Internet privacy and security: airstrip one, brave new world or what else?

Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

Unlike the easy copy that flows from tabloid media (of any form), the political attacks on the United States in 2001 did not mark some radical change in the alignment or nature of politics and the policy process. Some "new dawn" did not rise on 12 September 2001 and, for all the horror, pain, and suffering (inflicted and yet to be perpetrated), the world was not "changed forever". For all that death, the most significant thing to occur was the opening of a window.

The response to this world(view) shattering event, however, has been dramatic. In the United States, the USA PATRIOT Act was rushed through a Congress too shell-shocked to refer to their pocket-sized version of the Bill of Rights, heralding a massive expansion in the surveillance powers of law enforcement and intelligence services in that nation, and a peeling away of the checks and balances shown to be so critical in the days of King and Hoover, where organisations like the FBI showed their ability to support the status quo and suppress dissent.

Increased access to surveillance; roving wiretaps; the surveillance of citizens by foreign intelligence agencies; access to ISP logs by law enforcement - all featured in PATRIOT, with liberals in Congress increasingly frustrated by the lack of information from security agencies about how these powers have been employed, and conservatives looking to extend the lifespan of the legislation (from its original 2005 sunset). In Australia, the federal government toyed with its own version of PATRIOT (which has resurfaced now the War in Iraq has exposed the nation to greater risk of attack), while Victoria has foreshadowed legislation aimed at allowing "sneak and peek" covert-entry warrants. For Australia, this type of legislation reflects a lack of an indigenous Bill of Rights, for the United States, a lack of understanding - as Alanis Morissette has shown us - of what the word "ironic" actually means.

And this leads, in a round about way, to a discussion about technology.

It is interesting that for a man who wants to know a lot of things about people, Dr. John Poindexter's biography on the webpage of Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency failed to mention his more famous exploits in the Iran-Contra affair (that is before the page was removed completely). Regardless of his previously-demonstrated contempt for the rule of law and the role of Congress, however, the head of the Total Information Awareness project of DARPA may be just one of the most significant figures in the future of American democracy.

Total Information Awareness (TIA), for all its state-of-the-art jargon, isn't a new concept. TIA aims to develop a comprehensive (when they say total, they mean total) data mining and synthesis system, drawing information from a range of government databases, and using the inter-operability of online systems, to comprehensively search online information as well. Combined with advanced analysis techniques (read: profiling), Poindexters's team will use this information to make the world safe for democracy - as they see it.

Overall, strategies like TIA have been mooted ever since computerisation began to register on the public consciousness as a means of expediting the handling and processing of "routine" information. In 1970, Malcolm Warner and Michael Stone, a political scientist and a computer scientist, wrote in the Data Bank Society - an incredibly presentient book -that "Our freedom is threatened by the computer because its information-power demands that it be given more information, on the evidence of which conclusions may be drawn, plans made, directing us (corporately and singly)".

It is this information-power demand that makes the prospects of computerisation and total information awareness so attractive. As the Vice-Chairman of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - Senator Shelby - argued, systems like the TIA are vitally important to the role of intelligence agencies because they overcome the problem of "stovepipes" (hierarchical-only information flows) and "reservoirs" (disconnected information repositories). As the US intelligence community was quick to point out, it wasn't the incompetence of senior managers ignoring field officers reports about suspicious foreigners learning to fly planes and not land, but a lack of aggregated reports that failed to trip important intelligence alarm bells. Aggregated databases, therefore, are the only way to make America safe from the type of people it regularly irritates.

This is an old and hackneyed argument and runs counter to both the intent and sprit of pluralistic governments, and the logic of complex systems.

First, the TIA approach appeals to conservatives because of its inherent call to economy, that is, that with a wide number of competing agencies, there are inefficiencies due to duplication and redundancy. Perfect efficiency, therefore, becomes the objective of organization reshaping. Put the other way, however, perfect efficiency (total elimination of redundancy) means that should any single element in the system fail, the result is total failure of the whole. Think about just how precious efficiency is to you the next time your 747 bounces onto the tarmac and multiple redundant systems come into play to get you to the terminal, rather than the morgue.

