavsky, American Scientist, 67 (1979), p.32.

  234 ... Similar mixtures of confidentiality and assigned responsibility ... Partial juror anonymity is well known in the scientific peer review process, whereby articles submitted to technical journals are anonymously critiqued by several experts. While this confidentiality encourages generally open appraisals of a paper, the option of unsealing the reviewers’ identity is available, if suspicion of partiality is raised.

  235 ... fringe believes such invisibility will remain possible ... This fantasy was reflected in the television series, Max Headroom, which depicted a computer-networked world of tomorrow in which many individuals chose to become “blanks”—opting out of the databases and living in a shadowy economy on the streets.

  235 ... restrict use of the number by federal agencies ... The U.S. Privacy Act of 1974 (Public Law 93-579) does not go so far as to require agencies using the SSN to change to some other identifier, nor does it prevent agencies from using the SSN for new purposes; however, it does make it unlawful for federal, state, or local governments to deny an individual rights or benefits based simply on whether a client refused to provide his or her SSN.

  236 ... Why Should People Lie? ... Except that it does happen. An author I know was impersonated for years by someone who arranged book signings, gave radio interviews discussing my colleague’s novels as if she had written them, and finally began signing documents in the real author’s name! The impostor did real harm, yet for years no one ever thought to ask for proof that she was who she claimed to be.

  239 Am I dubious this will work as planned? ... Are modern encryption techniques truly ready to handle the coming needs of electronic commerce? This book is not a tome about that weighty subject. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that many of the claims being made by proponents of e-commerce—that it will be secure, efficient, and accountable—have still to be proved. No technique has yet been developed that can simultaneously guarantee authentication, privacy, and atomicity (making sure that the transaction happens only once). When you add some of the other dangers that have been widely discussed, such as unexpected software glitches, or disgruntled software designers setting up back doors to allow undetected theft or fraud, the resulting scenario may be too frail and unreliable a foundation to depend on for the economic well-being of an entire world. Under these circumstances, people might still demand paper receipts for a long time to come. A hard copy keeps both sides of a transaction accountable, and makes it reconstructible, if volatile electronic memories unexpectedly go “poof.” (More on this later.)

  243 ... using the Social Security number ... Illustrating this trend, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is now calling for the collection of the SSNs of all air travelers, not primarily for security reasons, but in order to identify victims of accidents. Whether or not this particular request is blocked, such efforts will only multiply in the future.

  247 ... time limits, which have been reduced ... A bipartisan federal commission on government secrecy, the second in the nation’s history, reported that the government kept too much secret for too long, and blamed “a culture of secrecy” for fostering and perpetuating conspiracy theories. The commission proposed a National Declassification Center to oversee an opening process. Most classified material would be made public after ten years, all after thirty years. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated, “The culture of secrecy in place in the federal government will modernize only if there comes about a counterculture of openness, a climate which simply assumes that secrecy is not the starting place.”

  247 ... some kinds of transparency should be ... Alas, as we will see in chapter 9, it is very likely that technology will set time limits for us. Any security system that is adequate for one decade may seem like tissue during the next. The ciphers guarding old secret files and records may wind up having a natural decay rate. If so, we will all have to assume that even whispers may echo back to us, someday.

  249 By codifying the Govemment’s power to spy invisibly ... Diffie seems to assume that the wealthy, the powerful, and criminals require a government-mandated back door in order to do their sneaking around, when in fact what all these groups really need is a haze to remain hidden and unaccountable from both government and the public at large.

  250 ... an encryption tax or tariff ... The notion of “bit taxes” has already been raised by Walter Truett Anderson, a Canadian economist. Dr. Arthur Cordell proposed an alternative as a method for governments to survive the information age: every digital bit of information transmitted on the Net would be taxed at some minuscule amount, say, .000000001 cents a bit, or one-billionth of a cent, on every single item of e-mail, every piece of data. Naturally, most netizens abhor this idea. Clinton administration Commerce Secretary William Daley has already said that the Internet should be considered a “tariff-free environment,” but we are in early days yet, and the official tune may change when e-commerce takes over as the major cashenthalpy flow in the economy. Encryption taxes and other ideas may or may not be practical on today’s Internet, but what about the new networks being put together by the NSF, or DARPA, or consortia including IBM and MCI, whose designs are not yet finished? Perhaps one or more of these might be set aside for anonymousencrypted traffic, while secrecy is discouraged on others? We may wind up having several realms, each with its own rules, a diversity that may lend civilization strength.

