Solving the Privacy Puzzle

...It may no longer be disgraceful to have premarital sex, or (in most educated circles) to be homosexual...

...A woman who worked for the phone company in the 1940s, when operators on roller skates monitored wall-sized batteries of phone wires, once told me that if an operator picked up a particularly salacious conversation, she would motion to her coworkers and they would roll over to listen...

...The enormous market for drugs in the U.S...

...Until we recognize this, it will continue to be a surrogate for another, and perhaps more important, debate...

...One is that the elite—in particular, elite men—know from personal experience how abusive business and government can be, andrationally fear giving employers and government agencies high-tech tools to gather, codify and transmit information...

...The claim that a historic right is on the block, putting our democratic society injeopardy, is ascendant...

...The new privacy crusaders claim they are defending us all against abuses of power by authority...

...Perhaps a similar approach is needed for many of the behaviors that Americans feel obliged to conceal...

...Agglomerating a growing number of distinct controversies and filing all of them under "privacy" is an even later political phenomenon...

...No one who follows the privacy debate with a degree of objectivity can fail to be impressed by two things: Its tone is peculiarly emotional, and its social base is peculiarly el itisi...

...probably includes people most of us would not ever suspect—the secretary, the corporate vice president, the business school professor (perhaps even you, dear reader...

...The boundaries of crassness would not be pushed much further if someone casually said "This is Mary, whom I met in the Bondage and Submission chat room...

...As recently as the John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations, the FBI seems to have been wiretapping anyone of any prominence in the United States...

...The truth is that the notion of privacy in its current elastic sense dates back only to the 1960s and '70s, when it first entered public discourse in connection with reproductive choice in Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973...

...The emotionalism is familiar from past "moral panics," such as the fear of fluoridation or the much-hyped "epidemics" of child-stealing in the 1980s and church-burning in the 1990s, which turned out later to be fabricated from misunderstood data...

...One of the slogans of the '60s was, "The issue is not the issue...

...Nevertheless, the baby boomers and their children have their own morality, and thus their own set of shocking secrets...

...Thinking Aloud Solving the Privacy Puzzle By Michael Lind In a remarkably short period of time, "privacy" has moved from the margins to the center of political debate in the United States, Canada andEurope...

...They are not worried that the FBI or the CIA will discover they are plotting to overthrow the United States...

...The privacy debate is being driven by something nobody discusses: changing conceptions of shame in our society...

...The peculiarly hysterical tone adopted by many otherwise reasonable persons when discussing privacy, then, is easily understandable: They are afraid of being caught...

...Here, I think, the opposition has to do with the unacknowledged but widespread consumption of recreational drugs—chiefly marijuana, but also cocaine and more exotic substances like heroin and ecstasy...

...Many of the same women who dread high-tech Peeping Toms, though, appear to be the purchasers of "kindercams" and "nannycams"—the tiny cameras hidden in clocks and other appliances to spy on children and their caretakers...

...We already suspect that many of the couples we know did not meet in the circumstances they describe...

...Much of the resistance to biometrie cameras might be eliminated if minor vices were legalized, or if prosecutors made it clear that victimless (and propertyless) crimes caught on camera would rarely be prosecuted...

...They are worried that their wives will discover their favorite porn sites, or that the FBI agent doing the background check for a Commerce Department job will discover the alias Stud Muffin...

...There are two possible explanations...

...Those respectable secret drug users must live in fear that biometrie cameras will photograph them buying drugs from a dealer or a friend in a public place and automatically alert the local vice squad...

...In public discussions of privacy, one hears them repeatedly raise the specter of employers secreting a camera in the women's bathroom...

...What unites these diverse concerns, according to the emerging consensus, is the danger that new technologies of surveillance, data-recording and data exchange will be put to nefarious purposes...

...But it seems a reasonable inference, reinforced by the curious lack of alarm about the use of cameras in apartment and office buildings, where no illicit transactions are likely to take place...

...Every society suffers from the gap between its professed social code and the actual norms of everyday life...

...Until a few generations ago, most Americans lived on farms or in small towns or crowded neighborhoods where personal privacy, in the contemporary sense, was virtually nonexistent, This was as true of the aristocrat, surrounded most of the time by servants, as it was of the peasant sharing a one- or two-room hut with family and, sometimes, livestock...

