Xref: utzoo comp.org.eff.talk:1947 alt.privacy:222
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From: cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,alt.privacy
Subject: Re: The end of privacy... and so what comes next?
Message-ID: <63565@bbn.BBN.COM>
Date: 5 Apr 91 13:19:29 GMT
References: <63473@bbn.BBN.COM> <10777@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <1991Apr1.180311.5557@eff.org>
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mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin) writes:

}Bernie Cosell's posting seems to me to be an excellent
}articulation of the anti-privacy position (which he makes a
}point of saying he does not necessarily share, by the way).

Indeed! :-)  I now understand a bit better about being a devil's
advocate: to do it effectively, you really have to not keep disclaiming
everything you write [so that it will read persuasively.. you ARE
supposed to be defending the other side, right?]  On the other hand, it
becomes easy for people jumping onto the thread [especially with
excerpting] to *put* you on the other side of the fence...

I'll disclaim here, just once: I am almost fanatically pro-privacy.
I've argued and debated it both on the net and in various other forums
for years.  But basically, I think we've lost!  I'll respond some to the
thread [maintaining the d-a position, on the whole], but as I hope you'll
see, the arguments _for privacy are mostly very subtle and often
just hypothetical; by contrast the arguments _against_ privacy can be very
seductive, practical, easy to grasp.  

Is the 'common man' better or worse off if the police can track every
movement of every person?  Imagine that you could have "knocker ID"?
How about being able to buy an 'intrusion monitor', and in the
unfortunate event that your house was burglarized, you could just check
the "presence logs" and read out the IDs of every person who set foot
on your property.  Would you run to embrace it? [think of it as the
next step in ensuring the 'privacy' of your home after the world
becomes comfortable with caller-id --- answering the phone [and hanging
it up] is baby stuff: how about doing something about that person at
the door before you REALLY commit yourself by opening it?]

Well, arrayed against the philsophical arguments about potential abuses
of such "people tracking", one will have to do something the constant
pressure of the seductions of such a scheme: just as folks who think
they get too many junk calls rush to embrace caller-id, I suspect
people who feel threatened in their neighborhoods will rush to embrace
it, and call those of us who counsel against such dangerous toys
luddites or worse.  How do you make the arguments for continued,
vigilant asceticism sound as persuasive as the ones for the seductions
of taking advantage of some neat new toy if you can get the
privacy-sissies to bend just a little, just this one time, and if
things go awry we can patch it up later,

Back to my Devil's Advocate role.... :-)....


}.. John pointed out
}that we live in a society in which each of us breaks laws,
}knowingly or unknowingly, all the time....

In what way is this a relevant observation [aside that it is true]?
Should we deny the police to enforce the burglary/rape/whatever laws
effectively because they might use those powers to enforce
parking-too-far-from-the-curb violations?  Should we let muggers go
free so that we don't go wild arresting people for tearing the tags off
of their pillows?  Why shouldn't the response to John's observation be
"OK, so fix the laws, but what does this have to do with the police
going after the REAL criminals?"


}The easy accessibility
}of personal data makes it easy for the government to exercise
}its discretion to prosecute us or otherwise make our lives 
}miserable.

This is all very hypthetical.  Who gets to decide which are the bad crimes
and which are the good?  This discretion exists ANYWAY, and crippling
the police from enforcing the laws, all of them and any of them, is
pretty arbitrary: if you don't want the police to enforce some
particular law, shouldn't you be making the law go away, rather than
trying to so-cripple the police that they _cannot_ enforce it?

Is THIS what privacy is for: to allow us to *knowingly* flout the
laws?  Should it be personal discretion as to which laws we use our
"cloak of secrecy" to hide?  What sort of society is that?

 /Bernie\