The Transparent Society
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275 ... Umberto Eco expressed this concern eloquently ... Lee Marshall, “The World According to Eco,” Wired, March 1997.
276 ... validity of box 2, in principle ... Box 2 is superior only when we are talking about potential threats to constitutional freedom. But there are other troubling questions. What of the “quiet” neighbors who are spouse beaters, child abusers, white-collar thieves, and so on? Should they be spared all accountability, just because they cannot plot a coup against democracy? It is a hard question, and one that might have different answers, depending on whether you are the powerful one or the powerless victim held in the dark, private tyranny of some individual homes.
CHAPTER 9
279 The interested reader is encouraged ... Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996). Schneier is a pragmatist who has no illusions about the practical problems of implementing crypto-systems. “Why Cryptography Is Harder than It Looks,” B. Schneier, Information Security Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 2, March 1997, pp. 31—36.
280 ... DNA Computer has drawn special attention ... “DNA Solution of Hard Computational Problems,” Richard J. Lipton, Science, vol. 268, 28 April 1995, p. 542. Also “Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems,” Leonard Adelman, Science, vol. 266, 11 November 1994, p. 1021.
286 ... gnat cameras ... seem plausible at this point ... The chief theoretical limit has to do with optics, where visual systems begin losing acuity when the size of the aperture gets too small. Actual insect eyes, for instance, have only crude image-forming capabilities, relying instead on localizing and characterizing types of motion. But this problem may not limit micro-imaging devices very much. A mobile surveillance system need only implant itself at a good vantage point, presumably in some shrouded corner with a view of some adversary, and then inflate an artificial air or gel-based lens to the size that is needed in order to concentrate enough light and escape diffraction limitations. In the long run, the point is not whether such devices are likely, or even plausible, but whether we should bet the entire farm against these surveillance tools ever appearing on the scene. In an open society, we will have a chance of knowing if they do arrive—and of holding their owners accountable.
287 Stepping back from far-out speculation ... For more on the Witness program, see http://www.witness.org.
289 Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Biology (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
290 ... favorite human pastime ... What is fiction but a made-up tale that the reader chooses to believe in for a while? (Note: One recent popular novel, The Truth Machine, by James L. Halperin, vividly depicts the quest for an effective lie detector.)
290 ... a less radical midway opinion may be more typical ... Once again, the reader is invited to try taking an informal poll among male and female friends regarding their attitudes toward the desirability of an effective, cheaply available lie detector. Draw your own conclusions.
292 ... Psychiatric Aspects of Wickedness ... Psychiatric Annals, vol. 27, no. 9 (Sept. 1997). A study released in 1997 showed that 80% of the 1.7 million men and women behind bars in the U.S. had abuse or addiction problems with drugs or alcohol (Columbia Univ.).
293 Most people are cowed by the power of large institutions ... See http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/HumanID.html.
295 Steven E. Miller, Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power and the Information Superhighway (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1996), p. 292.
295 ... According to one dour vision ... Gary T. Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
298 ... individuals tend to gravitate towards a safe average, suppressing individuality and creativity in favour of ... demands of an omniscient observer ... Philip E. Agre and Christine A. Harbs, “Social Choice About Privacy: Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems in the United States,” Information Technology & People, vol. 7, no. 4 (1994).
298 ... Dr. Seuss’s children’s story ... Dr. Seuss, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? (New York: Random House, 1973).
299 ... in his short story “I See You” ... In Damon Knight, On Side Laughing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). Another science fiction tale depicting people exchanging privacy for participation in a new culture can be seen in the novel Oath of Fealty, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
A WITHERING AWAY
306 ... government that creates markets in the first place ... Jaron Lanier, quoted from “Karma Vertigo: Or Considering the Excessive Responsibilities Placed on Us by the Dawn of the Information Infrastructure,” Netview: Global Business Network News, winter 1995. Although bureaucrats are often depicted as relentlessly power hungry, many officials actually share the same cautious attitude toward government’s proper role, as expressed in March 1997 by Christine A. Varney of the Federal Trade Commission, at the Seventh Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy: “First, I believe that, in general, government should regulate only when there has been an identifiable market failure or where an important public policy goal cannot be achieved without government intervention. Second, the pace of change in the information industry is unprecedented. Government regulation, on the other hand, moves very slowly, and the predictive skills of government agencies are notoriously limited. As a result, regulatory and legislative solutions to consumer protection issues are unlikely to be either timely or sufficiently flexible with respect to the digital world at this juncture. And finally, I believe the electronic medium itself offers new opportunities for consumer education and empowerment, which in turn increases the likelihood that self-regulatory regimes will be effective.”