...The nebulous concept today embraces a number of issues, ranging from the serious—the possible abuse of the results of genetic testing by corporations and the government —to the trivial—the sharing of information about consumer preferences among businesses that bombard hapless consumers with unsolicited catalogs and e-mail advertisements...

...Why, then, would anyone except a neoConfederate militiaman in Idaho or a member of the anarchist Left oppose the adoption of so potent a security weapon in the United States...

...Worse, it is to put oneself in the unpopularposition of being "against" privacy...

...Perhaps the privacy debate should be renamed the secrecy debate...

...The deployment of 250,000 of them in Great Britain has been an extraordinary success...

...Most of us are hypocrites...

...Despite these dissenters, fear of the imminent erosion of a historic right and of a threatening new, soft totalitarianism, is rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom...

...But the compromise of hypocrisy, in order to succeed, requires a considerable degree of secrecy...

...I have no proof that this accounts for the near panic the device inspires among many individuals who belong to the educated professions and business community...

...Searching for a constitutional pedigree for their campaign, privacy crusaders in the United States have merely been able to come up with a few tidbits—a quote from Justice Louis D. Brandeis here, an early 20th-century court case about publishing photographs without permission there...

...I suspect that in a room full of blue-collar workers, a consensus in favor of the law enforcement agencies would be equally pronounced...

...If I am correct, terrorists and criminals have found unwitting allies in a large number of Americans who are so worried about the possible exposure of their minor vices or medical conditions that they support a privacy regime which would weaken the ability of government to combat terror and crime...

...But the revelation that you are having an extramarital affair, or trolling the Internet for sex partners using the alias Stud Muffin, or perhaps Miss Behavior, would still be highly embarrassing...

...Big Brother, we are cautioned again and again, is finally here —not in the form of a totalitarian state, but of something subtler and perhaps more sinister, a universal surveillance society...

...The catalog of attitudes and actions that are acceptable in secret but unacceptable in public changes constantly...

...Those who try to live strictly according to the code are generally considered annoying prudes...

...The emotional electricity that crackles around the privacy issue comes from fear of public exposure and humiliation...

...The answer, I would suggest, has less to do with politics than sociology...

...The fear that the convergence of high technology with law enforcement and business practices is about to rob us of our privacy has all the hallmarks of a classic, irrational moral panic...

...In a letter of paternal advice to his son, the 19th-century American architect Henry Hobson Richardson warned that confidences should never be committed to paper, because servants were fond of reading letters...

...Should enough elite Americans who are afraid of being photographed buying marijuana on a street comer join forces with radical libertarians to prevent the adoption of biometrie cameras in public places, an opportunity will be lost to prevent, or punish, many muggings, murders and acts of political terrorism...

...It strikes me as not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense that could do enormous harm to a great many people...

...A similar explanation probably underlies the widespread resistance to the introductionof biometrie cameras on street corners and in airports...

...Of course, mine is a minority opinion...

...The paradox is glaring...

...In 1901, illegitimacy or black or Jewish ancestry could be the shocking secret on which a tragic novel turned...

...The other possibility is that a lot of people have something to hide...

...Instead of dealing with each case on its own merits, they retreat to the higher, abstract principle of privacy...

...The gap between our public personas and our private weaknesses would merely be fodder for sociological analysis or satire or perhaps literary tragedy, if it were not so potentially dangerous...

...But if, as I believe, the conventional wisdom about privacy is deeply confused, what explains its appeal to so many otherwise thoughtful people...

...Today's American elite are far more relaxed about all these subjects, to the consternation of conservatives...

...On a different but no less relevant plane, should enough elite Americans who are afraid of having someone discover their cosmetic surgery or use of Viagra or Prozac lobby Congress to install extreme medical privacy laws, many of us with treatable diseases and conditions that might have been discovered by the dissemination of medical data would suffer or die unnecessarily...

...The idea that there was a golden age of personal privacy in the past is naïve...

...In the case of Prohibition, the tension between the ideal of abstinence from alcohol and the practice of widespread drinking was resolved in favor of the practice...

...Furthermore—to make another generalization I believe can be confirmed— this male anxiety is most intense among affluent, college-educated, heterosexuals...

