The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

by David Brin

  One thing is certain: panic won’t be quelled by exhortation alone. I believe a free people can be persuaded to accept risk, provided the balance strikes them as sensible and reasonable. (See the discussion of risk analysis in chapter 6.) But grand moralistic statements will seem like droplets in a whirlwind of recriminations if the public ever feels naked, frightened, and betrayed. Politically, it will be impossible to resist an avalanche of legislation granting authorities sweeping new powers, going vastly beyond the scope of pathetic little Clipper.

  By then it will be too late to establish a working relationship of negotiated trust between the Justice Department and groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or to protect freedom by instituting safeguarding systems of reciprocal transparency so that the government’s new powers of vision are matched by equally fierce measures for oversight.

  Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were refused because each side was so busy self-righteously being right.

  Unless the negotiations to which Vice President Gore referred are undertaken with goodwill by all sides, that tragedy could very well loom on our horizon.

  Or else ...

  Or else, maybe not.

  Ironically, all of this may matter very little in the long run. The whole argument could become moot for basic technical reasons. As we shall see in chapter 9, some very smart people have begun suggesting that there is simply no such thing as a reliably unbreakable code. Given enough resources, and new innovations on the horizon, any encryption scheme might be threatened, at least enough to deny its users the carefree sense of inviolability promised by crypto-proselytes. Moreover, even the strongest encryption method might be bypassed by a variety of techniques outside the computers, in the physical world.

  If even a small part of this proves true, anyone relying with total confidence on a favorite downloaded or store-bought scrambling routine—counting on shuffled bits to resist the skeleton keys of great and powerful institutions—might as well supplement that reliance with prayer, a flannel blanket, and a well-sucked thumb.

  Anonymity on the Internet has an important benefit. It can enable those who fear political or social reprisal to speak out.

  JAMAIS CASCIO

  Cypherpunks don’t want real confrontations or discussions, or they would reveal their identities and make it possible to respond, as most flamers do.... Anonymous communication makes verbal violence easy.

  ION KATZ

  THE ALLURE OF SECRECY

  Let me start this section with a disclaimer. Not all secrecy is harmful. As we saw in chapter 3, there are many times and places when each of us needs to withdraw into a private world, or share specific information or personal musings with a friend, or engage in some private endeavor unobserved and unbothered by others. In fact there is a very real danger, for reasons that we shall cover later in this book, that the coming technologies of pervasive vision may push us too far toward transparency. So, for the record, let me say that a wide variety of secret transactions will be worth trying to safeguard in the next century. For example: • The relationship confidentiality presently enjoyed by patient and therapist, or attorney and client, or pastoral worker and parishioner should be protected if possible.

  • In a dangerous world, states will continue striving to conceal vital technical, tactical, and strategic information from potential foes (see chapter 10, “Global Transparency”).

  • Professionals need some space to work in without feeling a glare of relentless scrutiny. If all meetings must be open and recorded, participants will feel less free to offer original or impulsive suggestions—“to see if an idea flies”—out of fear that they will forever be branded for some offhand remark. Already, many officials of the U.S. government will not take written notes, lest they later be subpoenaed.

  • Sometimes information must be kept secret from the public temporarily, such as when a sunken Revolutionary War gunboat was discovered underwater in Lake Champlain in June 1997. To keep the wreck from being raided by souvenir hunters, the exact location was withheld until a formal expedition could explore the site first.

  • It has been pointed out that secrecy is currently the default condition when it comes to communication by mail, or telephone, or in conversing with someone at a restaurant. Most of the time, we engage in such activities with a fair degree of certainty that the information exchanged was not snooped by hidden eavesdroppers or busybodies.

  In all such cases, pragmatic solutions may be worked out during the coming years, because the secrecy involved does not necessarily lead to unaccountability. For instance, therapists in some states and countries must override confidentiality if they have strong reason to believe that a violent crime is about to be committed. Most Western nations put time limits on the secrecy of important documents, opening them for scrutiny by historians after the set period (often far too generous) has expired. Even many crypto-advocates do not deny the lawful right of justice officers to snoop the mail and telephone traffic of criminal suspects, after fulfilling all the requirements of due process. (As one cypherpunk blithely put it, “They are welcome to try.”)

  Unfortunately, as we have seen all too often, the natural drives of self-interest and human nature tend to cause those involved to push, or drift, toward ever-increasing amounts of secrecy. People can be counted on to use some genuine need as an excuse for greater concealment than is really necessary for the accomplishment of their beneficial task. While individuals and groups would err toward granting themselves more shelter from accountability, it is in society’s interest to counter this trend by pressing for less.

