Surveillance Statists (Was: Cato forum on liquor advertising and electronic media)

[Bill Stewart]

At 09:13 PM 4/24/97 -0700, Blanc wrote:
>>I wish these people would go live in the U.S.S.R., or something.(*)
The fact that the USSR only exists in the past should be just fine for
some of these people, who'd also rather live in the past :-)

At 12:58 AM 4/25/97 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
>Indeed - I frequently find myself wondering who really won the cold war. The
>"free world" seems to be adopting the totalitarian/surveillance-state tactics

Same as it ever was - J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy weren't much different
from Louis Freeh or Ollie North today, or than the thugs who drafted people 
into the wars of 1846, the 1860s, 1917-18, the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s, or the
thugs who arrested Schenck for speaking against the draft in 1916 before there
even was a draft...  Perhaps they were a bit more aggressive than Louis, 
but Louis's got the advantage of better hardware, and 
Moore's Law is unfortunately on the side of the surveillance state.
If Harry Anslinger wanted to wiretap a Demon Rum Dealer, he needed guys
to listen to the tap, though perhaps wire recorders could help,
and any recordkeeping correlation was done by people and dead-tree machinery.
If J.Edgar wanted to wiretap a Commie, he could use voice-activated tape 
recorders, but it was still analog, and still needed people to interpret it,
though records like names of important convicts and Commies could be kept in 
big expensive mainframes.  If either one wanted to read your mail, 
the Post Office would be happy to pick it out for them, and they could steam 
open the envelope if you weren't taking advantage of the Post Office's
cheaper rate for unsealed envelopes.

Back in the early 80s, if you wanted to store 1 byte of information for
every American adult, you either needed a high-end magtape (160MB)
which used a $30-50K tape drive, for slow retrievals, or a fast removable
disk pack ($1000 for 250MB) which also needed a $35K disk drive.
This meant that large-scale data on the population was mainly used by
people who were making money out of it, and governments mainly focused on
a million or so usual suspects because it was too much trouble to do more.

Now $30 will get you a CDROM with 100 million phone numbers on it,
$300 will get you a 3GB of hard disk (still only 10 bytes/person),
or a disk drive holding 500MB removables, a 4GB tape drive is probably $1000,
and your original $30K will probably get you a few terabytes worth of
tape stacker capacity - if not today, then next year.  That means that
not only can Louis Freeh keep data on everybody, but just about anybody
can afford to, and it's increasingly possible to keep it in random-access
forms like disk drives which can be correlated much more easily than tapes.
Optical scanners are getting cheap - paper won't be just dead trees much
longer.
[If I mention video cameras I'll start sounding depressingly like David
Brin :-)
Of course, the amount of data you'd want to track keeps growing faster as
well...

So if we want to create or preserve privacy in this sort of world,
we need to change how we do transactions - keep less information,
do more immediate clearing instead of book-entry (at least that's 
getting cheaper as well), build systems that interact with people
that accept anonymity for most transactions, and use it by default.
On the other hand, there's money to be made in data-mining transaction data,
through improved marketing and targeted advertising - so we need
to find other ways for companies to make money on transactions
so they'll be willing to let go of the transaction data.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts at ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#     (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)