What Lies Ahead
In preparing this book, I came to realize we must cover important ground before getting to the kernel of argument. So we'll begin Chapter 2 by comparing the bright new Information Age with other highly vaunted "eras" that left disappointment in their wake. Cynical observers are already predicting the same demise for the swaggering, overconfident epoch of silicon and electrons, yet the new cybernetic tools may help bring about a time of unprecedented opportunity, assisting hard-pressed humanity with pragmatic solutions to many vexing problems.
Chapters 3 and 4 will explore fundamental issues -- the nature and practical limits of privacy, how it is perceived by the law, and the looming question of whether information is a commodity that can be owned. One aspect that we'll focus on is the role of copyright protection to promote openness and creativity in society.
Ultimately, the big choices must be made by citizens, who will either defend their freedom or surrender it, as others did in the past. In chapter 5 we'll examine some peculiar traits of neo-western civilization -- a quirky and amorphous global super-society where eccentricity and ego are fostered the way other cultures extolled obedience, or physical courage. Chapter 6 then considers how lessons of accountability may apply to everyone from cops to society's rebels, as we learn to "watch the watchmen."
Along the way, in a string of "boxed" sections, we will take a look at several topics of survival in the Information Age, including the worrisome problems of photographic fakery and computerized extortion, as well as the ongoing question--should we concentrate on ideals, or what works?
Chapter 7 gets into "nitty gritty" issues concerning encryption (secret codes) and anonymity, two prescriptions that are highly touted by some of society's best and brightest cyber-philosophers. Then chapter 8 will cover some pragmatic problems, such as the controversy concerning names, passwords, social security numbers, and national ID cards.
Any honest person must consider the possibility that he or she might be mistaken, so chapter 9 is where I do that. Among other things, we'll discuss whether mathematicians think encryption can really offer security against data-spying by the biggest government computers. We will also cover a range of possible ways that "transparency" might turn into a nightmare, especially if my sanguine views of the advantages turn out to be wrong.
The Ghost Of Pericles
We live in an time that spills over with contradictions. Extraordinary wealth gushes alongside grinding poverty. Episodes of horrific bloodshed contrast starkly against unprecedented stretches of peace, in which billions of living human beings have never personally experienced war. Within a single lifespan we've seen great burgeonings of freedom -- and the worst tyrannies of all time. To find another era with as dramatic a range of highs and lows, you might go back twenty five centuries, when another "golden age" posed towering hopes against cynicism and despair.
Like today, classical Athens featured profound bursts of creativity in science, culture and the arts. But above all, what we tend to envision is that city's brief adventure in democracy, a brave experiment that lasted just a little while, and would not again be tried in a big way for two millennia.
Even staunch fans of Athenian democracy admit it was imperfect by present-day standards; for instance, women, slaves and those not born in the city had few rights. Yet, its relative egalitarianism was impressive in an age of hereditary chiefdoms and arbitrary potentates. Across centuries of darkness, from that democracy to this one, the lonely voice of Pericles spoke for an open society, where citizens are equal before the law and where influence is apportioned " -- not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward for merit; and poverty is not a bar..."
The virtues of this notion may seem obvious to modern readers. Today, citizens of many nations -- those that I call the neo-west -- assume that principles of equality and human rights are fundamental, even axiomatic. (Though they are often contentious to implement in practice.)
So it can be surprising to learn just how rare this attitude was, historically. In fact, Pericles and his allies were roundly derided by contemporary scholars. Countless later generations of intellectuals and oligarchs called democracy an aberration -- ranking it among the least important products of the Athenian golden age. Even during the Italian Renaissance, Niccolo Machiavelli had to mask his sympathy for representative government between the lines of The Prince, in order to please his aristocratic sponsors. After Athens' flickering candle blew out, during the Pelopennesian War (431-403 B.C.E.), none were more eager to cheer the demise of democracy than Plato, the so-called "father of western philosophy." Partly due to the influence of Plato and his followers -- and for reasons discussed in Chapter 5 of this book -- the democratic experiment was not tried again on a large scale until the era of Locke, Jefferson, and Madison.
"The greatest principle of all is that nobody should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully.... In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it." -- Plato of Athens.