  What must any pragmatist (or person with compassion) conclude from all of this? Many innocuous kinds of secrecy may find a place in a decent civilization of tomorrow. But since the natural drift will always be to justify too much, we are well advised to be wary of such trends and lean the other way for safety’s sake.

  Nowhere is this more true that when it comes to the most dangerous form of secrecy. The one kind that is all too often aimed directly at eluding responsibility or accountability.

  Anonymity

  Radio essayist Garrison Keillor once described the pleasure he felt, coming to New York as a young man, to find that he could move along the streets and avenues unknown and unnoted by the crowds. It was strangely liberating after life in a small town, where everybody knew everything about everybody else. Such experiences were common in this century. For generations, Americans left village gossips and busybodies behind to dwell among countless strangers, picking and choosing whom to know, while everyone else remained as nameless as clouds, or trees, or blades of grass.

  This experience is directly related to the topic of encryption. Indeed, the spread of pervasive anonymity in coming decades will rely heavily on new technologies for creating ever more cryptic secret codes. There is great overlap between those who favor unrestricted private and commercial use of encryption and those who advocate anonymity as a sovereign right, or even a great benefit to society at large.

  Lately, pundits and commentators have been telling us that the information superhighway will expand and enhance this power to wear masks and veils. People can sign on to Internet discussion groups using pseudonyms, much like the “handles” that became popular back when CB radios were all the rage. There are many highly publicized ways to send messages or retrieve data anonymously—either for legitimate purposes or in order to make a nuisance of yourself on the Net—and, supposedly, with complete impunity.

  And yet, anybody with enough technical background knows better. Nobody can guarantee that a pseudonym will hide your true Internet identity from a truly first-rate hacker who is adamant about finding it out.

  An analogy might be made to caller ID, which lets a person, on hearing her telephone ring, consult a little screen to check the number of the person who is calling. So informed, she may choose to ignore the call, or program her moder
n answering machine to reject a specific party, or to identify someone making harassing phone calls. Caller ID has proved a boon to those wanting some degree of control over whose voice can barge into their home at any hour of the day or night, though it was delayed in California and some other locales because of fears that the technology violated the privacy of callers, another example of how privacy is subjective and contingent on each person’s point of view at a given moment.

  Callers can pay for a service that will deny the recipient this information, that is, they can opt out of caller ID. Recipients can, in turn, refuse to accept “blocked” or anonymous calls. In fact however, the digital identifier tag is never actually removed, even by the blocking service. It is still there in the ring signal, masked by a single “privacy bit” informing the recipient’s telephone company that the outgoing number is blocked. It is up to the local company how diligently that blocking request is honored. Consequently, related services such as call trace and call return may still work. This makes it likely that somebody with enough electronic savvy can rig up his or her own illegally souped-up caller ID unit to pluck the information. So-called protection for callers can be pierced by a technical elite, or anyone wealthy enough to hire that kind of professional help.

  The story of caller ID is just one example of the murkiness that accompanies attempts at anonymity. We saw earlier how some of the most important Internet communities have been forced to forbid anonymous postings, in order to foster an atmosphere of adult discourse. But the implications range far beyond just propriety and failings of mutual respect. Many thinkers and commentators have explored the pros and cons of concealed identity. Some see great promise in a future when people will feel free to interact with others behind masks. For instance, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center hopes to see “technologies of anonymity” that liberate citizens to act with truly liberated autonomy. “We need systems of commerce that allow people to buy things without being identified and that allow people to travel in cyberspace without saying who they are. And we need [the] law to keep pace with the technology.”

  We already touched briefly on anonymous remailers, which enable users to dispatch messages without leaving an electronic trace that others might follow to the source. Several years ago, Johan Helsingius pioneered this kind of communication by running the largest anonymous remailer service in the world, anon.penet.fi, based in Helsinki, Finland. His service rerouted close to ten thousand messages a day, concealing as many as a quarter of a million identities, stripping messages of their originating name and address before forwarding them. Users of his service included suicide counseling groups, and human rights organizations, as well as posters of illicit and obscene information, software thieves, and people eager to speak out without their true names being known. Ultimately, the Church of Scientology persuaded Finnish authorities to force out of Helsingius the identity of an individual who was posting CoS-copyrighted material on the Internet through his remailer, an event that led him ultimately to shut down his system.

  There are two interesting lessons to be drawn from the “Helsinki incident.” 1. Tens—and perhaps hundreds—of thousands of people who thought their secret identities were secure later found out that they were not. Their faith in one “anonymizer” proved misplaced. Will others turn out any better?

  2. As events like this become more commonplace, and larger nations place restrictions on wholesale anonymity, little countries (for example, banking havens) will step up to provide Internet secrecy for a fee.

