Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Book Review: Peter Wayner's "Translucent Databases"

I think Bob made some great points about my book, but it's clear that this debate is revolving around a few sentences in Bob's review. Perhaps he miscategorizes Brin, perhaps he doesn't. I haven't read _Transparent Society_ in some time. Still, it's important to realize that this isn't just a battle between the state and its citizens. Encryption can provide a practical tool and a great option for the data management engineers. Brin has a good point about the value of openness, but I'm sure he doesn't extend it to things like people's credit card numbers. Brin would probably be interested in the book and the way it leaves some things in the clear. It's all about translucency, which is, after all, partially transparent. The glass is half empty or full. So maybe there's something in common here? The right use of encryption (and any anonymity that comes along with it) can protect businesses, customers, clients, employees and others. I'm sure it might also be used to by a few elites to avoid scrutiny, but that doesn't have to be the case. For me, the mathematics of on-line anonymity are essential parts of on-line security. While I think that there are plenty of personal and emotional reasons to embrace anonymity, one of the best is the higher amount of security the systems offer. Simply put, identity-based systems are more fragile because identity theft is so easy. Systems designed for anonymity avoid that weakness because they're designed, a priori, to work without names. So I think they're just bound to be a bit safer. It should be noted that the anonymous techniques developed by Chaum, Brands and others do not have to be used to avoid scrutiny. You can always tack on your true name in an additional field. To me, the systems just avoid relying on the the name field to keep people honest. I'm glad Bob sees the resonance between _Translucent Databases_ and the world of cypherpunk paranoia, but I would like to avoid a strong connection. It's not that there's no relationship. There is. But the book is meant to be much more practical. It explores how to use the right amount of encryption to lock up the personal stuff in a database without scrambling all of it. In the right situations, the results can be fast, efficient, and very secure. So the techniques are good for the paranoids as well as the apolitical DBAs who just want to do a good job.

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It is particularly dishonest of a so-called reviewer not only to misinterpret and misconvey another person's position, but to abuse quotation marks in the way Robert Hettinga has done in his review of Translucent Databases By Peter Wayner. Openly and publicly, I defy Hettinga to find any place where I used the word "trust" in the fashion or meaning he attributes to me.

In fact, my argument is diametrically opposite to the one that he portrays as mine. For him to say that 'Brin seems to want, "trust" of state force-monopolists... their lawyers and apparatchiks." demonstrates either profound laziness - having never read a word I wrote - or else deliberate calumny. In either event, I now openly hold him accountable by calling it a damnable lie. This is not a person to be trusted or listened-to by people who value credibility.

Without intending-to, he laid bare one of the 'false dichotomies" that trap even bright people into either-or - or zero-sum - kinds of thinking. For example, across the political spectrum, a "Strong Privacy" movement claims that liberty and personal privacy are best defended by anonymity and encryption, or else by ornate laws restricting what people may know. This approach may seem appealing, but there are no historical examples of it ever having worked.

INdeed, those mired in these two approaches seem unable to see outside the dichotomy. Hettinga thinks that, because I am skeptical of the right wing's passion for cowboy anonymity, that I am therefore automatically an advocate of the left wing's prescription of "privacy through state coercive information management'. Baloney. A plague on both houses of people who seem obsessed with policing what other people are allowed to know.

Strong Privacy advocates bears a severe burden of proof when they claim that a world of secrets will protect freedom... even privacy... better than what has worked for us so far - general openness.

Indeed, it's a burden of proof that can sometimes be met! Certainly there are circumstances when/where secrecy is the only recourse... in concealing the location of shelters for battered wives, for instance, or in fiercely defending psychiatric records. These examples stand at one end of a sliding scale whose principal measure is the amount of harm that a piece of information might plausibly do, if released in an unfair manner. At the other end of the scale, new technologies seem to make it likely that we'll just have to get used to changes in our definition of privacy. What salad dressing you use may be as widely known as what color sweater you wear on the street... and just as harmlessly boring.

The important thing to remember is that anyone who claims a right to keep something secret is also claiming a right to deny knowledge to others. There is an inherent conflict! Some kind of criterion must be used to adjudicate this tradeoff and most sensible people seem to agree that this criterion should be real or plausible harm... not simply whether or not somebody likes to keep personal data secret.

The modern debate over information, and who controls it, must begin with a paradox.

(1) Each of us understands that knowledge can be power. We want to know as much as possible about people or groups we see as threatening... and we want our opponents to know little about us. Each of us would prescribe armor for "the good guys" and nakedness for our worst foes.

(2) Criticism is the best antidote to error. Yet most people, especially the mighty, try to avoid it. Leaders of past civilizations evaded criticism by crushing free speech and public access to information. This sometimes helped them stay in power... but it also generally resulted in horrific blunders in statecraft.

3) Ours may be the first civilization to systematically avoid this cycle, whose roots lie in human nature. We have learned that few people are mature enough to hold themselves accountable. But in an open society where criticism flows, adversaries eagerly pounce on each others' errors. We do each other the favor of reciprocal criticism (though it seldom personally feels like a favor!)

