Brin: The Transparent Society revisited

[William T Goodall]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/26/cfp_transparent_society/

"By Wendy M. Grossman
Published Monday 26th May 2008 09:02 GMT
CFP 2008 A little over ten years ago, science fiction author David  
Brin stood up at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference and  
delivered the first draft of some of his 1998 book The Transparent  
Society. The crowd, he said Thursday, was "both helpful and actively  
hostile".

The resulting book was, as Michael Froomkin (http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin 
) noted, widely laughed at and reviled. Yet a decade later it's still  
in print, frequently cited in legal and communications work, still  
rebutted(http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/03/securitymatters_0306 
) and defended (http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/03/brin_rebuttal 
), and still very much a part of the mental landscape surrounding  
privacy issues. Few, Froomkin added, admit publicly to agreeing with it.


Brin's central thesis: The cameras are coming. Rail against them or  
join your billions of neighbours in controlling them. Give everyone  
access to everything. Secrecy protects the elite and powerful;  
openness benefits the rest of us. Privacy is a matter of taste and  
fashion.

Last Thursday, the 2008 edition of CFP took another look. Ten years  
on, the book seems more nuanced. Then, the Net was still full of  
libertarians, privacy passion was shifting from the waning crypto  
wars; and pre-9/11, mass CCTV deployment and data-sharing were only  
security service wet dreams. Is it plausible, Froomkin asked, to  
believe that radical transparency will help us now?

Daniel Weitzner (http://www.w3.org/People/Weitzner.html) argued that  
Brin was right about the need to create mechanisms of accountability.  
These have not developed since 1998; what good are privacy rules  
without them? People should not be expected to make decisions at the  
point of collection about information whose future flow and usage is  
unknown, but they should be able to access and correct information  
used to make decisions about them.

The Canadian privacy activist Stephanie Perrin was against giving up  
on privacy just because regulations do not work perfectly. It is far,  
far too soon in the history of technology to expect good controls or  
privacy-enhancing technologies, and the notion that privacy is just  
for old fogeys and kids don't care about it is just another of those  
things kids haven't matured to understand yet.

Still, consider Brin's idea of watching each other: the government of  
Ontario is spending millions of dollars putting security cameras in  
buses and Metro trains, when at any given time of day or night there  
are at least a dozen passengers with camera phones available to take  
pictures if something bad happens.

Alan Davidson, associate director at the Center for Democracy and  
Technology(http://www.cdt.org), pointed out that 9/11 encouraged  
government to embrace secrecy rather than transparency and  
accountability. In that sense, society has gone a long way away from  
Brin's key idea of reciprocity and back towards enclosing elites.

If anything, Brin concluded via cell phone, we should "fight for a  
civilisation that chills out". The more today's kids post stuff that  
will embarrass them later, the more they will have to create a  
civilisation that forgives when they become adults.

Debate to resume ten years hence. Froomkin's prediction: there will be  
more change between now and 2018 than there was between 1998 and 2008.  
®"


-- 
William T Goodall
Mail : wtg at wtgab.demon.co.uk
Web  : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/

And yes, OSX is marvelous. Its merest bootlace, Windows is not worthy  
to kiss. - David Brin