307 ... paternalistic protections may prove less necessary ... Jeff Cooper, director of the Center for Information Strategy and Policy, contends that states have traditionally relied on five monopolies in order to maintain their sway: (1) legitimate use of violence, (2) promulgation of views through propaganda, (3) establishment of a firm currency and setting exchange rates, (4) access to cutting edge technology, and (5) expertise and credibility. Today we see the power of states eroding in four out of five of these categories. The new wired world offers vast alternatives to state propaganda, for instance. Private currency brokers are now more important than state bankers in establishing rates of exchange. New technologies enter the civilian realm so quickly that armed forces now buy many items straight off the shelves. And expertise is spreading to the populace at large, at unprecedented rates. The chief questions we face are (a) Do we really want the legitimate use of coercion or violence to be “deregulated” or “privatized” along with the rest? (b) Might there be plenty of jobs left for government, even if Cooper’s monopolies are broken? (c) Will the loss of state control in categories 2 through 5 be a democratic dispersal or simply wind up giving these powers over to the hands of other elites?
In a society that is mostly transparent, former monopolies 2 through 5 may become so widely distributed, among so many players, that accumulation of tyrannical power may never become likely again. This could result in nation-states that are less relentlessly dominant in our lives than in the past. That does not mean nations will necessarily go away, or even lose great importance in helping mediate consensus approaches to solving great problems. One role they can serve is as the centripetal centers of common loyalty that bind together all the diverse, spinning “tribes” of interest we will be joining, a core identification of citizenship that people share.
CHAPTER 10
310 ... initiative made by President Eisenhower ... The Soviets claimed that the “open skies” proposal was a step toward acquiring targeting information for a preemptive strike. Their counterproposal for limited overflights, while unsatisfactory and self-serving, might conceivably have been the basis for negotiated confidence building, but it was rejected by Washington. Special interests in both capitals had a stake in continued distrust. Nevertheless, few doubt Eisen
hower’s essential sincerity, or the foresight of his prediction that the alternative to openness would at best be a devastatingly expensive arms race. Several trillion dollars later, that bitter and secretive standoff has left an ecologically damaged world, barely keeping up with population growth, unable to afford truly ambitious projects such as acquisition of resources from outer space. A trillion dollars is a lot of money to spend on things that were supposed to be too scary ever to be used. Containment was effective, but an open world might have been better still.
310 ... democracies almost never wage war on one another ... Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism in World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80(4) (1986): 1151—69.
316 Some propose information itself as the target.... Jeffrey Cooper, “Understanding Information Warfare: Another View,” from Society and Security in the Information Age, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
318 ... invite outsiders to test ... A secondary effect of such contests would be to throw government and nongovernment techies into each other’s company for periods long enough for them to recognize their similarities and common ideals, and to realize that they are members of the same civilization.
319 ... Repression is not defensible ... David Rothkopf, “In Praise of Cultural Imperialism?” Foreign Policy (summer 1997). Rothkopf is managing director of Kissinger Associates.
319 ... lack of internal passport controls ... A possible sign of an end to this era may be seen in the fact that ticket holders on U.S. domestic airline flights are now asked to present a picture ID. Airline employees are trained in “profile watching” to alert superiors to types of individuals who score highly on a list of traits that are considered to correlate with potential security risk. Some see in these measures the slow but steady approach of authoritarianism. An alternative would be to view them as awkward and desperate measures that might be eliminated if transparency tools made air travel safe from terror threats. (See the earlier discussion of risk perception.)
320 ... toward a true center of culpability ... At this point let me drop even a pretense of scholarly detachment. Since World War II, Switzerland and its fellow banking havens have sheltered lucre for the world’s tax cheats, drug dealers, dictators, and mafias. In exchange for this money-laundering scam, the banks could charge large fees and, above all, get away with paying scant interest, a major unfair competitive advantage. Many Third World countries have been stripped of working capital by corrupt officials, entrenched elites, and criminal gangs. Out of these ill-gotten gains, the pittance that was not squandered—perhaps a few tens of billions of dollars—arguably rests at this moment in coffers alongside “dormant” accounts of Nazi warlords and their hapless murdered victims. One might envision those poor nations someday demanding justice—as depicted in my novel Earth—but real pressure can come only from the West. Recently, the bankers of Berne and Vaduz have begun loosening the ignominious shroud of secrecy just enough to eliminate some of their most disreputable clients, a few notorious drug lords, as a sop to Western governments. But this gesture may not suffice when hard-pressed U.S. and European taxpayers estimate how much of their own burden might ease if aristocratic tax cheaters had to account for their fair share.
