[IP] Privacy -- Books: "No Place to Hide" by Robert O'Harrow -- Nonstop Scrutiny, as Orwell Foresaw
------ Forwarded Message
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 03:58:31 -0500 (EST)
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Privacy -- Books: "No Place to Hide" by Robert O'Harrow -- Nonstop
Scrutiny, as Orwell Foresaw
>From the New York Times --
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/books/25kaku.html
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
'NO PLACE TO HIDE'
Nonstop Scrutiny, as Orwell Foresaw
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Picture "Minority Report" combined with Orwell's "1984" and
Francis Ford Coppola's "Conversation": in an effort to prevent
future crimes and predict what certain individuals are likely
to do, the government has begun working with high-tech titans
to keep tabs on the populace.
One company has come up with a digital identity system that
has tagged every adult American with a unique code. Another
company is intent on gaining control of all records -
including state and local files, financial information,
employee dossiers, DNA data and criminal background checks -
that define our identity. In addition to iris scanners, voice
analyzers and fingerprint readers, there now exist face
recognition machines and cameras that can identify an
individual by how he or she walks. One government group is
working on infrared detectors that could register heat signals
around people's eyes, indicating an autonomic "fight or
flight" response; another federal agency has floated a
proposal to assess risk by examining airline passengers' brain
waves with "noninvasive neuro-electric sensors."
This surveillance state is not a futuristic place conjured in
a Philip K. Dick novel or "Matrix"-esque sci-fi thriller. It
is post-9/11 America, as described in Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s
unnerving new book, "No Place to Hide" - an America where
citizens' "right to be let alone," as Justice Louis Brandeis
of the Supreme Court once put it, is increasingly imperiled,
where more and more components of our daily lives are
routinely monitored, recorded and analyzed.
These concerns, of course, are hardly new. Way back in 1964,
in "The Naked Society," Vance Packard warned about
encroachments on civil liberties and the growing threat to
privacy posed by new electronic devices, and in 1971, in "The
Assault on Privacy," Arthur R. Miller warned that advances in
information technologies had given birth to "a new social
virus - 'data-mania.' " The digital revolution of the 1990's,
however, exponentially amplified these trends by enabling
retailers, marketers and financial institutions to gather and
store vast amounts of information about current and potential
customers. And as Mr. O'Harrow notes, the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, "reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate
over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives
of ordinary people."
Some of the material in "No Place to Hide" is familiar from
news coverage (most notably, the author's own articles about
privacy and technology for The Washington Post), from a recent
ABC News special (made in conjunction with Mr. O'Harrow's
reporting) and from recent books like Jeffrey Rosen's "Naked
Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age" and
Christian Parenti's "Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From
Slavery to the War on Terror."
Still, Mr. O'Harrow provides in these pages an authoritative
and vivid account of the emergence of a "security-industrial
complex" and the far-reaching consequences for ordinary
Americans, who must cope not only with the uneasy sense of
being watched (leading, defenders of civil liberties have
argued, to a stifling of debate and dissent) but also with the
very palpable dangers of having personal information (and in
some cases, inaccurate information) passed from one outfit to
another.
Mr. O'Harrow also charts many consumers' willingness to trade
a measure of privacy for convenience (think of the personal
information happily dispensed to TiVo machines and Amazon.com
in exchange for efficient service and helpful suggestions),
freedom for security. He reviews the gargantuan data-gathering
and data-mining operations already carried out by companies
like Acxiom, ChoicePoint and LexisNexis. And he shows how
their methods are being co-opted by the government.
The Privacy Act of 1974, enacted in the wake of revelations
about covert domestic spying by the F.B.I., the Army and other
agencies, gave individuals new rights to know and to correct
information that the government was collecting about them, but
the government's current predilection for outsourcing
data-gathering to private companies has changed the rules of
the game.
As Mr. O'Harrow notes: "Among other things, the law restricted
the government from building databases of dossiers unless the
information about individuals was directly relevant to an
agency's mission. Of course, that's precisely what
ChoicePoint, LexisNexis and other services do for the
government. By outsourcing the collection of records, the
government doesn't have to ensure the data is accurate, or
have any provisions to correct it in the same way it would
under the Privacy Act. There are no limits on how the
information can be interpreted, all this at a time when law
enforcement, domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence
are becoming more interlinked."
Privacy and civil liberties advocates have put the brakes on
some government projects, like the Total Information Awareness
initiative promoted by John Poindexter, the former vice
admiral (of Iran-contra notoriety), and a surveillance engine
known (half jokingly) as the Matrix (for the Multistate
Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) that would combine
criminal and commercial records in one blindingly fast system.
Yet Mr. O'Harrow points out: "The drive for more monitoring,
data collection, and analysis is relentless and
entrepreneurial. Where one effort ends, another begins, often
with the same technology and aims. Total Information Awareness
may be gone, but it's not forgotten. Other kinds of Matrix
systems are already in the works."
Even now, one mini-me version of Big Brother or another is
monitoring Americans' daily lives, from the computer "cookies"
that map our peregrinations around the Net, to the MetroCards,
E-ZPasses and car-installed Global Positioning System devices
that track our travels, to the security cameras that eyeball
us at banks and stores. Mr. O'Harrow writes that RFID (radio
frequency identification) tags will be attached soon to credit
cards, bank passbooks and "anything else that will enable
businesses to automatically 'know you' when you arrive," and
that several organizations "are working on a standard that
would enable every manufactured item in the world to be given
a unique ID, at least theoretically."
"Before long," he adds, "our phones, laptop computers, Palm
Pilots, watches, pagers and much more will play parts in the
most efficient surveillance network ever made. Forget dropping
a coin into a parking meter or using a pay phone discreetly on
the street. Those days are slipping by. The most simple,
anonymous transactions are now becoming datapoints on the vast
and growing matrix of each of our lives."
It is an alarming vision of the future uncannily reminiscent
of the world imagined by Orwell in "1984": a world where "you
had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in
the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
It just arrived some two decades later than Orwell predicted.
NO PLACE TO HIDE
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
348 pages. Free Press. $26.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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