#daniel solove

[libraryprivacy]

Free ebook download “The future of reputation: Gossip, rumor, and privacy on the Internet.”

Solove, D. J. (2007). The future of reputation: Gossip, rumor, and privacy on the Internet. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

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[briannaisuntitledatpresstime]

An essay on Privacy -- Written for my "Internet, Society & Philosophy" class. I'm pretty proud of it. :-)

During times of national crisis, we, as American citizens, may be less likely to think twice about being subjected to government surveillance.  After all, it’s in the name of the greater good, and for the sake of protecting our country from terrorist threats, right?  It’s not quite that simple.  People shouldn’t be so quick to give up their privacy rights in the name of national security because this makes it too easy for the government to abuse their power and strip citizens of rights for reasons that may not be justified.

            Now, some people will surely argue that giving up a few privacy rights is a small cost for making sure our country is safe.  In his essay, “Invisible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets,” philosopher Peter Singer suggests that people will be more honest and altruistic if they feel that they are being watched, referring to Focault’s idea of the “panopticon” as an ideal model.1 Human beings are easily influenced by social pressures, so I don’t question the validity of Singer’s suggestion, but I have to ask, what will this feeling of being watched do to people’s personalities and sense of identity over time?

            In George Orwell’s 1984, Orwell introduces the concept of “Big Brother,” a figure that has become synonymous with the idea of government surveillance.2 Big Brother is government surveillance at its worst (if you so much as think about rebellion, “the Party” will find you and torture you into submission, however long it takes), but I can’t help but sense a bit of Big Brother in Singer’s interpretation of the panopticon.  The United States government may not be trying to control our thoughts and establish a totalitarian state, but will people still feel comfortable behaving naturally and “being themselves” if they feel like they are always under the government’s eye?  How long will it take before people either start feeling the need to be surreptitious about their behavior and take it underground, or start basing their regular behavior on government ideals for fear of being accused of a crime otherwise (although I feel like the former possibility is more likely)?

            The government may say that it needs to circumvent certain rights in order to crack down on terrorist threats, but there are ways to do so while protecting American citizens’ right to privacy and remaining within the limits of the Constitution.  A perfect example of this is the US National Security Agency (NSA)’s pre-9/11 surveillance project, ThinThread.  The NSA was falling behind, technologically speaking, as America headed into the Internet age.  It was awash in more data than it could possibly comprehend with its information processing methods at the time.  ThinThread, developed by NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney while working with the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), was going to be the solution.3 Journalist Jane Mayer explains in an article for the New Yorker, that what made ThinThread ingenious is that, “Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems.”3 ThinThread was so thorough and good at collecting information that it picked up intelligence on American citizens without the NSA intending it to.  As a fix, Binney built in a set of privacy controls.  With these controls in place, data on American citizens would remain encrypted unless ThinThread flagged it as a potential threat.  In this case, it would remain encrypted until NSA officials were able to obtain a proper warrant to access it.  The NSA could scour the world for threats and pinpoint specific bits of potentially significant data, all while maintaining a reasonably small budget for the project, remaining within the confines of the law and protecting the privacy of American citizens.  But after 9/11 that was no longer enough. 

            ThinThread was scrapped, and the pieces were used to build its follower, the Trailblazer Project.  Trailblazer was very similar to ThinThread, but lacked the privacy controls.  The government wanted to be able to search for people by name without the limits of the US Constitution to stop them.  (This justification doesn’t make sense to me because if the specific people the NSA is targeting are serious threats, shouldn’t ThinThread take notice of their communications anyway?)  In an interview with Mayer for her New Yorker article, Diane Roark, a staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that when she confronted then NSA Director Michael Hayden about why he removed the privacy measures from Trailblazer, he reluctantly said after some prodding, “We didn’t need them.  We had the power.”3 Hayden basically admitted that the NSA saw following privacy laws as a hindrance and thus, decided to circumvent them.  President Bush actually gave the NSA permission through a secret executive order to go forward with the Trailblazer Project, even though monitoring American citizens without a warrant violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  According to a March 2010 article in the New York Times, “Congress (has since) overhauled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to bring federal statutes into closer alignment with what the Bush administration had been secretly doing. The legislation essentially legalized certain aspects of the program.”4 Surveillance of American citizens without a warrant is still illegal, but that doesn’t mean the Obama administration has refrained from the unethical practices of its predecessor entirely.  It was proven in pilot tests that ThinThread worked efficiently and effectively, so I have yet to see a true justification for why the program wasn’t used instead of Trailblazer, which went hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and was ultimately deemed a failure.3 Not only do I question the NSA’s motives in rejecting ThinThread, but I have also recently come to question the extent of what our government deems a “terrorist threat” itself.

