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

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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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

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.

To continue reading, purchase The Transparent Society.

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