The Eternal Value of Privacy
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http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70886-0.html
The Eternal Value of Privacy
By Bruce Schneier| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM May, 18, 2006
The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor
of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale
surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything
wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have
no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's
wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do
something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these
-- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that
privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent
human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition
with dignity and respect.
Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches
the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he
famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of
the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him
hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to
arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because
without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell
to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to
be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing
nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are
not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for
reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the
privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then
burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.
A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to
the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call
out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility
of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own
home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be
inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted
criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic
to the concept of liberty.
For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat
of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own
uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes,
constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future --
patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by
whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and
innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is
observable and recordable.
How many of us have paused during conversation in the past
four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped
on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an
e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public
place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop
suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of
context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has
changed, and our words are subtly altered.
This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us.
This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our
personal, private lives.
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy."
The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises
under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic
authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security
without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police
surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why
we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
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Bruce Schneier is the CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and the
author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an
Uncertain World. You can contact him through his website.