In the aftermath of September 11 a press "debate" has begun on the value of privacy. Support is being canvassed for a thinly disguised version of George Orwell's Big Brother.
The September 13 Washington Post electronic edition, for example, described "a mother of two young children" as saying, "I am very much for what this country was founded on, freedom and the Bill of Rights and everything. But when it's a matter of people's lives and making sure we all have a nice place to live, then I would definitely give up the privacy part to ensure the other part."
It is difficult to overestimate the loss of privacy that is possible through the internet and related technologies. This is particularly true if privacy protection mechanisms such as cryptography (encoding) for correspondence is banned. That has been a theme of press statements from government leaders across the world.
Given that the overwhelming majority of terrorist acts are committed by capitalist governments or groups they have trained and funded, elimination of privacy would have no effect on terrorism. It would, however, strengthen governments against their constituents.
Three of the most important areas of privacy risk are:
- Knowledge about who I am including my religious and political beliefs, my racial origins, my health and financial records, my disabilities, my biometrics. Most of this information already exists, spread across many locations and in many forms. The internet creates the possibility of combining all these sources into one seamless whole, accessible by a wide range of government and commercial organisations. (IBM is currently being sued for the contribution its early information systems played in the Nazis' identification of German Jews to be sent to extermination camps.)
- My location, both right now and my movements in the past. Designed to facilitate locality based services (such as the nearest pizza shop or garage), several technologies are currently being developed to locate internet users anywhere in the world to within a few hundred metres. Combined with data-base technologies, facial recognition systems and global positioning technologies, this information threatens a high level of social control through constant monitoring. When large numbers of people's movements are tracked this represents a significant attack on the right of assembly.
- Detail about what I am doing, and therefore my activities and preferences. In one precedent, Judge Robert Bork's nomination to the US Supreme Court was rejected following the "dirty tricks" release to the media of a list of videos he had rented. This led to the passing of the US 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.
Discussions of privacy are often vague. A useful approach taken by legal authority Lawrence Lessig in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is to identify three functions of privacy: as protection of personal dignity; as a means of reducing the burden that loss of privacy would impose; and as a means of controlling the power of the state to regulate.
This last aspect is a much more politically active definition of privacy than most. It underlines the point that the fight to protect privacy is an important means of controlling the expansion of the capitalist state.
By all indications that is a fight we will have to have in relation to the internet over the coming months and years.
BY GREG HARRIS (gregharris_greenleft@hotmail.com)
From Green Left Weekly, November 21, 2001.
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