Notes

There are a couple interesting posts at Wired in the last couple days.

Today, David Brin writes to defend his idea of a “transparent society,” in which there is more surveillance, but everybody gets to see everybody else. Last week, another Wired columnist, Bruce Schneier, pointed out that the problem with Brin’s model is that “[y]ou cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee.” He gives an example

You’re stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer’s ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

Seems pretty persuasive to me. Brin disagrees. He writes in response:

Almost monthly, we hear of some angry cop arresting a citizen on trumped “privacy violations,” for using a cellphone camera or MP3 recorder to capture an interaction with authority. And each month, judges toss the arrests, forcing police to apologize. Every time. So much for those power exponents.

In other words, the judiciary provides a check. Since the cops’ arrests get “tossed,” no harm, no foul. In other words, the massively disruptive, intimidating power of the police to arrest people on trumped up charges apparently carries no value in Brin’s universe.

It is particularly interesting then to see that just yesterday there was a post on Wired describing how American police officers afraid of “unfair maligning” were able to convince the web hosting service GoDaddy to pull the plug on the website RateMyCop.com, which allowed people to “post comments about police they’ve interacted with, and rate them,” including names and badge numbers.

The owner of the website is looking for other hosting and will probably find it, but for how long? Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, and chief of police in my very own city of Fresno, wants legislation that would make such websites illegal. That seems unlikely, but the fact that Dyer and his cop cronies are so afraid of citizens shining a light on their activities sure sounds suspicious. If citizens were acting so suspiciously, the police would probably start looking for probable cause to search or arrest.

That enormous power imbalance makes Brin’s argument look, in my opinion, downright stupid. If it is acceptable for citizens to be arrested on “trumped” charges because we can rely on the judiciary to “toss” their arrests, why is it not acceptable for police officers to be “unfairly maligned”? It’s acceptable to unfairly take citizens and arrest them, disrupting their lives and tarnishing their reputations, but it’s not acceptable for people to “malign” police officers, unfairly or not? The police are immune from mere criticism while citizens are not immune to unfair arrests?

Furthermore, why should the mass of police officers in the United States have the clout to put pressure on a private company to censor a private website? Even worse, the information on RateMyCop.com is not private or secret information. It is information provided by citizens based on their interactions with the police, which the police record in reports that are public record. Except those reports are written by police, while information provided online is written by citizens. Why should the police be so worried that information not subject to their own slant is available to the public?

David Brin thinks transparency that allows citizens to look in on the government is the perfect antidote to transparency that allows the government to look in on citizens. He ignores reality. The government has more power to make people’s lives miserable. The government has more guns. The government has the privilege of keeping secrets. The government has the benefit of massive propaganda that has caused many citizens to believe falsely that police officers and military personnel are automatically respectable people because they are in uniform.

The imbalance is too great. The government retains all the meaningful power. The solution is in the rights of free speech, free press, free assembly, petition for grievances, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right of privacy. Although the last does not appear in the Constitution, it has long, underlying precedent in the common law and has been affirmed by the United States Supreme Court.

Transparency is not the solution. It is a foolish illusion propped up by people who fail to notice that governments with unlimited power to look in on citizens provide the perfect tool for idealists, utopians, and fundamentalists who are looking to control the conduct of their neighbors. The power of our government has already been seized by people who believe that sex offenders can never finish being punished, that they must not only be registered, but that they should be listed on a website so all their neighbors can find them and drive them away, or perhaps even murder them. Give government the power to gaze into people’s lives and let the judgmental, moralistic right-wing get too much power and you have the perfect recipe for a truly nightmarish existence.