The Transparent Society

Technological myopia comes in when privacy experts claim we can protect ourselves by hiding. Cameras are getting smaller, faster, better, cheaper and more mobile at a rate far faster than Moore's Law.  (Some call this "Brin's Corollary.")  And yet, nearly every discussion of surveillance assumes that they will remain great big, visible boxes on lamp posts. They won’t. They will shrink and move and zoom and become more numerous than blades of grass. Shall we banish them? How, when they become smaller than mosquitos and more numerous?

Freedom can only be effective when most of the people know most of what's going on, most of the time. Only one thing will keep you free: Aggressively, militantly empowering yourself and your neighbors to see.

Ancient Greek myths tell of a farmer, Akademos, who did a favor for the sun god. In return, Apollo granted the mortal a garden wherein he could say whatever he liked, even about the mighty Olympians, without retribution...The alternative was to empower Akademos with an equalizer, some way to enforce the gods' promise. That equalizing factor could only be knowledge. But more about that in a moment

Police are waging a futile war against camera-toting citizens. In The Transparent Society, I describe exactly this kind of tension, between citizens armed with new tools of vision and accountability, and tens of thousands of cops who - from day to day - see themselves as doing a harsh, difficult and under-appreciated job. According to “Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law” -- the cameras will get smaller, cheaper, more numerous and more mobile every year. So figures of authority might as well get used to it now.

In the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations about the U.S. Intelligence Community -- and the subsequent storm of protest -- President Obama appointed a blue ribbon commission to survey the situation and report back with recommendations.  Headed by Richard Clarke, chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, it included a lifelong CIA professional and a trio of university professors with experience in both law and security policy (one of whom is a colleague of mine and an expert on privacy matters).  The contents of their report -- just made public -- were certain to raise controversy.

 Can we thrive in the info age by embracing, not fearing the power to see?
Let's put it plainly. The opposite approach, pushed by almost everyone, simply cannot work.  That prescription -- finding ways to control and limit information flows and protect the databases from leaking -- has never once been demonstrated in practice to be effective.  Not once… ever! Instead, every couple of months another tsunami spilll takes place… from one company then an agency then a nonprofit then another trusted company... and no one learns the obvious lesson.

Media discussions of privacy, freedom and the information age are starting to get more interesting, as folks finally start to realize a core truth... that everything eventually leaks. That the reflex of whining and demanding shadows to hide-in will never work. The data we entrust to banks and retail chains?  The trade secrets that companies rely on for competitive advantage? The cherished spy programs of our governmental professional protector caste (PPC)? If these do not leak because of hackers, or accidents, then would-be (or self-styled) whistle-blowers will see to it, sooner or later. Which provokes our core question... is the world of information leakage one that we should (at a fundamental level) be fighting against... at all? Or actively encouraging?

We should ask which is more important: what government knows, or what it might do to us? Intrinsically, you can never be certain what elites see or know. But actions can be observed and held accountable, by insisting that all watchers be supervised, answering top-down surveillance with "sousveillance," the habit of a brash citizenry monitoring from below – with a goal to preserve both freedom and safety. Sousveillance isn't just a response to surveillance, it is the wellspring of freedom.

Instead of railing against that fact that there will be more Edward Snowdens, let's revamp whistleblower laws, in order to encourage in-house correction of bureaucratic errors. This would also let us calibrate where future Snowdens fall in the wide range from traitor to hero.

Last year I touted the most important civil liberties event (so far) in the 21st Century, when top U.S. courts (Glik v. Cunniffe) ruled that citizens have an absolute right to record their interactions with police in public places, and the Obama Administration issued a declaration supporting this ruling as "settled law."  I went on to say that the matter would continue to be at issue, at the level of the streets, with many cameras and cell phones "accidentally" broken… until that phase of resistance ends the way it must, with more bystander-cams catching -- then deterring -- the breaking of cameras. And of course all of it was portrayed in both fiction and nonfiction 25 years ago.

Face-recognition has reached your smart phone, bringing science fiction closer and also (I expect) a storm of controversy.

Open Data and Transparency: A Look back at 2013: Was this the year that "transparency" came into its own? In this year-end review, we learn of progress in some nations, while others cling tenaciously to old, corruption-prone ways.

 Our civilization prospers - and its opponents tend to shrivel - the more open the world and its varied competitive battlefields become. The more open is the competition, the more it becomes a matter for the accountability arenas - markets, science, democracy... that create beneficial synergies out of competition, instead of reciprocal destruction. Further, the more open the playing field, the more standing individuals have, contributing their billions of eyes to a network that can detect errors and criminality, helping the professionals to do their jobs.