Humans
One of the problems in writing about privacy over the last nearly 30 years is that it's easy for many people to see it as a trivial concern when you look at what's going on in the world: terrorist attacks, economic crashes, and the rise of extremism. To many, the case for increasing surveillance "for your safety" is a reasonable one.
I've never believed the claim that people - young or old - don't care about their privacy. People do care about their privacy, but, as previously noted, it's complicated. The biggest area of agreement is money: hardly anyone publishes the details of their finances unless forced. But beyond that, people have different values about what is private, and who should know it. For some women, saying openly they've had abortions is an essential political statement to normalize a procedure and a choice that is under threat. For others, it's too personal to disclose.
The factors involved vary: personality, past experience, how we've been treated, circumstances. It is easy for those of us who were born into economic prosperity and have lived in sectors of society where the governments in our lifetimes have treated us benignly to underestimate the network externalities of the decisions we make.
In February 2016, when the UK's Investigatory Power Act (2016) was still a mere bill under discussion, I wrote this:
This column has long argued that whenever we consider granting the State increased surveillance powers we should imagine life down the road if those powers are available to a government less benign than the present one. Now, two US 2016 presidential primaries in, we can say it thusly: what if the man wielding the Investigatory Powers Bill is Donald Trump?
Much of the rest of that net.wars focused on the UK bill and some aspects of the data protection laws. However, it also included this:
Finally, Privacy International found "thematic warrants" hiding in paragraph 212 of the explanatory notes and referenced in clauses 13(2) and 83 of the draft bill. PI calls this a Home Office attempt to disguise these as "targeted surveillance". They're so vaguely defined - people or equipment "who share a common purpose who carry on, or may carry on, a particular activity" - that they could include my tennis club. PI notes that such provisions contravene a long tradition of UK law that has prohibited general warrants, and directly conflict with recent rulings by the European Court of Human Rights.It's hard to guess who Trump would turn this against first: Muslims, Mexicans, or Clintons.
The events of the last year and a half - parents and children torn apart at the border; the Border Patrol operating an 11-hour stop-and-demand-citizenship checkpoint on I-95 in Maine, legal under the 1953 rule that the "border" is a 100-mile swath in which the Fourth Amendment is suspended; and, well you read the news - suggest the question was entirely fair.
Now, you could argue that universal and better identification could stop this sort of the thing by providing the facility to establish quickly and unambiguously who has rights. You could even argue that up-ending the innocent-until-proven-guilty principle (being required to show papers on demand presumes that you have no right to be where you are until you prove you do) is worth it (although you'd still have to fight an angry hive of constitutional lawyers). I believe you'd be wrong on both counts. Identification is never universal; there are always those who lack the necessary resources to acquire it. The groups that wind up being disenfranchised by such rules are the most vulnerable members of the groups that are suffering now. It won't even deter those who profit from spreading hate - and yes, I am looking at the Daily Mail - from continuing to do so; they will merely target another group. The American experience already shows this. Despite being a nation of immigrants, Americans are taught that their own rights matter more than other people's; and as Hua Hsu writes in a New Yorker review of Nancy Isenberg's recent book, White Trash, that same view is turned daily on the "lower" parts of the US's classist and racist hierarchy.
I have come to believe that there is a causative link between violating people's human rights and the anti-privacy values of surveillance and control. The more horribly we treat people and the less we offer them trust, the more reason we have to be think that they and their successors will want revenge - guilt and the expectation of punishment operating on a nation-state scale. The logic would then dictate that they must be watched even more closely. The last 20 years of increasing inequality have caused suspicion to burst the banks of "the usual suspects". "Privacy" is an inadequate word to convey all this, but it's the one we have.
A few weeks ago, I reminded a friend of the long-running mantra that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. "I don't see it that way at all," he said. "I see it as, I have nothing to hide, so why are you looking at me?"
Illustrations: 'Holy Mary full of grace, punch that devil in the face', book of hours ('The De Brailes Hours'), Oxford ca. 1240 BL, Add 49999, fol. 40V (via Discarding Images).
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.