Copyright © 1998, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

The Table of Contents and reviews, blurbs and commentary are also available on this site.

The issue of threatened privacy has spawned a flood of books, articles and media exposés -- from Janna Malamud Smith's thoughtful Private Matters, and the erudite Right to Privacy, by Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, all the way to shrill, paranoic rants by conspiracy fetishists, who see Big Brother lurking around every corner. Spanning this spectrum however, there appears to be one common theme. In almost every case, the author has responded with a call to arms, proclaiming that we must become more vigilant to protect traditional privacy against intrusions by faceless (take your pick) government bureaucrats, corporations, criminals, or just plain busybodies.

That is the usual conclusion... but not here.

For in fact, it is already far too late to prevent the invasion of cameras and databases. The djinn cannot be crammed back into its bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new surveillance tools and databases. They are here to stay.

Light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives.

The real issue facing citizens of a new century will be how mature adults choose to live -- how they might compete, cooperate and thrive -- in such a world. A transparent society.

Regarding those cameras for instance -- the ones topping every lamp post in both City One and City Two -- we can see that very different styles of urban life resulted from just one decision. From how people in each town answered the following question.

Will average citizens share, along with the mighty, the right to access these universal monitors? Will common folk have, and exercise, a sovereign power to watch the watchers?

Back in City Number One, Joe and Jane Doe may walk through an average day never thinking about those micro-cameras overhead. They might even believe statements made by officials, claiming that all the spy eyes were banished and dismantled a year or two ago. (When in fact they were only made smaller, harder to detect.) Jane and Joe stroll secure that their neighbors cannot spy on them. (Except the old-fashioned way, from overlooking windows.) In other words, Jane and Joe blissfully believe they have privacy.

The inhabitants of City Number Two know better. They realize that -- out of doors at least -- privacy has always been an illusion. They know that anyone in town can tune in to that camera on the lamp post over there... and they don't much care. They perceive what really matters... that they live in a town where the police are efficient, respectful, and above all accountable. A place where homes are sacrosanct, but out on the street any citizen, from the richest to the poorest, can walk both safely and with the godlike power to zoom at will from vantage point to vantage point, viewing all the lively wonders of the vast but easily-spanned village their metropolis has become, as if by some magic power it had turned into a city not of men and women, but of birds.

Sometimes, citizens of City Number Two find it tempting to wax nostalgic about the old days, before there were so many cameras... or before TV invaded the home... or before the telephone and automobile. But for the most part City Two's denizens know those times are gone, never to return. Above all, one thing makes life bearable -- the surety that each person knows what is going on, with a say in what will happen next. And rights equal to any billionaire or chief of police.

This little allegory -- like all allegories -- may be a gross oversimplification. For instance, in our projected city of "open access," citizens will have ten thousand decisions to make.

Since one might conceivably use these devices to follow someone home, should convicted felons be forbidden access to the camera networks?

Might any person order up a search program, using sophisticated pattern-recognition software to scan a throng of passersby and zero in on your specific face? If such "traps" could be laid all over town, a lot of fugitives might be brought to justice. But will you or I ever again be able to seek anonymity in a crowd? Will people respond by wearing masks in public? Or will safety ultimately come from unleashing our own search programs, that alert us to watchers.

When should these super-cameras be allowed indoors? If cameras keep getting smaller and more mobile (e.g., wasp-scale drones), what kind of defenses might protect us against peeping Toms, or police spies, flying such devices through the open windows of our homes?

The list of possible quandaries goes on and on. Such an endless complexity of choices may cause some citizens of City Two to envy the simplicity of life in City One, where only big business, the State, and certain well-heeled criminals possess these powers. That elite will, in turn, try to foster a widespread illusion among the populace that the cameras don't exist. Some folk will prefer a fantasy of privacy over the ambiguity and arduous decisions faced by citizens of City Two.

There is nothing new in this. All previous generations faced quandaries the outcomes of which changed history. When Thomas Jefferson prescribed a revolution every few decades, he spoke not only politically, but about the constant need to remain flexible, adapting to changing circumstances -- to innovate at need, while at the same time staying true to those values we hold unchanging and precious. Our civilization is already a noisy one for precisely that reason -- because we have chosen freedom and mass sovereignty, and that means the citizenry itself must constantly argue out the details, instead of leaving them to some committee of sages.

What differs today is not only the pace of events, but also our tool kit for facing the future. Above all, marking our civilization as different, has been its knack for applying two extremely hard-won lessons from the past.