  The advantage o
f an encryption tax over a mere bit tax is that raw bit traffic is not a deleterious commodity whose reduction might provide a social good. Rather, taxing bit flows would inherently burden and even threaten openness—like atherosclerotic plaque on the walls of a body’s blood vessels. But taxing encrypted traffic is another matter entirely. One needn’t create a huge bureaucracy of officials to enforce this tax, or inspect every portal of the Internet for coded messages. We would never catch or detect most cases, but a significant sampling would do. If tattle-tale audits were carried out by private individuals or competitors, that should be enough to keep things reasonably honest and above board, in much the same way that shoplifting is suppressed to irritating but bearable levels nowadays mostly by the alert eyes of other customers, not by a store’s harried employees.

  250 ... same principle should be vigorously applied to government agencies ... The tricky part would be how to make sure agencies did not writhe to evade such limitations, or simply “budget away” the added costs. Nevertheless, such a tool could be worth exploring, especially if everyone came to see it as a matter of simple equity—treating all secretkeepers equally.

  252 ... Public Feedback Regulation ... Professor Peter Swire, Public Feedback Regulation: Learning to Govern in the Age of Computers, Telecommunications, and the Media, Unpublished Study, 1993. See wsw.osu.edu/units/law/swire.html.

  257 ... may fight for a general policy of live and let live ... This optimistic scenario assumes that all the different types of weirdos are smart enough to see what they have in common with other weirdos. This is a supposition, and it may not happen, as we see in the darker examples given in chapter 9. In addition to tolerance of eccentricity, a world of light will also need forgiveness, a tendency to let minor transgressions slip into the past. Again, there are three ways this might be achieved: (1) mandated amnesia, as credit bureaus are now required to “forget” consumer information that is more than seven years old; (2) exhorting people to have a forgiving attitude towards others; and (3) creating a situation in which gossips and harridans find it in their own best interests to let others forget mistakes that they have outgrown, because it will be easy to turn the glare of disapproval around and shine it on the imprudent past errors of disapprovers.

  Each of these three solutions has problems. Number one has limited effectiveness in dealing with specific institutions, and will not prevent banks or other companies from maintaining their own secret lists, for example, noting bankruptcies more than seven years old. Basically, solution number one tries to overcome the human drive to know things.

  Number two, exhortation, has a miserable track record, when used all by itself. Number three, reciprocal transparency, is at least partly hypothetical. Many examples show that tolerance based on self-interest plays a role in modern life. But whether the method will translate into the future, as depicted on these pages, is a view that the author freely admits to be speculative.

  258 ... database containing reports by all the women that the young man had previously dated ... Again, try polling your friends about this use of “dating databases,” and see if there is a difference between the responses of men and women.

  260 ... role of producer or critic won’t vanish ... Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason magazine (a libertarian journal), projects that the twenty-first century will be the “age of editors,” because human potential for creativity will tap a vast reserve of billions of educated minds; the real art will be in sifting the datascape, culling and selecting, nurturing and guiding—and finally drawing the attention of a distracted multitude to something new that’s worthy to rise above the general storm of new things.

  260 Lee Marshall, “The World According to Eco” (interview), Wired, March 1997.

  260 “... tag commentary ... a few parasitic bytes affixed to any data stream ...” Some experts dislike the term “tag commentary,” and I can’t blame them. For one thing, metadata concerning a particular message do not have to be “affixed to” the data itself but can flow or be stored elsewhere, yet be logically associated with their intended referent. W3C PICS and RDF are among the technology initiatives currently working along these lines. Nevertheless, for the purposes of helping a general audience visualize the concept, I have kept with the original terminology I used in 1987.