Four great social innovations foster our unprecedented wealth and freedom: science, justice, democracy & free markets. Each of these "accountability arenas" functions best when all players get fair access to information. But cheating is always a problem because of (1) and (2) above. It's a paradox, all right.

While new surveillance and data technologies pose vexing challenges, we may be wise to pause and recall what worked for us so far. Reciprocal accountability - a widely shared power to shine light, even on the mighty - is the unsung marvel of our age, empowering even eccentrics and minorities to enforce their own freedom. Shall we scrap civilization's best tool - light - in favor of a fad of secrecy?

Across the political spectrum, a "Strong Privacy" movement claims that liberty and personal privacy are best defended by anonymity and encryption, or else by ornate laws restricting what people may know. This approach may seem appealing, but there are no historical examples of it ever having worked.

Here are a few themes discussed in The Transparent Society:

* Cameras and surveillance devices swarm our technological world, multiplying and getting harder to spot each day. A "Moore's Law of Cameras" shows them halving in size, doubling in acuity and movement capability and sheer numbers, every year or so. Passing laws won't stop them. Robert Heinlein said: "Privacy laws only make the bugs smaller... and limit their use to some elite."

But there may be another solution.

* Knowledge is the ultimate drug, and forbidden knowledge is craved above all. Credit companies, banned from holding bankruptcy records beyond 7 years, now ship the taboo information to offshore 'data havens.' Shall we create an underground economy in contraband information, as we have done with drugs? Who will benefit?

* One wing of the Strong Privacy crusade wants Euro-style privacy commissions with a myriad laws and clerks to police what may be known by doctors, corporations, and individuals. Dataflow controls may indeed be needed at times! But this solution should be a last resort, not the first place we turn.

* Another wing of wing of Strong Privacy likes libertarian techno-fixes -- empowering individuals with encrypted cybernetic anonymity. But scientific and social flaws may render these panaceas no more effective than 'ghost shirts'. Even if they can be made to work, it may just empower a new elite - those who best know-how to use the new masks and armor.

* Is government the chief enemy of freedom? That authority center does merit close scrutiny... which we've been applying lately with unprecedented ardor. Meanwhile other citizens worry about different power groups -- aristocracies, corporations, criminal gangs, and technological elites. Should 'suspicion of authority' apply in all directions? Can anyone justifiably claim exemption from accountability?

* Privacy and personal safety are better safeguarded by catching peeping toms. Freedom thrives when we turn 'henchmen' into whistle-blowers. Elites will always have some advantages, but we're all better protected by knowing than by forbidding others to know. (It is far easier to verify that you know something, than to verify that someone else is ignorant.)

* Why do our "accountability arenas" work so well? Science, justice, democracy & free markets are direct products of openness... most of the people knowing most of what's going on, most of the time. Even individual eccentricity seems to flourish best in light. Closed societies have always been more conformist than open ones!

Many of these points may seem counter-intuitive... but so is our entire rambunctious, argumentative, tolerant, eccentric, in-your-face culture! The Transparent Society explores underlying issues, from the technological (cameras, databases and the science of encryption) to the startling (why all our films preach suspicion of authority), helping foster a new appreciation of our unique civilization.

Defying the temptations of secrecy, we may see a culture like no other, filled with boisterous amateurs and individuals whose hunger for betterment will propel the next century. This will happen if we stick to a formula that already works... most of the people knowing most of what's going on, most of the time.

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"New tech is handing society tough decisions to make anew about old issues of privacy and accountability. In opting for omni-directional openness, David Brin takes an unorthodox position, arguing knowledgeably and with exceptionally balanced perspective." - Stewart Brand, Director, Global Business Network

"As David Brin details the inevitability of ubiquitous surveillance, your instinct, as an individual facing this one-way mirror, is to hope that he is wrong about the facts. As you follow his argument for two-way social transparency, you realize your only hope is that he is right." - George B. Dyson, author, Darwin Among the Machines

"Where, in the information age, do we draw the line between privacy and openness? David Brin's answer is illuminated by his insistence that criticism is as vital to eliminating our errors as the T-cells of our immune system are to maintaining our health. . . . Brin's informed and lucid advocacy of fresh air is very welcome." - Arthur Kantrowitz, Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth College

"David Brin is one of the few people thinking and writing about the social problems we are going to face in the near future as the result of new electronic media. The Transparent Society raises the questions we need to ask now, before the universal surveillance infrastructure is in place. Be prepared to have your assumptions challenged." - Howard Rheingold, author, The Virtual Community

"The Transparent Society reframes the debate on what our world can become-and the choices aren't what they may seem." - K. Eric Drexler, author, Engines of Creation

"David Brin's nonfiction marvel, The Transparent Society, is what Lewis Mumford or Thorstein Veblen might write, could they contemplate our increasingly webbed world and its prospects for social change. It's what Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson would be writing these days about technology and democracy. Brin's book is full of imaginative, far-sighted concern for how fluid information is going to transform our civil society. Knowledge only occasionally leads to wisdom, but here we see some, and the book is so wonderfully entertaining that it's bound to be widely read." - William H. Calvin, neurophysiologist and author of How Brains Think.

For more information, see: http://www.davidbrin.com/http://www.davidbrin.com/

-- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up. </x-flowed>

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-- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'