Absolute Privacy

In the increasingly strident and polarized popular discourse surrounding privacy, people tend to break down into two categories.

Absolutists: the right to privacy, like freedom and justice, is an inalienable right and an abstract concept that does not have to be defined in any specific way relating to the real world. What I choose to watch on TV or YouTube is just as private as my social security number or 24-hour surveillance footage of me or what kind of cereal I choose to buy. Any monitoring of these activities or collection of data pertaining to them constitutes a violation of my Constitutional rights. These rights may as well have been handed down by God; that is to say the morality, logic, and appropriateness of their application to any given situation cannot be questioned. In fact, their strength derives from their universality, from the fact that they are appropriate to all possible situations (and, I would argue, from their vagueness).

Situationalists: The value of privacy in a given context depends on what can be gained by the individual or the society when it is sacrificed.

Imagine two worlds: one in which no one has any weapon larger than a slingshot and another in which everyone has an atomic bomb. In order to use any weapon in either world, people must go through various preparatory acts which include talking on the phone, emailing others, and doing other things in the privacy of their own homes. An absolutist would say that we should not monitor phonecalls, emails, or other private activities. We should work to make sure people don't use the bombs, and we should try to dismantle the bombs. But if we can't do those things, then it is worth running the risk of having a few angry people use the bombs and thereby destroy the world just so long as privacy is preserved. A situationalist would also advocate weapons control and anger management, but once those options have been exhausted, then they would say that the slingshot world requires one level of privacy (no wiretaps, etc) while the atomic bomb world requires another (24-hour surveillance).

We do not live in either of these worlds, but we've been moving steadily from the slingshot world to the atomic bomb world. Its increasingly easy for a small group of angry people to kill a lot of people. This has less to do with Bush or Bin Laden, Islam or Christianity, China or Palestine, and more to do with technology and our interconnectedness (side question: has our interconnection via the internet made us less vulnerable, as it was originally intended to do, or more vulnerable to attack?).

This steady move doesn't make the atomic bomb world an inevitability. We need arms control. We need to remember that two things made 9/11 as bad as it was: jet fuel and architecture. If jets were battery powered and people in buildings were more spread out, it would be harder to kill large numbers of people. We also need to figure out why people who launch attacks are so pissed off and try to do something to resolve those conflicts non-violently. Taking steps to reduce inequality, even if that means (god forbid) regulating a market or implementing a governmental program every now and then, would almost certainly help in this regard. Once we've done those things to the extent that we can, we need to decide whether we are absolutists or situationalists about the remaining risk and our privacy.

Resolutions: approximating the likelihood of and identifying the motivations for abuse of surveying power. Designing mechanisms to detect abuse and punishing abuse severely. Figuring out ways of assessing the risk of failing to survey the population properly and punishing the over-valuation or under-valuation of a threat severely. These are, of course, extremely difficult to even approximate. And yet, I would argue, this is what people in power are already doing, and this is what they must do. My hunch is that people who aren't in power (Joe Blow on the internet forum) tend to be absolutists because they do not have to face the negative consequences of being wrong. Those who are in power must face these consequences, and so they tend to be situationalists. If we were ever to have a more direct democracy and really give the power to the people, I'd wager that we'd make some pretty big mistakes b/c most people are not used to dealing with the consequences of very bad decisions made on a large scale. We'd learn, of course, but it would be pretty ugly.

The problems go beyond the rapid evolution of technology. I think that our culture (primarily on the left) is running into a conflict that we (primarily on the right) had when we tried to reconcile modernity with another document written in another era: the Bible. The way we think about the world - in particular language and the self - is not the way that we looked at it when the Constitution or the Bible were written. The shift happened gradually, as the population became more educated and interconnected, more industrialized. I'm not saying that the way we perceive our world and our selves is superior or inferior to the way we perceived them before; only that it is different, so different that words written in one paradigm, while still maintaining some semblance of meaning that applies to our lives today, need to be translated and updated.

This sounds really dangerous, I'll admit. This way lies moral relativism. But I'd argue that there is no other way to deal with our inner conflict between the modern reliance on technology, logic, and interdependence and our obsession with the roots of our democracy.

To sum up, we need to shift the debate away from whether there is potential for abuse of surveillance power (there is) to the likelihood of it being abused (how easy does the technology and socioeconomic structure make it to abuse that power) and the motivations for abuse. We also need to take a longer view with surveillance and let go of the idea that we ever lived in a world where determining our levels of privacy was completely up to us. We need to be vigilant for abuse of surveying power, aware of structures that concentrate this power, and we should question the legitimacy of outside threats. But we cannot keep getting freaked out about a few cameras, invoking Orwell every time a new technology hits the market. We need to realize that cultures and even species have been playing this game of hide and seek for awhile now. When a culture is surveyed, its mode of expression changes. A more intricate slang language develops. A subtle sense of irony develops, one that is indiscernible to outsiders. Pranksters demonstrate how sophisticated photoshop and video editing technology is so that courts will no longer be able to use video surveillance as proof that an event occurred. Like any power struggle, it does not end. Both sides evolve more sophisticated ways of outsmarting the other side. Better eyes lead to better camouflage, ad infinitum.