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From: byron@archone.tamu.edu (Byron Rakitzis)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: The end of privacy... and so what comes next?
Message-ID: <13967@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Date: 1 Apr 91 00:07:53 GMT
References: <63473@bbn.BBN.COM>
Sender: usenet@helios.TAMU.EDU
Organization: College of Architecture, Texas A&M University.
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In article <63473@bbn.BBN.COM> cosell@BBN.COM (Bernie Cosell) writes:
	[discussion about privacy deleted]
>CAN one make a case that privacy is
>protectable, or worthwhile, or even means anything?

>Here are three conundrums that seem to do a pretty good job of
>skewering the case for privacy, (and the more I think about them the
>more despondent I get):
>
>  1) privacy is just a cloak for illegal activity  [i.e., trading
>	privacy for security is a win]
>
>  2) privacy just makes life unnecessarily difficult [i.e., trading
>	privacy for convenience is a win]
>
>  3) no single bit of information is really "private" anyway [i.e., the
>	problem is not the data, but its aggregation].

I am sure you are going to get a *lot* of mail over this one. I just
want to throw in my 2c by dealing with a couple of your examples.

>Why shouldn't police be allowed to frisk
>people at random on the street?  or search cars [or even homes] on a
>hunch, or less?  If you don't do drugs, why do you bitch so much about
>drug testing?  What do you have to hide, anyway?  The debate always
>ends up with the anti-privacy folks having specific, concrete,
>immediate, seductive _advantages_ of foregoing a bit of privacy, while
>the pro-privacy folk end up making vague, theoretical, philosophical,
>"but what if" arguments against.  

This is an *extremely* dangerous viewpoint to hold. I'll grant you that
if the police somehow consisted of perfect robots dedicated to
upholding the law, and that the law itself was somehow objectively
deemed to be just and reasonable, at *best* we could hope for a kind of
Brave New World scenario where everybody is continually under the
scrutiny of a "benevolant" state.  This is alone enough to terrify me,
but just consider: policemen, politicians, law, government are in
general *far* from perfect. What if our government had this kind of
power you are talking about, and then decided, say, that books were
illegal, or that Jews could not hold more than $1000 in property, and
so on? If you don't grant the possibility that the government is
fallible then you are missing the whole point. I take government's
fallibility as an *axiom*. I strongly believe that our government
should be set up under pessimal assumptions of infallibility. That's
why I think it's terrible, for example, that Congress can just vote in
a tax raise without asking the rest of us.

Just remember what happend when Sen. McCarthy was around, and you will
realize that the Good Ol' American Way of Life is at stake here. It's
not a "vague, theoretical, philosophical" issue at all.

>2) A non-private world could be VERY convenient: just call Domino's,
>the person answers the phone, and without my having said anything says
>"Hi Mr. Cosell, just the usual tonight?".

How about this one: you walk into a convenience store, and pull out
your VISA, and they come back with, "sorry, we don't serve Communists
here", or worse yet, the government disallows free travel between
states. You don't have to go too far to find this one. Just take a trip
to the Soviet Union.

I won't keep going. I originally intended this to be a very short
followup. Please forgive my verbiage. I just hope you can see the
other side of the coin also.

Byron.