...in Glasgow, Scotland, alone they are credited with reducing crime nearly 70 per cent...

...But the groups most likely to suffer from discrimination and exploitation—the working class and poor, members of racial minorities, gays and lesbians—appear to be much less preoccupied with the alleged problem than more mainstream members of the suburban, educated overclass...

...We pay lip service to the public norms, while frequently flouting them and tolerating considerable deviation in others...

...Women express a disproportionate concern about being objects of male voyeurism...

...At present the dinner conversation of the chattering classes tends to revolve around abs and low-carb diets...

...This would make it possible to conclude, for example, that corporations should not be allowed to subpoena the PCs of employees to learn whether they are involved in union activity, and that all newborns should be tested for HIV—or the opposite...

...The second hypothesis brings to mind a remark by the cartoonist Scott Adams, in his book The Dilbert Future: "In the future, new technology will allow the police to solve 100 per cent of all crimes...

...Ditto extending the kind of social tolerance already shown toward premarital sex to the use of personal ads, potency-enhancing drugs, cosmetic surgery, and the consumption of pornography—all practices that remain taboo...

...The very people who, thanks to their privileged backgrounds, are most likely to be corporate executives and high-level civil servants, tend to be most alarmed about the prospect of corporations and governments being able to acquire information they want to conceal...

...This is not a tool whose intrinsic value reasonable people can disagree on...

...The sensible alternative would not only be to treat each situation individually, but to recognize personal privacy as just one of several competing factors deserving consideration...

...If advances in camera and computer technology are contributing to the salience of the privacy issue in politics, my sense is that—to put it crudely—women tend to be more obsessed with cameras and men with computers...

...In the era of the telephone party line, operators were notorious for eavesdropping...

...This is actually nothing new...

...It is also the simple and misleading modus operandi of the new privacy theorists: They link together discrete disputes that would best be analyzed separately—for instance, the argument about using biometrie cameras to catch criminals, and the question of mandatory HIV testing of newborns...

...To accept the lumping together of different topics as "aspects" of a single "privacy issue" is to engage in the debate on their terms...

...In many of today's heated arguments about privacy, the issue is not the issue either...

...Mature, worldly-wise people will look the other way as long as you do not, as the saying goes, frighten the horses...

...The bad news is that we'll realize 100 per cent of the population are criminals, including the police...

...That alone, I would wager, goes a long way toward explaining the enthusiasm of law-abiding, upright citizens—particularly men—for computer encryption techniques...

...Had a proper system of biometrie cameras been in place in American airports on September 11, the World Trade Center towers might be standing today...

...Men, to judge by their contributions to public discussions of privacy, are less worried about cameras in the bathroom than they are about the boss or the government tracking their surfing on the Web...

...In addition, one is struck by a difference in the reactions of men and women (these are my impressions, but I trust that the experience of others bears them out as well...

...those who openly reject the code are usually treated as probable subversives...

...In 1951, it was more likely to be homosexuality or a secret divorce...

...This is especially clear where privacy questions intersect with those involving sex and children...

...The major source of the moral panic that is the privacy scare, I have come to believe, is the apprehension of many Americans that a truly sophisticated system of camera surveillance and computer information collection will catch them doing things that are technically illegal or, if legal, personally embarrassing...

...A few thinkers have challenged this perception, among them the communitarian sociologist Amitai Etzioni, who stresses the need to balance individual privacy against the legitimate interests of the community, and the scientist David Brin, who argues that we must adapt to "the transparent society" rather than attempt to prevent its evolution...

...Cameras that compare faces to photographs in computer databases are a proven and reliable method of identifying criminals and terrorists...

...During Prohibition, mainstream Americans who liked a drink now and then were the de facto allies of gangsters...

...I have been in rooms fall of wellheeled individuals where only one person dissented from the consensus that citizens should be allowed to hide any information they choose from law enforcement agencies by means of encryption devices of the sort used by spies, terrorist organizations and organized crime...

...The young William Faulkner, during a stint as a postmaster, is alleged to have amused himself by reading the mail of his neighbors...

...Once some behavior that is tacitly permitted yet theoretically forbidden is exposed, the public norm is reaffirmed by moral denunciation or at least ridicule of the unfortunate victim...