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

[Udhay Shankar N]

<x-flowed>Bob,

I forwarded your review of Wayner's book to, among others, David Brin. He
sent this reply, asking me to pass it on. Seems to have touched a nerve!

Udhay

>Uday, thanks for sharing this.
>
>Could you submit the following reply?
>
>---------------
>
>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.
>
>
>====================================================================
>
>
>"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 <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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 <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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'