privacy-dg.htm
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<TITLE>Privacy in the Real World</TITLE>
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23 May 1999. Thanks to <A HREF="mailto:geer@world.std.com">Dan Geer</A> senior
strategist, CertCo.
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<I>[Remarks at the
<A HREF="http://www.smartcardforum.org/meetings/1998-99/May99/Privacyinfo.htm">Smart
Card Forum Symposium, "Enabling Privacy in a Virtual World"</A>]</I>
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Privacy in the Real World
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Smart Card Forum
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<B>Washington, D.C.</B>
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<B>20 May 99</B>
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<B>Dan Geer</B>
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Thank you for that introduction.
<P>
It <I>is</I> timely that we speak of privacy in the real world.
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Privacy is <I>the</I> boundary condition between rights and privileges, a
boundary evidently in dispute everywhere and forever.
<P>
If privacy is "The right to be left alone -- the most comprehensive of rights,
and the right most valued by civilized men" [Brandeis] then its sanctity
serves as a barometer on our civilization.
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Because privacy is definitionally "the state of being free from unsanctioned
intrusion" [AHD] it begs the question of by whose sanction intrusions may
occur, if not merely by force.
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As much as "Civilization is the process of setting man free from men," [Rand]
privacy is its coin.
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Privacy, beyond all other endowments, is the one more blessed to give than
to receive as, save for love and water, privacy is the only gift that can
be exchanged across any of humankind's divides.
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Because privacy tolerates our differences with "Ain't nobody's business but
your own" it creates us equal in ways nothing else can ever hope to do.
<P>
That "Philosophical and legal analysis has often identified privacy as a
precondition for the development of a coherent self" [Agre] one must conclude
that it is a mortal peril to give up privacy.
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As "Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world" [Hughes]
in choosing what to reveal, however idiosyncratically, we demonstrate our
liberty.
<P>
Yes, it is timely that we speak, that we speak plainly, that we in fact speak
extremely for "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." [BaH2O]
<P>
It is said that the wonderful thing about a small town is that you know everyone
while the terrible thing about a small town is that they all know you.
Indeed, a coherent if nostalgic argument for a "transparent society" can
be made, one where there are no secrets, where there is no privacy, where
everyone knows everyone else's business, where unsolved crime is very nearly
impossible, where neither need nor triumph is invisible, a place where everything
that is not self-incriminating is therefore public. Even were you able
to craft the consensus that we all would each tell each other the contents
of our hearts while leaving our cameras on at all times, I'm afraid that
in such a utopian society you would soon find some were more equal than
others. In short, I reject the one extreme, that of glass houses for
us all.
<P>
I have come to the conclusion that in all things it is bigness that is the
enemy, neither ideology nor biology nor theology but bigness. Big business,
big government, big labor, big money, big crime, big media, big religion
-- it is their bigness alone that predisposes them to predatory behavior.
<P>
The two economists Adam Smith and Ronald Coase described the nature of our
economic interactions -- Smith with his millenial ideal of small producers
trading amongst themselves in the mutual self-interest of wealth maximization,
and Coase with his explanation of why the millenium does not arrive.
In particular, Coase observed that economically viable firms expand until
intra-firm coordination costs exceed inter-firm transaction costs.
Putting it in biologic analogy, cells grow until their surface to volume
ratio crosses a survivability threshold. Despite the starry enthusiasm
of many Internet devotees, it is now unarguably clear that although the Internet
does spectacularly lower transaction costs, it lowers coordination costs
more. Any reading of the newspaper will show you that the Internet
is driving the greatest economic concentration in world history -- the outscale
prices of "Internet stocks" do not represent wealth creation, they represent
wealth redistribution.
<P>
It is precisely this side effect of the global concentration of the control
of wealth and economic power that must be the foundation of our thinking
about privacy. As the ever prescient Phil Agre put it,
<BLOCKQUOTE>
The global integration of the economy is ... commonly held to decentralize
political power by preventing governments from taking actions that can be
reversed through cross-border arbitrage. But political power is becoming
centralized in equally important ways: the power of national governments
is not so much disappearing as shifting to a haphazard collection of undemocratic
and nontransparent global treaty organizations, and the power to influence
these organizations is likewise concentrating in the ever-fewer global
firms. These observations are not pleasant or fashionable, but they
are nonetheless true.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>
If the reason I reject the transparent society is that I acknowledge my inability
to sufficiently police its stronger members, then the most important thing
I can do is to protect my privacy and, frankly, at all costs. The loss
of privacy is irreversible for information is never un-revealed. Privacy
is therefore the paragon of Hume's conjecture: Few liberties are lost all
at once. In the face of the snow-balling bigness of the institutions
of globalized human life, we must reserve privacy rights explicitly so that
we may misrepresent ourselves to those against whom we have no other defense,
against those for whom our name is but a label on data collected without
our consent.