1. In all of history, we have found just one cure for error -- a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes. One remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Scientists have known this for a long time. It is the keystone of their success. A scientific theory only gains respect by surviving repeated attempts to demolish it. Only after platoons of clever critics have striven to come up with refuting evidence, forcing a myriad changes and improvements, do a few hypotheses eventually rise from mere theories to accepted models of the world.

Another example is capitalism. When it works, under just and impartial rules, the free market rewards agility, hard work and innovation... as it punishes the stock prices of companies that make too many mistakes. Likewise, any believer in evolution knows that death is the ultimate form of criticism, a merciless driver, transforming species over time.

Even in our private and professional lives, mature people realize that improvement only comes when we open ourselves to learn from our mistakes--no matter how hard we have to grit our teeth, when others tell us we were wrong.

Which brings up a second observation --

2. Alas, criticism has always been what human beings -- especially leaders -- hate most to hear.

This ironic contradiction -- that I will later refer to as the "Paradox of the Peacock" -- has had profound and tragic effects on human culture for centuries. Accounts left by past ages are filled with woeful events in which societies and peoples suffered largely because openness and free speech were suppressed, leaving the powerful at liberty to make devastating blunders without comment or consent from below.

If neo-western civilization has one great trick in its repertoire, a technique more responsible than any other for its success, that trick is accountability. Especially the knack -- which no other culture ever mastered -- of making accountability apply to the mighty. True, we still don't manage it perfectly. Gaffes, bungles and inanities still get covered up. And yet, one can look at any newspaper or television and see an eager press corps at work, supplemented by hordes of righteously indignant individuals (and their lawyers), all baying for waste or corruption to be exposed, secrets to be unveiled, and nefarious schemes to be nipped in the bud. Disclosure is a watchword of the age, and politicians grudgingly responded by passing the Freedom of Information Act, truth in lending laws, open-meeting rules, then codes to enforce candor in housing, in dietary content of foodstuffs, in the expense accounts of lobbyists, and so on.

Although this process of stripping off veils has been uneven, and continues to be a source of contention, the underlying moral force can be clearly seen pervading our popular culture, in which nearly every modern film or novel seems to preach the same message -- suspicion of authority. The phenomenon is not new to our generation. Schoolbooks teach that freedom is guarded by constitutional "checks and balances," but those same legal provisions were copied, early in the 19th century, by nearly every new nation of Latin America, and not one of them remained consistently free. In North America, constitutional balances only worked because they were supplemented by a powerful mythic tradition, expounded in story, song -- and now every Hollywood film -- that any undue accumulation of power should be looked on with concern.

Above all, we are encouraged to distrust government.

The late Karl Popper pointed out the importance of this mythology in the dark days during and after the Second World War, in The Open Society and its Enemies. Only by insisting on accountability, he concluded, can we constantly remind public servants that they are servants. It is also how we maintain some confidence that merchants aren't cheating us, or that factories aren't poisoning the water. As inefficient and irascibly noisy as it seems at times, this habit of questioning authority ensures freedom far better than any of the older social systems that were based on reverence or trust.

And yet, another paradox rears up every time one interest group tries to hold another accountable in today's society.

Whenever a conflict appears between privacy and accountability, people demand the former for themselves and the latter for everybody else.

The rule seems to hold in almost every realm of modern life, from special prosecutors investigating the sex lives of political figures, to worried parents demanding that lists of sex offenders be made public. From merchants anxious to see their customers' credit reports, to clients who resent such snooping. From people who "need" Caller I.D. for screening their calls, to those worried that their lives might be threatened if they lose telephone anonymity. From activists demanding greater access to computerized government records, hunting patterns of corruption or incompetence in office, to other citizens who worry about release of personal information contained in those very same records.

In recent years there have erupted widespread calls to "empower" citizens and corporations with tools of encryption -- the creation of ciphers and secret codes--so that the Internet and phone lines may soon fill with a blinding fog of static and concealed messages. A haze of habitual masks and routine anonymity.

Some of society's best and brightest minds have begun extolling a coming golden age of privacy, when no one need ever again fear snooping by bureaucrats, federal agents, or in-laws. The prominent iconoclast John Gilmore -- who "favors law-n'chaos over law-n'order" -- recently proclaimed that computers are literally extensions of our minds, and therefore their contents should remain as private as our inner thoughts. Another activist, John Perry Barlow, published a widely discussed "Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace" proclaiming that the mundane jurisdictions of nations and their archaic laws are essentially powerless and irrelevant to the Internet and its denizens (or "netizens"). Among the loose clan of self-proclaimed "cypherpunks" a central goal is that citizens should be armed with broad new powers to conceal their words, actions, and identities. The alternative, they claim, will be for all our freedoms to succumb to a looming tyranny.