We all know in our hearts that freedom cannot survive such assaults, unless it is defended by much more than good intentions. For a time, in the middle of the Twentieth Century, it looked as if the Athenian tragedy might happen again, when constitutional governments seemed about to be overwhelmed by despots and ideologues. Writing under the shadow of Hitler and later Stalin, Karl Popper began his opus, The Open Society and its Enemies, by appraising the relentless hatred for empiricism and democracy that Plato passed on through his followers all the way to Hegel -- a philosophical heritage of self-serving, tendentious incantations (or "reasoning") whose hypnotic rhythms were enthusiastically adapted by innumerable rulers, from Hellenistic despots to Marxist Leninist commissars, many of them using logic to justify their unchecked power over others.
Looking back from the late 1990s -- a time when democracy seems strong (though hardly triumphant) -- we can only imagine how delicate freedom must have seemed to Popper, as well as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and others writing in the forties and fifties. Did they feel the ghost of Pericles hovering over their shoulders as they worked? Would the candle blow out, yet again?
Scanning history, those writers could see only a few other brief oases of relative liberty -- the Icelandic althing, some Italian city-states, the Iroquois Confederation, and perhaps a couple of bright moments during the Roman Republic, or the Baghdad Caliphate -- surrounded by vast eras when the social pyramid in every land was dominated by conspiracies of privilege. Ruling elites varied widely in their superficial trappings. Some styled themselves as kings or oligarchs, while others were priests, bureaucrats, merchant princes, or "servants of the people." But nearly all used similar methods to justify and secure the accumulation and monopolization of privilege.
One paramount technique was to control the flow of information. Tyrants were always most vulnerable when those below could see and hear the details of power and statecraft.
Today the light appears much stronger than in Popper's day, and new technologies such as the Internet seem about to enhance the sovereign authority of citizens even further. Yet, the problem remains as fundamental and worrisome as ever.
What measures can we take to ensure that freedom, instead of being a rare exception, will become the normal, natural, and stable condition for ourselves and our descendants?
In fairness, this same unease motivates many of those who oppose the notion of a "transparent society." They share the apprehension that Orwell conveyed so chillingly in Nineteen Eighty-Four -- that freedom may vanish unless people promptly and vigorously oppose the forces that threaten it. So, from the start, let me say to some of them that we are not arguing about goals, but rather the best means to achieve them.
That still leaves room for disagreement -- for instance whether the sole peril originates from national governments, or if dangerous power centers may arise from any part of the social-political landscape. Moreover, we differ over which tools will best help stave off tyranny. Metaphorically speaking, some very bright people suggest that citizens of the 21st Century will be best protected by masks and shields,while I prefer the image of a light saber.
These glib metaphors may cue readers that I won't be presenting an erudite or academic tome on the same level as Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, and that is certainly true. I won't claim to prove or demolish any broad social rules. Above all, this book does not push an absurd over-generalization that candor is always superior to secrecy! Only that transparency is under-represented in today's fervid discussions about privacy and freedom in the information age. My sole aim is to stir some fresh ideas in the cauldron.
If we have learned anything during the hard centuries since Pericles tried to light a flickering beacon in the night, it is that we owe our hard-won freedom and prosperity to an empirical tradition -- in science, free markets, and the rough-tumble world of democracy. Only mathematicians can "prove" things using pen and paper. The rest of us have to take our ideas out to the real world and see what pragmatically works.
In other words, this is not a book of grand prescriptions (though some suggestions are offered). I plan chiefly to discuss under-utilized tools of openness and light that have served us well in the past.
Strong Privacy
Before getting to those suggestions, we need to establish some context about today's public debate over privacy. In keeping with the theme of this book, I rank the players and their arguments according to what effect their proposals would have on the flow of information in society.
Take Megan's Law for example. Under a 1994 U.S. federal mandate, all fifty states have begun publishing lists of registered sexual offenders, which will lead eventually to a nationwide database. California provides this information on a CD-ROM disk that can be viewed at most police headquarters, letting parents, school officials, and other interested parties survey over 65,000 names (and many photos) for "potential molesters" who may live or work in their area. Activists supporting this system portray it as a way to ensure accountability in an area of life where a single mistake can lead to tragedy.
Foes of the measure, including the American Civil Liberties Union, claim that the rights of former prisoners are violated by this registry, which can be regarded as a non-juridical penalty slapped onto the sentences of convicts who already paid their debt to society. Opponents also cite anecdotes in which individuals suffered because they were erroneously listed, showing that innocents can be harmed by overzealously rushing to open spigots of faulty data.
