A plug for "Blown to Bits"
Bits and Pieces 2013-10-30
Summary:
A friend who got a copy of Blown to Bits: Your Life Liberty and Happiness After the Digital Explosion when it came out five years ago just got around to reading the privacy chapter and is blown away (sorry) for the way it anticipates issues in the Snowden revelations, and the Eggers novel The Circle and Joe Nocera's column about it. To tell the truth, when I read the Nocera column, I said to myself "so what else is new?" and went back to preparing my classes. Still, it's nice to have someone note the things I and my colleagues Hal Abelson and Ken Ledeen talked about before they were generally apparent. Here are a few anticipatory quotes my friend pulled.
"With corporations trying to make money from us and the government trying to protect us, civil libertarians are a weak third voice when they warn that we may not want others to know so much about us." "The Prime Minister [Gordon Brown] had to apologize to the British nation because among the things that have been blown to bits is the presumption that no jjnior staffer could do that much damange by mailing a small parcel." "The same kinds of clustering algorithms work on patterns of telephone calls. You can learn a lot by knowing who is calling or emailing whom, even if you don't know what they are saying to each other -- especially if you know th time of the communications and can correlate them with the time of other events." "The snoopy neighbor is a classic American stock figure -- the busybody who watches how many liquor bottles are in your trash, or tries to figure out whose Mercedes is regularly parked in your driveway.... But in Cyberspace, we are all neighbors. We can all check up on each other, without even opening the curtains a crack." "The government creates projects, the media and civil liberties groups raise serious privacy concerns, the projects are cancelled, and new ones arise to take their place. The cycle seems to be endless. In spite of Americans' traditional suspicions about government surveillance of their private lives, the cycle seems to be almost an inevitable consequence of Americans' concerns about their security..." [On the failure of the Warren-Brandeis notion of privacy rights:] "Throughout the twentieth century there were simply too many good reasons for not leaving people alone, and too many ways in which people preferred not to be left alone. And in the U.S., First Amendment rights stood in the way of privacy rights. As a general rule, the government simply cannot stop me from saying anything...about your private affairs..." "Many privacy-shattering things have happened fo us, some with our cooperation and some not. As a result, the sense of personal privacy is very different today than it was two decades ago." "It is time to admit that we don't even really know what we want. The bits are everywhere; there simply is no locking them down, and no one really wants to do that anymore. The meaning of privacy has changed, and we do not have a good way of describing it. It is not the right to be left alone..... It is not the right to keep our private information to ourselves....."
And finally, the conclusion of the chapter:
In 1984, the pervasive, intrusive technology could be turned off:
As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
“You can turn it off!” he said.
“Yes,” said O’Brien, “we can turn it off. We have that privilege. ...Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.”
Sometimes we can still turn it off today, and should. But mostly we don’t want to. We don’t want to be alone; we want to be connected. We find it conven