In opposing this modern passion for personal and corporate secrecy, let me first emphasize that I like privacy! Outspoken eccentrics need it, probably as much or more than those who are reserved. Going back to the example at the beginning of this introduction -- I would find it hard to get used to living in either of the cities described in those early paragraphs. But a few voices out there -- such as Stewart Brand and Bruce Sterling -- have begun pointing out the obvious. Those cameras-on-every-street-corner are coming, as surely as the new millennium.

Oh, we may agitate and legislate. But can "privacy laws" really prevent hidden eyes from getting tinier, more mobile and clever? In software form they will cruise the data highways. "Anti-bug" technologies will arise, but the resulting surveillance arms race can hardly favor the "little guy." The rich, the powerful, police agencies and a technologically-skilled elite will always have an advantage.

In the long run, as author Robert Heinlein prophesied years ago, will the chief effect of privacy laws be simply to "make the bugs smaller"?

The sub-title of this book -- Will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom? -- is intentionally provocative. As we'll see, I think such a stark choice can be avoided. It may be possible to have both liberty and some shelter from prying eyes.

But suppose the future does present us with an absolute either-or decision -- to select just one, at the cost of the other. In that case, there can be no hesitation.

Privacy is a highly desirable product of liberty. If we remain free and sovereign, we may have a little privacy -- in our bedrooms and sanctuaries. As citizens, we'll be able to demand some.

But accountability is no side benefit. It is the one fundamental ingredient on which liberty thrives. Without the accountability that derives from openness -- enforceable upon even the mightiest individuals and institutions -- how can freedom survive?

In the Information Age to come, cameras and databases will sprout like crocuses -- or weeds -- whether we like it or not. Over the long run, we as a people must decide.

Can we stand living exposed to scrutiny... our secrets laid open... if in return we get flashlights of our own, that we can shine on anyone who might do us harm? Even the arrogant and strong?

Or is an illusion of privacy worth any price, even surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful?

There are no easy answers, but asking questions can be a good first step.

Up to this point, much of Chapter 1 appeared earlier as a published article, and has since been perused online by interested parties around the globe. Their varied comments opened my eyes to a wide range of opinions about freedom, privacy and candor. From philosophers to steelworkers, it seems that each person views such things differently. Especially privacy, which like the fabled elephant fondled by a dozen blind sages, is described uniquely by each beholder.

Even legal scholars cannot agree what the word means. American juridical rulings tend to treat privacy as a highly subjective and contingent commodity -- a matter of tradeoffs and balanced interests -- whereas other freedoms, of speech and the press, are defended with sweeping judgements of broad generality. Some reasons for this will be discussed in Chapter 3, where privacy is examined from many angles, and shown as the exquisite desideratum that it is. Indeed, without some privacy, we could scarcely function as humans. A chief aim of this book is to explore whether -- and how much -- privacy can be safeguarded in a coming era of cameras and databases.

Alas, although it seems intuitive to protect privacy by erecting barriers to information flow, there may be good reason to question that assumption. While putting off a more involved discussion for later, let me briefly illustrate with a "restaurant analogy."

We all know it is possible to be alone, or hold intimate conversations, in a public place. It bothers people to be stared at, especially while eating, yet we dine in crowded restaurants all the time, fairly secure that most of the eyes surrounding us aren't looking our way, at least not very often. We don't achieve this confidence by wearing masks, or because laws require other customers to wear blinkers and blindfolds. Mutual civility and common decency play a role, but not alone.

An added factor that helps deter people from staring is not wanting to be caught in the act. The embarrassment accrued by a voyeur is greater than your chagrin at being seen with asparagus in your teeth. Open visibility seems to favor defense over offense.

All right, it's not perfect, but it works overall.

Now suppose we try to improve things by passing laws and sending forth regulators with clipboards -- commanding that all restaurants erect a maze of paper shoji screens to keep customers from ogling other patrons. Will this prevent staring, or increase it? Without any plausible likelihood of getting caught, might voyeurs use technology (in this case poking tiny holes) to penetrate the "protective" curtain? No longer deterred, could peepers stare with impunity?

The restaurant analogy is just a thought experiment. But it suggests there is no dichotomy between accountability and privacy. Rather, you may need one to get the other.

Continue to 3 and 4, or purchase The Transparent Society.

The Table of Contents and reviews, blurbs and commentary are also available on this site.