  262 ... Percolation may have drawbacks ... Note that one experiment along these lines can be found at http://www.crit.org. Percolation may wind up depending on something like the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). This system proposes a general labeling infrastructure for Internet traffic, while leaving the labeling vocabulay to the user. Some proposed uses of PICS labels are to rate levels of language, violence, nudity, and sex, or whether a product has been scanned for viruses. Publishers can label their own sites, but cannot prevent others from distributing further labels about them. PICS could also note privacy ratings. Your Web browser could flash a warning if a site doesn’t match your privacy preferences. PICS shifts the burden of censorship from online publishers to the individual users. But some claim that PICS filters could be imposed at the level of proxy server or nation-state, providing a tool for censors and making it easier for countries such as China or Singapore to impose restrictions. HotWired columnist Simson Garfinkel described PICS as “the most effective global censorship technology ever designed.”

  263 Does [Buck Henry’s skit] illustrate the decadent ... future? ... If so, Plato will turn out to be right in predicting that the final outcome of democracy is mob rule, followed by a takeover of his preferred approach to government; dictatorship by a “noble” elite.

  266 ... modern observers who think we have entered an era of unpredictability ... See Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), and Edward Tenner. Why Things Bite Back (New York: Knopf, 1996).

  267 ... a “predictions market” ... University of California economist Robin Hanson calls his system a “betting pool on disputed science questions, where the current odds-on favorites are treated as the current intellectual consensus. Ideas futures markets let you bet on the future settlement of a scientific controversy. [See http://www.ideosphere.com/ and http://hanson.berkeley.edulideafutures.html.] But the method may have wider applications.” Note: a form of predictions market was depicted in John Brunner’s wonderfully prescient science fiction novel The Shockwave Rider in 1974, a work that illustrated principles of transparency and also invented the terminology, possibly the very concepts, of computer “viruses” and “worms.”

  267 ... Anyone claiming to have special foresight ... In management, the yearly performance review is supposedly a kind of predictions registry, attempting to further the careers of those who have done well. In fact, this is basic to almost all forms of accountability, as humans strive to tell the difference between those who are credible and those who, despite their superficial charismatic allure, are not.

  268 ... lets them be applied anywhere, any time ... Regarding the “specificity score” of any prediction, one notes that, way back in 1798, in one of Europe’s most popular books, the authors claimed to show how every verse and phrase of the Book of Revelation meticulously related to Napoleon Bonaparte and his contemporaries. Today we see the same level of blithe certainty in countless millennialist treatments of the very same biblical passages. In not a single case does the writer ponder why protean vagueness should be a desirable trait in prophecy.

  268 ... society should take notice ... Regarding potential for a predictions registry consider the intriguing possibility of a “policymaker’s dating service.” It is a simple fact of life that certain charismatic types of individuals (like Kennedys) are likely to have exceptional influence in our world, by virtue of charisma, social skills, or family connections. This is bound to happen, because human beings have always been swayed by such qualities. Unfortunately, charisma and connections have little positive or negative correlation with being right. On the other hand, there are lots of people out there who have excellent track records for accuracy and good judgme
nt, who will never get anywhere near a position of power because they are also irksome, funkylooking, not well connected, or hard to get along with. Our hypothetical predictions registry offers a unique possibility of matching these two types of individuals. Imagine if the charismatic could be paired up with those who have proved astute! What service could better help society than to unite those who are destined to be powerful with advisers who will help them to be right! (Or at least to steer them away from the most egregious blunders.)

  268 ... fans suspensefully follow champion seers ... In a growing hobby of “celebrity markets,” fans bet on the relative values, rising and falling, of movie star careers. This is a concrete (if trivial) example of ad hoc registries becoming a participatory sport, as well as catering to spectators.

  “THE PLAUSIBILITY MATRIX”

  273 ... put us on more even ground .... Some suggest that in a world of masks there will be safety for average citizens because the rich will be in competition with each other, and ultimately will hold one another at bay. Alas, there is no evidence that such a thing happens outside the influence of fierce social and governmental constraints. Medieval Europe, the Roman Empire, imperial China, nineteenth-century American robber barons, and countless other cases indicate that, on the contrary, aristocrats see it as in their own best interests to collude. Confronting each other head-on can be terribly risky. Yes, there are flashy feuds and “wars,” but the upper classes routinely dropped all such struggles to unite at the first sign of serious competition from below. By acknowledging each other’s spheres of influence, oligarchs found it possible to fleece the lower classes like sheep in a field.