As far as this book is concerned, the relative merits of Megan's Law are not at issue. Rather, this struggle serves to illustrate certain traits that appear in countless other modern privacy disputes.
One party believes that another group is inherently dangerous, and its potential to do harm is exacerbated by secrecy. Therefore accountability must be forced upon that group through enhanced flow of information.
Opponents argue that some vital good will be threatened by this heightened candor, and hence want the proposed data flow shut down.
Watch for this pattern as we go along. We shall see that it is almost ubiquitous when people to take a stand on knowledge disputes. In Chapter 7, for instance, we'll discuss the many various "Clipper" proposals that have been floated by the FBI and other federal agencies concerned about the potential of data and voice encryption to conceal criminal or terrorist activities behind a static haze. Officials worry that widespread use of electronic ciphers will thwart traditional surveillance techniques -- such as court-ordered wiretaps -- enabling dangerous villains to conspire in security and secrecy. They want to retain a level of vision and accountability that they traditionally had in an era of crude analog phone lines.
A coalition of groups -- including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) -- joined numerous journalists and private persons to lambaste the Clipper proposals, depicting them as encroachments by government on freedom and privacy in cyberspace. Often the threat was couched in dramatic terms, as the opening move in a trend toward a Big Brother dictatorship. In any event, they point out that the FBI seeks a data flow enhancement that would go just one-way, to government officials.
In this example, the FBI's proposal fits pattern A, while their adversaries fill position B. But these roles are often reversed! Take the ongoing struggle faced by anyone seeking documents from a federal agency under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Although many officials are forthcoming and cooperative, others react with hostility against any attempt to enforce accountability. They drag their feet, cite national security, and sometimes use privacy concerns to justify non-compliance.
It can be fascinating to watch the very same players take turns performing roles A and B, without any apparent awareness of irony or inconsistency. Some groups justify this conditional attitude towards information flow by assuming that government will always and automatically be wrong, whether it is trying to open a data spigot, or attempting to close one down.
The same pattern can be seen in other areas of modern society. For instance, when a corporation starts spying on its employees, tracking every computer keystroke, timing each phone call, reading everyone's email, and logging trips to the bathroom, managers justify it as essential for efficient business needs, in order to ensure staff accountability. Opponents decry such practices as violating basic human rights, calling for a shutdown of the offensive dataflow.
Those same opponents then turn around and file suit to force release of proprietary company documents -- for the public good, of course -- widening the particular spigot that they choose to open.
These issues will all be discussed later. I am not laying value judgements at this point, only noting a consistent pattern that will help us explore why we often take one-sided positions, self righteously demanding far more openness from our opponents than we want applied to ourselves.
Matters of privacy, accountability, and freedom are often judged first and foremost on the basis of whose ox is being gored.
In the following chapters, I use a catch-all phrase -- Strong Privacy advocates -- to label those who are most outspoken against "transparency." From the start, let me aver that this term oversimplifies a wide range of groups and individuals. For instance, many ACLU members do not share the generalized antipathy toward government that is a common premise of "cypherpunk" activists like Hal Finney and Tim May. Although liberals and libertarians both see themselves staunchly combating dire threats to freedom, they often find themselves vigilantly facing opposite directions.
As we'll see later, there is also a wide range of proposed prescriptions being offered by those I put in this camp. For instance, some groups like the ACLU lobby for new legislation to prevent misuse of private data by corporations and snooping government agencies. This is sometimes called the "European Model," since members of the European Union have been extremely active setting up rules and regulations to govern who has the right to collect, withhold, or control the use of personal information. At one extreme of this trend are those who demand legal recognition that individuals have a basic right of ownership over any and all data about themselves. No one should be able to use any fact or datum concerning you -- even your name -- without your explicit permission.
Supporting a quite different approach are some of the most vivid and original thinkers of the information age. John Gilmore, Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow, and others on the (roughly) libertarian wing were in the vanguard fighting against both the Clipper Chip Proposal and the Communications Decency Act. Seeing little need or value in new laws, they hold that a key factor in defending liberty during the coming era will be technology. Fresh tools of encryption and electronic anonymity will protect individuals against intrusive spying by others... and especially by the state. What they demand, therefore, is that government just stand back and not interfere as a myriad anonymous personae and enciphered secrets throng across the dataways.
