SCN: Privacy

Fri Oct 26 07:25:53 PDT 2001

x-no-archive: yes

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(Business Week, excerpts)---Polls taken since September 11 show 
that 86% of Americans are in favor of wider use of facial-
recognition systems, 81% want closer monitoring of banking and 
credit-card transactions, and 68% support a national ID card. 

But the quest for safety is also going to come at an incalculable 
cost to personal privacy. 

The war on terrorism is still in its early days, but one thing is 
already clear: In the future, information about what you do, where 
you go, who you talk to, and how you spend your money is going 
to be far more available to government, and perhaps business as 
well.

Across a wide range of battlefields, privacy is on the retreat.  Many 
high-tech surveillance tools that were deemed too intrusive before 
September 11...are being unleashed. 

Pre-attack legislation aimed at protecting people from unwanted 
privacy invasions has been shelved, while Congress is on the 
verge of passing an anti-terrorism law giving cops broad new 
powers to wiretap, monitor Internet activity, and peer into personal 
bank accounts. 

The notion of forcing citizens to carry a national identity card - 
once anathema to America's open culture - is getting more serious 
consideration than ever in U.S. history.  

These developments could wind up having profound implications 
for our democracy.  Privacy involves the most fundamental issue in 
governance: the relationship of the individual to the state. 

Since the forefathers, Americans have been committed to the idea 
that people have the right to control how much information about 
their thoughts, feelings, choices, and political beliefs is disclosed.  
It's a matter, first and foremost, of dignity - creating a boundary that 
protects people from the prying eyes of the outside world.  That, in 
turn, helps to shield religious minorities, political fringe groups, and 
other outsiders from persecution by the majority.  

By reducing our commitment to privacy, we risk changing what it 
means to be Americans.  To the extent that ID cards, databases, 
and surveillance cameras help the government track ordinary 
citizens, they may make people marginally less willing to exercise 
basic freedoms - to travel, to assemble, to speak their minds.  "It's 
possible that through a tyranny of small decisions, we could make 
a nightmare society," says Harvard Law School Professor 
Laurence Tribe.  

Of course, we're still a long way from that point.  Although many 
civil libertarians worry that the era of Big Brother is dawning, polls 
show that Americans are still committed to personal privacy and 
are unwilling to give law enforcers a blank check.

But this is a rapidly evolving issue.  We have already abandoned a 
number of old privacy taboos.  If new attacks come and the U.S. is 
powerless to stop them, a mandate could develop for greater 
levels of surveillance.

...government officials have a long history of abusing their power to 
collect personal information.  Remember J. Edgar Hoover and 
Richard Nixon? 

...databases created for one purpose have a way of being reused 
in unintended ways.  Files that Massachusetts accumulated about 
citizen health insurance claims, for example, had to be turned over 
to the tobacco industry when the state sued cigarette makers 
(though the state took steps to ensure that individuals' identities 
were masked).

One of the most controversial issues on the privacy landscape is 
that of national ID cards.  Many Americans are instinctively 
repulsed by the idea.  Passion runs so strong on this issue that the 
government has repeatedly blocked efforts to use Social Security 
numbers for drivers' licenses, voter registration, and prison 
records.  The fear is that the Social Security number would 
become the equivalent of a national ID card.  

More than 100 other countries, many of them democracies, 
disagree.  They come in many varieties.  Germany, after the 
human rights abuses of the Nazis, takes a minimal approach.  
Cards contain basic information, including name, place of birth, 
and eye color. 

Malaysia, on the other hand, this year launched a project to issue 
2 million "multipurpose" cards in Kuala Lumpur.  A computer chip 
allows the card to be used as a combination drivers' license, cash 
card, national health service card, and passport.  

That's only the beginning of what's theoretically possible.  Given 
the power of digital technology, criminal records, immigration data, 
and more could be packed onto ID cards.  In fact, they could 
contain so much data that they become the equivalent of portable 
personal files.  

The concern, of course, is that ID cards could lead the country 
down a slippery slope.  Over the long run, say critics, they might 
be used as a platform for creating new databases.  Starting with a 
card like, say, the one Malaysia just launched, governments could 
require the ID cards to be swiped into electronic readers every time 
people shopped, traveled, or surfed the Web and could 
accumulate an unprecedented quantity of information on their 
citizens.  

For now, though, the question of a national ID card appears to be 
off the agenda, though it's nowhere near dead.  Even some 
longtime civil libertarians are reevaluating. On Sept. 10, "I was a 
knee-jerk opponent of ID cards," says Harvard University law 
professor Alan Dershowitz.  "Now, I've had to rethink the whole 
thing."  

