Suspected Terrorist

Multimillionaire John Gilmore is suing the government to remain anonymous. Is this the last stand for privacy?

Brian Doherty from the August/September 2003 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

In many significant areas of life, the legal and technological fight for privacy appears to be over. Your employer pretty much has the right -- and the ability, thanks to aforementioned technologies and things like keystroke-recording software -- to snoop on everything you do, say, and write while on his property. It is an irony little appreciated by those who call on the government to protect your privacy from your boss that the biggest job-privacy concerns are caused by government policies. These include the tax laws that link health insurance to your job and thus make all your choices -- even in private life -- part of the boss' bottom line, and the occupational safety and discrimination laws (and lawsuits) that drive most employer record-keeping.

Courts have declared that being visually snooped on in public spaces is just fine, since you have no meaningful presumption of privacy there. Thus the awesome proliferation of video surveillance cameras. No one seems to know exactly how many are out there -- national estimates range from 2 million to 11 million. In New York, the Surveillance Camera Players, a guerrilla theater group, is trying to change the social consensus about these cameras. Members count cameras and, when they find them, map them on the World Wide Web. Such grassroots activism and information-sharing might do more to help individuals make their own choices about how much privacy means to them than will any national legislation.

I Love to Fly and It Shows

At the root of most privacy complaints, whether aimed at marketers or at the state, is the desire not to be bugged, in the term's common colloquial sense: not to be bothered, not to be harassed. That people know certain things about us can creep us out -- but should that mean we should restrict them from seeking out and spreading such knowledge, if done peacefully? We don't want e-mails or phone calls or mail we didn't ask for. (Except that some of us do at least some of the time, which shows why imposed legislative solutions to privacy concerns can't be optimized for everyone.) One of the benefits of modernity and urbanity over traditional life, as David Brin acknowledges, was that they allowed us to escape the village realities where everyone knew everything about us and judged us based on that knowledge. We came to the city to immerse ourselves in a soothing bath of anonymity.

The privacy rights movement doesn't talk about this much, but this very search for anonymity was the foundation of the modern database nation. Credit, for example, was originally based on merchants' personal knowledge of you and their judgment of your probity. But to enable a world where credit institutions can guarantee you everywhere on the planet, national institutions need to collate and check information easily. There's a reason the credit business -- and the credit report business -- has been steadily consolidating over the past 100 years. It is a very helpful, easy, convenient world. It is also a database world. Yet in some senses, it's a more private world because each individual merchant doesn't have to know a damn thing about you as long as the Visa system vouches for you.

The laws that supposedly defend our privacy are confused at best. Government right now certainly seems more intent on tearing down, not strengthening, the flimsy curtains we draw around our lives. Technology is doing the same. However, for every public surveillance camera, as one anti-camera activist has pointed out, there can be a laser pointer that temporarily disables it. And, perhaps more importantly, a clown to point it out and mock it.

David Brin, that prophet of a transparent society, laments the passing of the world he has verbally buried. It was fun while it lasted, this historical interregnum between the lack of privacy in the village and the lack of privacy in the bustling techno-metropolis. But lonely, too, he guesses.

The anti-Brins in this argument -- best exemplified by the tireless John Gilmore -- argue that we can fight and win ground. If our rights to anonymity and privacy mean anything to us at all, they say, we have to be willing to inconvenience ourselves for them, to pay for them, as Gilmore has done. I may doubt Gilmore's ability to win a meaningful victory, but his struggle strikes me as heroic. Still....

While working on this story, I needed to get to Atlanta. I found a surprisingly cheap ticket, at a perfectly convenient time.

It was on Delta, the airline that so raises the ire of privacy advocates because of its willing collaboration in testing the heinous CAPPS II system. I knew everyone concerned about privacy was supposed to be boycotting Delta. I'd even heard the anti-Delta spiel directly from the fellow who runs boycottdelta.com.

But I felt confident there was no information in any database anywhere that would keep me from getting on the plane. Only the guilty have reason to fear. And the ticket was more than 35 percent cheaper than anything else I could have gotten for that time. We'll give away our life story for a Big Mac.

I bought the ticket.