            In his book, The Illusion of Progress in the Arab World, Galal Amin compares the idea of “terrorism” that we know now, to the idea of “communism” that circulated during the Cold War.5 He lays out the fact that the name “terrorism” is extremely vague and can be used to refer to practically any act that is “scary.”  In being scary however, no one dares to question it, not only for fear of being caught off-guard by it, but also because of the powerful stigma attached to the label of “conspiracy theorist” that is attached to anyone who questions the validity of a concept as large and significant as this.  But really, how do we, as American citizens, know exactly what terrorism is and how pressing of a threat it actually poses at any given time?  The United States Criminal Code includes a legal definition of “terrorism,” but according to the Oxford Companion to American Law, throughout the rest of the world, “There is no generally agreed upon definition of ‘terrorism.’”6 I’m not questioning the fact that our country needs to be protected from potential threats, but I am wondering if the threat of terrorism is as pressing as it is made out to be, and if the government truly has a need to spy on American citizens without a warrant to fight it.  During times of war or conflict, people’s legal rights should offer them more protection, not less, for the very reason that any national threat can be used as justification for pushing those rights aside.  They need to stand firm in times of peace and conflict.

            A lot of people who believe in our government’s security efforts will surely say, “Let them look in on me.  I’ve got nothing to hide.”  In his book, Nothing to Hide, Daniel Solove quotes author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, saying, “Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal.  All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.”7No one is a completely open book, all of the time.  Would you honestly be okay if the public knew about that despicable thing you did as a child that you’d rather forget about?  Or that secret fetish that took all the guts you could muster just to share with your significant other?  I doubt the government cares about the average citizen’s sexual fetishes, but that’s not entirely the point.  The point is that everyone has something they’re reluctant to share with the world, and if asked, point blank, to hand that information over, I’m pretty sure people would think twice about having “nothing to hide.” 

            Privacy laws exist for a reason.  Even if we don’t always appreciate them, they’re still there to protect us from intrusion.  We can always give up information voluntarily when it suits us; that’s part of our privacy rights.  But I don’t think it’s wise to give up our right to keep information concealed, entirely.  Even with privacy laws in place, the government has broken them in the name of security.  Taking away those laws altogether would only make intrusion into people’s personal data easier.  It can all start with performing our duty as Americans to help our government keep us safe.  We give up a few rights temporarily during wartime to allow greater intelligence to be gathered.  But after that, who’s to say that those rights ever get handed back?  And after that, it’ll be something else.  You might be asked for your phone records, your bank records, then your travel records; little by little, privacy can be chipped away.  And if we’re not careful, one day we’re going to wake up and realize that we don’t have any privacy rights left, at which point we are going to be left wondering, what the hell happened and where did we go wrong?

References 

1. Singer, Peter. “Invisible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets.”  Harper’s Magazine.  August 2011.  31-36.  Print.  Accessed as .pdf from <http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123-net/privacy/singer_secrecy_wikileaks.pdf>

2. Orwell, George.  1984.  New York: Knopf, 1992.  Print.

3. Mayer, Jane.  “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an Enemy of the State?”  The New Yorker.   Condé Nast Digital.  May 23rd, 2011.  Web.  <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all>  Accessed: February 11th, 2012. 

4. Savage, Charlie.  “Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal.”  The New York Times.  The New York Times Company.  March 31st, 2010.  Web.  <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/us/01nsa.html>  Accessed: February 12th, 2012.

5. Amin, Galal.  The Illusion of Progress in the Arab World: A Critique of Western Misconstructions.  New York & Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.  2006.  Print.

6. John F. Murphy. “Terrorism.”  The Oxford Companion to American Law.  Kermit L. Hall, ed. Oxford University Press 2002. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.  University of Oregon.  <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t122.e0909>  Accessed: February 12th, 2012 

7. Solove, Daniel J.  Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security.  New Haven & London: Yale University Press.  2011.  Print.  Accessed in part as .pdf from <http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123-net/privacy/solove_nothing-to-hide-book.pdf>

[krisnelson]

Daniel Solove's six general types of privacy

Daniel J. Solove's 2008 book, Understanding Privacy, attempts to characterize and understand the complex and contradictory modern views and approches to privacy. For Solove, "[p]rivacy concerns and protections do not exist for their own sake; they exist because they have been provoked by particular problems" and it "is protection from a cluster of related problems that impinge upon our activities in related ways" (76). He takes in many respects a practical approach, though he does look into philosophical issues too. But his concern is with "specific types" and "specific activities":

We should conceptualize privacy by focusing on the specific types of disruption and the specific activities disrupted rather than looking for the common denominator that links all of them. ... Instead of construction an understanding of privacy from the top down by first seeking to elucidate an overarching conception of privacy, we should develop our understanding from a bottom-up examination of the problems based on analogical reasoning. (76)

He takes a common-law jurist's approach to analyzing a problem, one enshrined in the legal requirement that American courts must deal above all with specific "cases and controversies," not general theories or philosophical ideas. From the specific facts and harms one can then reason by way of analogy to larger concepts, deriving rules that can be applied to current and future situations. In short, his is a classic American approach to legal reasoning. But it's classic for a reason: it works.

Read about Daniel Solove's six general types of privacy at in propria persona.