In recent years, scientists have made enormous advances in 
location-tracking tools.  Surveillance cameras with facial-
recognition software can pick out criminals in public places.  Global 
positioning satellite (GPS) transponders in cars, boats - and one 
day, in handheld devices such as phones - send out signals 
identifying people's latitude and longitude to within 10 feet.  Both of 
these technologies will flourish in an environment free of many of 
the privacy concerns that clouded their future before September 
11.  

So far, facial-recognition systems are used primarily in highly 
controlled situations as authentication devices, to vouch for the 
identities of workers entering, say, a nuclear power plant.  They 
are not often used, especially in the U.S., as a general surveillance 
device in public places.

...in the wake of the terror attacks, a security committee formed by 
Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta has recommended 
the aggressive rollout of facial-recognition systems in airports.  But 
it's still unclear how useful they will be.  They can still be tricked by 
people wearing fake beards.  And they tend to generate too many 
false alarms.  Unless these glitches get fixed, the devices may 
never be appropriate for high-traffic settings such as tunnels and 
bridges.  

GPS is a different story.  The technology works - and it has been 
rapidly spreading to new places.  Before September 11, privacy 
groups and some legislators had been working to limit the ability of 
companies to collect location data from customers surreptitiously 
and to raise the legal standards for enforcement officials to 
subpoena this material.  Those battles, for the time being, are lost 
causes.  If GPS information helps track down terrorists, it will be 
collected.  

Unlike facial surveillance, ID cards, or data-mining - which invade 
everybody's privacy - the government's new eavesdropping 
powers will primarily target known suspects.  So they don't raise as 
many issues for the public at large.  

There's one major exception: Carnivore, a technology the FBI uses 
to monitor e-mails, instant messages, and digital phone calls.   
Carnivore generated widespread controversy before September 11 
for being too powerful.  When installed on a suspect's Internet 
service provider, it searched through not only the suspect's Web 
activities but also those of people who used the same ISP. 

After privacy advocates complained, the FBI scaled back its 
deployment.  Now, the brakes are off.  There are widespread 
reports that the government has hooked up Carnivore to ISPs with 
minimal oversight.  The government will probably soon demand 
that ISPs and digital wireless providers design networks to make 
them easier to tap.  Just a few months ago, the FBI wouldn't have 
dared to ask.  Now, such a move would barely make the papers.  

Facial-recognition software.  Data mining.  National ID cards.  
Carnivore.  For the near future, these technologies are going to be 
deployed as stand-alone systems, if at all.  But we live in a digital 
age.  All of these technologies are built on ones and zeros.  So it is 
possible to blend them together...into one monster snooping 
technology.  In fact, linking them together makes each one 
exponentially more effective.  

A national ID card, for example, could be used to launch a new 
unified database that would track everybody's daily activities.  
Information culled from Carnivore could be stored in the same 
place.  This super database, in turn, could be linked to facial-
recognition cameras so that an all-points bulletin could go out for a 
potential terrorist the second the data-mining program detected a 
suspicious pattern of conduct.  

Other, more futuristic new technologies could be added to the mix.  
Scientists will be able to make much more powerful surveillance 
devices if they're freed of the privacy concerns that have 
restrained them in recent years.  Already, researchers are working 
on satellites that can read the unique color spectrums emitted by 
people's skin and cameras that can tell whether people are lying 
by how frequently they blink. 

Left unchecked, technologists could eventually create a nearly 
transparent society, says David J. Farber, a pioneering computer 
scientist who helped develop the Net.  "All the technology is there," 
he says.  "There is absolutely nothing to stop that scenario--except 
law."  

To be sure, nobody is proposing such systems.  And they are a 
long, long way from technical feasibility. But they are within sight - 
and no more far-fetched than, say, eBay...was a generation ago.  
Indeed, unifying the various surveillance systems makes sense 
from a technological standpoint, and there's likely to be strong 
pressure, once the tools are in place, to try to make them work 
better.  

As the U.S. enters the next phase of the war on terror, it is useful 
to keep this Orwellian scenario in mind, if only as a warning 
beacon of some of the hazards ahead.  It is also reassuring to 
know that privacy principles developed in the past still apply in this 
new world. 

Surveillance can be checked by laws that require regular audits, 
that call for citizens to be notified when they're investigated, and 
that give people the right to correct information collected about 
them.  That's the best way of guaranteeing that, in our efforts to 
catch the next Khalid Al-Midhar, we don't wind up with Big Brother 
instead.  

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