[ed. Responses from: Evgeny Morozov, Jeremy K. Kessler, Jennifer Granick, Archon Fung, Richard M. Stallman, Bruce Schneier, Frank Pasquale, Rebecca MacKinnon, Marvin Ammori and Adam Kern.]
Since the rise of what was called Internet 2.0 about a decade ago, nearly all Americans have shared their beliefs, values, social and commercial proclivities, and patterns of behavior with a handful of Web-based companies. In return, the companies—most prominently, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Amazon—have shared with everyone and profited fantastically from user-generated content provided both consciously (such as emails or Instagram photos) and unwittingly (such as location information tracked via cell phones).
By pooling these data with the communications records it has been collecting since the spread of mobile phone networks two decades ago, the U.S. government has assembled the largest, if least visible, database in the world. It has given a million people security clearances. It has invested billions of dollars in software and hardware to analyze the data. It is constantly launching new code to comb the data for patterns that might reveal who is planning what terrible act against our country’s interests.
Few would deny the benefits of Internet 2.0 or mobile phones. And no one should begrudge the government’s official purpose. But information is power, and power corrupts. The effect may be insidious. Surveillance and pattern recognition can combine to convey an impression of knowledge so convincing that even the humblest of leaders may believe their data-driven judgments are infallible. The horrific threats we face today and the government’s apparent ability to know everything may seem to justify a broad range of actions, from prosecutorial (accusations, investigations, criminal charges) to punitive (drone strikes). The digital world moves so quickly that one might think it cannot accommodate the Constitution’s creaky eighteenth-century structures, which are designed to protect individuals—their privacy and personal liberty—from governmental power.
The fundamental question of politics remains unchanged: Who rules? Does the alliance of big business and big government to control big information constitute a new and necessary form of control over society? Or does the promise of democracy still hold—are individuals still sovereign? If the latter, then businesses would have to remember that the customer is king. Government would be of the people, by the people, and for the people. And technology would not jeopardize the rights of individuals. Instead it would re-establish the Bill of Rights in the digital world.
No individual can muster the spending power of the big firms, much less the government. However, computer scientists have recently invented new ways for people to act alone or together, in private, outside the purview of business or government. The desire of the state and firms to know everything is on a collision course with the possibility that individuals can now engage with each other, in anonymous confidence, as never before.
What is needed is nothing less than a digital bill of rights that reinterprets the original amendments for this century. This document, like the original, will have to be negotiated. My purpose is to outline the three principles that I think should guide the negotiation: (1) substantial reduction of the secrecy that shrouds the sharing of information between firms and the government and constraints against government misuses of personal data, (2) purposeful encouragement of the attempts by individuals, acting alone or together, to use new technologies that assure privacy, and (3) commitment to due process of law as the method for exercising state and business power over information.
by Reed Hundt, Boston Review | Read more:
Image:Andreas Herten
By pooling these data with the communications records it has been collecting since the spread of mobile phone networks two decades ago, the U.S. government has assembled the largest, if least visible, database in the world. It has given a million people security clearances. It has invested billions of dollars in software and hardware to analyze the data. It is constantly launching new code to comb the data for patterns that might reveal who is planning what terrible act against our country’s interests.
Few would deny the benefits of Internet 2.0 or mobile phones. And no one should begrudge the government’s official purpose. But information is power, and power corrupts. The effect may be insidious. Surveillance and pattern recognition can combine to convey an impression of knowledge so convincing that even the humblest of leaders may believe their data-driven judgments are infallible. The horrific threats we face today and the government’s apparent ability to know everything may seem to justify a broad range of actions, from prosecutorial (accusations, investigations, criminal charges) to punitive (drone strikes). The digital world moves so quickly that one might think it cannot accommodate the Constitution’s creaky eighteenth-century structures, which are designed to protect individuals—their privacy and personal liberty—from governmental power.
The fundamental question of politics remains unchanged: Who rules? Does the alliance of big business and big government to control big information constitute a new and necessary form of control over society? Or does the promise of democracy still hold—are individuals still sovereign? If the latter, then businesses would have to remember that the customer is king. Government would be of the people, by the people, and for the people. And technology would not jeopardize the rights of individuals. Instead it would re-establish the Bill of Rights in the digital world.
No individual can muster the spending power of the big firms, much less the government. However, computer scientists have recently invented new ways for people to act alone or together, in private, outside the purview of business or government. The desire of the state and firms to know everything is on a collision course with the possibility that individuals can now engage with each other, in anonymous confidence, as never before.
What is needed is nothing less than a digital bill of rights that reinterprets the original amendments for this century. This document, like the original, will have to be negotiated. My purpose is to outline the three principles that I think should guide the negotiation: (1) substantial reduction of the secrecy that shrouds the sharing of information between firms and the government and constraints against government misuses of personal data, (2) purposeful encouragement of the attempts by individuals, acting alone or together, to use new technologies that assure privacy, and (3) commitment to due process of law as the method for exercising state and business power over information.
by Reed Hundt, Boston Review | Read more:
Image:Andreas Herten