<P>
Consider your own life. Perhaps there is indeed no one fact about you
that you wouldn't good-naturedly share with this audience if I asked you
politely. But by the time I got to twenty questions, few of you would
still think this an amusing parlor game. The risk to you grows as the
product of the number of personal facts times the number of potential recipients,
but it is hard to fabricate an example where the benefit grows as fast even
if you are a politician or otherwise live by publicity alone. On purely risk
management grounds, any finite tolerance for risk caps the amount of information
you will want in play. This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether
you have anything to hide. If for no other reason, we must make it understood
that just as "..there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as
to [minimize] taxes" [Hand] neither is there anything sinister in maximizing
privacy. Naturally, the technologic tools of privacy can be misused,
but what is it that is marvelous that can not also be misapplied?
<P>
A wise man of my acquaintance, a career man in Federal law enforcement, reacted
to my arguments by telling me that I was typically naive. He said that
my choice is not between Big Brother or no Big Brother, rather it is between
one Big Brother and lots of Little Brothers. He suggests that I think carefully
before I choose.
<P>
I've thought about that a lot. I've thought about the comfort of being
taken care of against the unease of having to be. I've compared the
low cost of "one size fits all" to its correspondingly low benefit. I've
thought hard about the proposition that the price of freedom is the possibility
of crime. I've accepted that there is no such thing as righteousness
if there is no possibility of sin. I conclude that privacy is worth
its price, that near absolute privacy is indeed the worst of all social
constructs, except for all the others.
<P>
Look around you. The price of duplicating electronic information is
zero to begin with and communications prices are dropping like a rock in
hard vacuum. Ten years of progress in network computing has delivered
on its original charge -- location independence -- to such a degree that
location irrelevance is more like it. For the mass-less assets of an
electronic world, jurisdictional legal boundaries are unutterably meaningless
except where choice of law is pre-negotiated. The signal-to-noise ROI of
a commercialized Internet dismisses personal differences as an error condition
to be corrected with the aggregated data of surveillance. Sans the
Cold War, spooks everywhere are looking for commercial work and technology
drives policy through the obduracy of its artifacts -- investments are sunk
before democratic institutions detect their existence. Do you actually
imagine that within such a dynamic you will be consistently able to count
on your fellow man respecting your privacy or that you would have enforceable
recourse against its diminution?
<P>
Governments everywhere hate privacy because the efficiency of regulation
is proportional to the perfection of its surveillance. Here at home, our
government is relentlessly pursuing an anti-privacy track that would not
be so dangerous were it not so outside the ken of the average person's intuition
or we were not the world's presumed leader in matters of liberty. Beyond
all other lessons, history teaches us that wherever personal boundaries are
not taboo, the seeds of totalitarianism find fertile ground.
<P>
If only it were so simple that embattled farmers could again assemble by
that rude bridge that arched the flood and fire the shot heard round the
world. The citizenry, en-serfed to the demands of a culture of convenience,
resplendent with glossy temptations to half the deadly sins and making
entertainment of the rest, can hardly be counted upon to bite the hand that
seems to feed them. The rate of change in what is within the realm
of the technically possible is too great to digest, and we can oh so easily
return to a world of sorcerers, alchemy, and faith in powers in proportion
to their mystery.
<P>
When the cost of failure is intolerable, security designers insist that what
is not explicitly permitted be forbidden. Because privacy is that thing whose
loss is intolerable, we must make all acquisition and use of personal information
forbidden absent explicit permission to do otherwise. We do that in the law
itself -- my attorney cannot act outside my permission and my personal
information is sacrosanct. We have to do that everywhere, or we have
to let a globalized market take its course.
<P>
We already have many evidences of the market value of personal
information. The affinity card at the grocery store pegs the market
price of privacy there at about 5%. The cable television provider who
will take a $100 deposit in lieu of a credit check establishes a market price
for that form of privacy. Many web merchants measure their profit in
customer data more than dollars. Anywhere the same price is charged
for cash as for credit the merchant's credit-card discount rate is your premium
for privacy. The foregone benefits of any frequent buyer plan are what you'll
pay to avoid data fusion on your buying habits. The extra time you
spend at the gas station is the price you pay for withholding information
from their computers. The examples are legion, and many are far less
prosaic than these. To leap to the other end of the spectrum, the European
Union is considering extending privacy protections to legal persons, which
they evaluate as an essential bulwark against becoming an electronic colony
of ours.
<P>
The question before you is not preservation of the status quo -- all hope
of that is now lost. The question before you is whether a fervent unity
is worth the effort. If by our non-negotiable demands we manage to
harden the protections of privacy yet we are somehow ultimately shown to
be wrong-headed, we have then merely to relax and enjoy it. If we fail to
make privacy our hallmark and the effects are dire, we do not recover for
to do so is to unwind history.
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Demand privacy, while the question is still relevant.
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_________________
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[AHD] American Heritage Dictionary, 1993
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[Agre] Phil Agre, "The Architecture of Identity," 1998
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[BaH2O] Barry Goldwater, Nomination Acceptance, 1964
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[Brandeis] Justice Louis Brandeis, <U>Olmstead v. U.S.</U>, 1928
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[Coase] Ronald Coase, <I>The Nature of the Firm</I>, 1937
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[Hand] Judge Learned Hand, <U>Commissioner v. Newman</U>, 1947
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[Hughes] Eric Hughes, "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," 1993
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[Rand] Ayn Rand, <I>The Fountainhead</I>, 1943
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[Smith] Adam Smith, <I>The Wealth of Nations</I>, 1776
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END
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