Whether or not this scenario actually comes to pass, it is credible enough that the world’s elites should go on notice. Caching their reserves in such havens may be self-defeating in the long run, creating a dossier that will later haunt them when secret lists are handed over to placate an angry world. From now on it might be better to invest the money, whether ill gotten or not, in real estate.
322 ... the scientific spirit is more human ... J. Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
CHAPTER 11
328 ... a wired, global society, the concept of openness has never been more important .... Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom: A History of the Future 1980—2020,” Wired, July 1997; see also http://www.wired.com/5.07/longboom/.
328 Jaron Lanier, “Karma Vertigo: Or Considering the Excessive Responsibilities Placed on Us by the Dawn of the Information Infrastructure,” Netview: Global Business Network News, vol. 6, no. 1, winter 1994—95.
FOLLOW-UP
Join a critical discussion on openness. The Foresight Institute, a nonprofit educational organization examining the impact of coming technologies, will sponsor a series of online discussions on the goal of openness and its relationship to surveillance and encryption technologies in the twenty-first Century. Interested participants are invited to visit http://crit.org/openness on the Web for information on these discussions, which are tentatively scheduled for June and December 1998, 1999, and 2000, featuring contributions by both advocates and opponents of transparency. Archives of past discussions will also be available.
In addition to comments or criticism of this book, some questions that might be worth pursuing are as follows:
1. What accumulations of power do people fear most and are those centers of power best controlled by blinding them or by forcing accountability on them? What real or potential power elites are getting too little attention nowadays?
2. Looking to history: Is there an example where a civilization failed because it was too open? Are there any examples when generalized secrecy helped prevent tyranny?
3. Do we need new social innovations to help unite and draw us together while we fly apart into a million little tribes? What do we need to flourish as a society in an Age of Amateurs?
None of us will have the last word on this subject. If we create a society that is dynamic, progressive, and free, our descendants are sure to find many of our abstract posturings rather quaint and amusing. That’s just fine. As long as we keep raising children who are smarter and better than we are, all these problems we’re agonizing over will sort themselves out in the long run.
Our brainy descendants will have other things to worry about.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
ABBIE HOFFMAN
I want to thank those who lent a kind (and critical) eye to early drafts of this book. These good folks include Stefan Jones, John Gilmore, Steve Jackson, Carl Malamud, Roger Clarke, Oliver Morton, John Perry Barlow, Bruce Murray, Bruce Sterling, Chris Peterson, Robin Hanson, Xavier Fan, Martha Minow, Ann Florini, Peter Swire, Michael Foale, Gregory Benford, Joe Miller, Robert Qualkinbush, Gary T. Marx, Wendy Grossman, Steinn Sigurdsson, Jonathan R. Will, Joseph Carroll, Eric J. Sprunk, Hollis Heimbouch, Nick Arnett, Rebecca Eisenberg, Erik and Rebecca Van Riper, Mark Burgess, Jay Kunin, James Flynn, Robert Redfield, Victor Stone, Geoffrey Landis, Peter Becker, Ira Moskatel, Dina Heredia, Bear Giles, Damien Sullivan, Declan McCullagh, Jeff Cooper, and Barry Fulton. A book like this one profits immensely from the attacks and brickbats of those who disagree with it. (Isn’t criticism the foremost defense against error?) Therefore, I thank those whose courteous—or caustic—disagreement revealed flaws in earlier drafts, helping make this book a better argument for transparency: Philip Agre, William Campbell, Reilly Jones, Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Solveig Singleton, and Matt Blaze.
Kalinda Basho was meticulous as my assistant. Special thanks go to John Bell, my editor, as well as to my agent Ralph Vicinanza. Finally, I owe so much to my wife, Dr. Cheryl Brigham, who contributed wondrous labors of research, innumerable insights, and support. If the light is to shine, it must begin at home.
INDEX
Accountability
adversarial system and
anonymity vs.
of authority
of business
of elites
encryption and
ensuring
of government
government policies aiding
importance of
laws regarding
matrix of
mutuality of
vs. privacy
secrecy vs.
value of
ACLU
&n
bsp; and personal information issues
and privacy issues
ACLU v. Janet Reno
Adams, Scott
Adelman, Leonard
Aficionados, role of
Agre, Philip
Alderman, Ellen
Amateurism, benefits of
American Civil Liberties Union
Ames, Aldrich
Anarcho-libertarian view
Anderson, Walter Truett
Andreesen, Marc
Anguilla
Anne, Statute of
anon.penet.fi
Anonymity
accountability hampered by
costs and benefits of
dangers of
defined
gender-based attitudes toward
history of
vs. pseudonymity