Taking this attitude to far greater extremes are the "anarcho" libertarians, like financier Walter Wriston, who take pleasure in predicting a virtual end to all government, opening an age of unbridled and anonymity-shrouded individualism.
Straddling between the cypherpunks and lobbyists are some of the newer online privacy groups like EPIC and the Center for Democracy and Technology, that support crypto technologies while still seeking to influence laws and regulations, a mix that sometimes leaves them seeming to pull in two directions at once. Others, like the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, emphasize a strictly pragmatic approach. A book by PRC Project Director Givens offers copious practical advice about how "little guys" can use today's legal protections to take some control over their own credit ratings, medical records, or whether their names will proliferate endlessly across a myriad irritating mailing lists.
This short compilation leaves out many other players, but it is enough to illustrate a single trait shared by all -- a belief that modern concerns over freedom and privacy can often be solved by some specific or general reduction in the flow of information, or by making the stream flow in just one direction. Whether they prescribe new laws, technologies, or practical savvy, each would empower people and groups to conceal things. For want of a better term, Strong Privacy will have to do.
In fact, I admire many of these advocates for their intelligence, passion, and concern. We would all be a lot worse off if they weren't out there, pitching.
In some cases, they are probably right.
But there is another side of the issue. One that needs to be heard.
Other Voices
I am not the only one speaking for transparency -- the notion that we may all benefit by carefully increasing two-way information flows. In addition to the names mentioned earlier in this chapter, some others should be noted.
Jack Stack, already a business legend for transforming his manufacturing company from red ink to splendid profitability, hit the bestseller lists in the mid-nineties with his book -- The Great Game of Business: Unlocking the Power and Profitability of Open-Book Management -- wherein he touts letting all of a company's employees view the ledgers. By welcoming input and oversight from every level, managers profit from a much wider pool of criticism and good ideas. This doesn't mean giving up executive authority, but it does engender in staff at all levels a sense of personal identification with team success... even when the "team" consists of several thousand employees. Stack's simple argument shrugs aside all theory. He makes no pretensions at ideology. His basis for open-book management is pragmatic. It works in good times, and especially well in hard times. It is a formula for success.
Unfortunately, as we'll see in Chapter 5, it takes maturity and will power for any kind of authority figure to loosen the reins of control, even when it clearly serves the greater good. Despite the popularity of his book, Stack is swimming against powerful currents of human nature.
On the other hand, didn't I just spend the first half of this chapter implying that transparency is inevitable?
Late in this book, we'll examine whether any single scenario about tomorrow seems compellingly likely. Personally, I think the jury is still out. But there is one celebrated author who contends that our fate has already been decided. According to cartoonist-humorist Scott Adams, we are destined for a world of universal vision, whether we like it or not. In The Dilbert Future, Adams offers a look at the next century that is both earnest and bitingly sardonic at the same time. Exploring many of the same themes as this book -- for instance that professional news reporters will be replaced by swarms of amateurs with cameras -- Adams takes into account likely breakthroughs such as ubiquitous video, DNA matching, and cybernetic scent-bloodhounds, before concluding, "In the future, new technology will allow the police to solve 100 percent of all crimes. The bad news is that we'll realize 100 percent of the population are criminals, including the police."
Adams then makes the hilarious extrapolation that every human on the planet will eventually land in jail for minor crimes, except the world's smartest person who, since she was too clever to get caught, must thereafter bear the tax burden of supporting the rest of us in prison, forever. Like Mark Twain and other great humorists, Adams uses outrageous exaggeration to raise serious issues -- in this case how we may respond when our smallest peccadilloes become public knowledge. Will we become a society of frantic finger-pointers and blamers? Or might we learn to "chill out" when everyone realizes that people who live in glass houses are unwise to cast stones?
We'll solve it by giving up the comforting blanket of darkness, opening up these new eyes, and sharing the world with six billion fellow witnesses.
The Table of Contents and reviews, blurbs and commentary are also available on this site.
David Brin is a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth, The Postman, and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War. (The Postman inspired a major film in 1998.) Brin is also known as a leading commentator on modern technological trends. His nonfiction book -- The Transparent Society -- won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin's newest novel Kiln People explores a fictional near future when people use cheap copies of themselves to be in two places at once. The Life Eaters -- a graphic novel -- explores a chilling alternative outcome of World War II.
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