Second, there's an inherent assumption that organizations involved in intelligence and law enforcement have only one objective and master - in the current political climate the elimination of "terrorists" and "terrorism" at the behest of the US President. This assumption is problematic - unless you assume that the US is run like Syria. When considering a federal system like the US (but also Australia, Canada, and now Europe), different law enforcement bodies (ranging from local, through state and federal) theoretically report to different masters with their own political agendas. Madison argued for division of power between multiple branches of government and different levels of the federation, not because he was interested in inefficiency, but because he feared the totalising power of a single sovereign. Democracy's costly, but Madison, Locke, and Montesquieu recognised the value proposition of complexity and countervailing centres of power in terms of personal liberty.

Third, regardless of the rule of law inherent in countries like the US, profiling and selective harassment of Arab-Americans and the use of mechanisms like military tribunals, demonstrate how democratic countries can be tyrannical in times of (real or perceived) crisis - the old problem of democracy, where the many are tyrants to the few. While technologies like the TIA are targeted at minority groups now, we have to remember what Milton Friedman said about nothing being as permanent as a temporary solution.

If security is the carrot that will encourage Americans to exchange their liberty for data profiling, then the corporate sector may illustrate how low a price privacy really is. In a recent analysis of Microsoft XP's Update feature (an automatic routine that allows users to download the latest "patch" for their computer operating system) Mike Hartmann of Tech Channel in Germany demonstrated how the software vendor gains access to hardware information from users, and has the capability to determine software used on individuals' machines. Again, information is power, but in this case particularly valuable marketplace power.

"So what?" some might ask, a little bit of "opt in" data for the software giant, "What does it cost you?". While Microsoft argues that updates are "optional", it must be remembered that these patches are often fixes to the imperfect products offered by the company in the first place, either simple error corrections or adjustments to the security and integrity of the computer. One must question how voluntary these corrections really are.

At the more prosaic level, Internet hoaxes like Freewheelz.com (a website promising a free car in exchange for extensive personal information, including a regular stool sample) illustrated how willing citizens are to hand over information in exchange for large or even very token rewards (many people responded to the hoax). Overall, this reflects either the casual attitude to information of those who fear not the state nor corporate America; or ignorance about the possibilities of the data bank society (the latter being more likely). When Scott McNealy, head of Sun Microsystems, told reporters that "You have zero privacy anyway … Get over it", he was not simply arguing that his vision of an integrated information society was not just right, but appropriate - a normative good for the post-modern age in which we live. This view, however, in combination with the aggressive stance taken by the PATRIOTs into online information, data mining of multiple databases, and the US music industry's desire to take direct action (cracking attacks) against computer users who share MP3 music files online, questions the status of personal privacy as a natural human right.

Developments in data mining in the intelligence community and commercial sector are not - as some would argue - the inevitable march of technological progress making us so much more efficient and effective. This revised view of technological determinism is an easy way to explain the tendency for governments and large corporate actors to erode the privacy of citizens. In reality, what we see is a least-effort lock-in adoption of an insidious character. Insidious, not because it's a type of "rush to the bottom of the barrel" phenomena proclaimed by many privacy groups - but because of a fundamental lack of political imagination. Technology driven (or dependent) western societies are not "locked-in" to the Poindexter-McNealy view of the future because the technology makes privacy and the respect for personal liberty obsolete, but because those who lead have limited political and cultural imaginations and are committed to a narrow economic-rationalist paradigm.

As the Europeans have demonstrated, public interest regulation of corporations can be effective, and the expansion of these regulations globally is required when corporations like Microsoft can extract information from Sydney for data mining in Redmond. When it comes to the aggregation of data by government intelligence services, can you really trust a US administration lead by a man who argues that "There ought to be limits to freedom" when irritated by public criticism?