  Combine these two facts and one can picture a dark possibility. Regular people will use anonymizing services that are wholly owned and controlled by elites whose own secrets are secure, but who can use their hidden influence to pluck out the name of any little guy, any time.

  Anonymity also pervades the vast and popular realm of chat rooms, discussion groups, and “multi-user worlds” on the Net. Author Dorian Sagan describes how, while researching a range of Internet experiences for an article, he felt liberated by portraying various personae online, including a thirteen-year-old girl.

  On the Net, you can work your personality like a novelist imagining a character. The only caveat is that, like the novelist, you must be consistent in your lies if you want to be taken seriously ... the longer you talk to people lying about their identities, the greater the chances that you will cross them up in their lies: while electronic transvestitism is admittedly easier than its real-life counterpart, it still takes effort, motivation, and skill to put up a convincing false front for any length of time.... To make the most of my new identity I had to do what other fly-by-nights and pathological liars do—I had to escape from the limited audience of those who were getting to know me all too well.

  Sagan appreciated “cyber-reality’s ability to reproduce the erotic atmosphere of a Renaissance masquerade, since behind our masks we are no longer as inhibited as we would have been had our real selves been on the line.”

  If this sounds just a bit effete and abstract, that does not make it any less a form of “self-expression,” to be defended according to our already existing social compact, which protects eccentric behaviors that do not harm others. Moreover, there is also a serious and pragmatic side offered by those arguing in favor of anonymity: it frees individuals to exercise personal sovereignty by performing legal actions for their own benefit, actions that might be thwarted by embarrassment or social sanctions, if true identities were known.

  While some champion the advantages of anonymity, others cite its downside. Professor Trotter Hardy, at the College of William and Mary, says, “Anonymity is power and I think it will be abused on the Net.” The White House computer network has received anonymous death threats against the president. Electronic “mail bombs” (Trojan horse programs and viruses) can now be sent anonymously, and individuals can pirate software without being traced. There is concern that digital cash, a form of electronic money that allows for untraceable financial transactions, will usher in new forms of racketeering and money laundering. An Internet site called Fakemail let people write mail from an imaginary e-mailbox, using an alias. Commonly used names included Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Elvis, and God. The service shut down when numerous people traced harassing mail back to its source, but others have taken its place.

  Anonymity also has a long-standing role in demagoguery, as when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have scores of independent sources to verify his wild accusations of Communist infiltration into the U.S. government. Sources that he “could not reveal”; nevertheless, the claim lent him credibility with some citizens. We have seen anonymity at work in countless fabrications and calumnies, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Turner Diaries, but it also plays a subtly powerful role in some of the most respected modern media journals. Speaking about unsigned newspaper editorials, E. M. Forster wrote that “anonymous statements have ... a universal air about them. Absolute truth, the collected wisdom of the universe, seems to be speaking, not the feeble voice of a man.” In other words, they have the flavor of ex cathedra statements, pronounced from the throne of impersonal expertise. On the Internet, this same effect can be seen at Internet Oracle, where people e-mail questions, and others anonymously answer, leading to a kind of collective wisdom, almost like the composite voice of Teilhard de Chardin’s parousic deity, but without any real omniscience to back up the illusion.

  According to Esther Dyson, publisher of Release 1.0 newsletter and a prominent EFF board member, “The damage that can be done by anonymity [on the Internet] is far bigger than in any other medium. In the end, you need to be able to get at somebody’s identity to enforce accountability, and the question is how do you also enforce freedom of speech and freedom from prosecution for unpopular opinions.”

  Although conceding that anonymity has some drawbacks, Michael Godwin explained his reasons for supporting far-reaching levels of protection for the widespread use of concealed identities, calling it “... wellestablished that
anonymity can be used to serve social, as well as anti-social ends.” He went on to cite examples such as twelve-step addiction recovery programs, which use anonymity to help sufferers talk about troubling issues, or participants in various alt.sex. discussion groups, who may be trying to work out their confusion about matters of sexual identity. Whistleblowers can feel a need for anonymous cover before reporting secret abuses by corporations or state agencies. Foreign nationals may wish to discuss controversial issues on the Net without fear of retribution by violent opposing factions, or by a repressive government back home. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that anonymity can be somewhat justified if it seems needed to let individuals step forward and assert other, more explicitly protected rights such as free speech, especially in an environment where fear of retribution may be well founded. In deciding the case Talley v. Califomia in 1960, the Court stated, “It is plain that anonymiy has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

  Let me stress that I understand and sympathize with all of the abovementioned positive uses of concealed identity. Especially when it comes to whistleblowers, society’s interests absolutely require that we provide means and venues for individuals to drop anonymous “tips,” leading investigators toward hidden malfeasance, a case where anonymity is the direct servant of accountability.