Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » Technology and the Bill of Rights

August 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Technology and the Bill of Rights

TAGS: Privacy

Do 18th century concepts of personal freedom still work in the 21st century?

For some reason, I don't expect the chairman of AT&T to stand up and say, "Give me liberty or give me death." It is just not going to happen. Therefore I'm not surprised that AT&T and other telecom companies complied when the government asked these companies to assist in wiretapping their customers.

But our legislators are a different story. We should expect more from them. As far as the Democrats and Republicans are concerned, I say a plague on both their houses.

Of course, in time of war it is not like there isn't precedent for companies complying with government directives. My father used to tell me stories of how lipstick manufacturers were ordered, not asked, to make bullets during World War II. Harley-Davidson produced only military motorcycles at that time, and the auto manufacturers made tanks.

But back then no one complained, because we all felt America was threatened and everyone had to do their part.

Is the same true today?

Will wiretapping save us from the enemy?

All I know is that Sept. 11, 2001, didn't happen for lack of a wiretap. Rather it was a lack of something far more low-tech, a willingness on the part of the various government agencies to share information. Even the CIA and FBI have now admitted that.

Nevertheless, that is not the real problem.

The problem is that the government thinks analog. It thinks it can solve today's security issues by using the same old-fashioned concepts that were used 50 years ago.

But we, the people, know we are in a digital age, and we understand that technology makes the idea of government snooping a very complex issue.

Communications are now so varied that a single law to permit the government to tap your POTS line can be used to tap into your VoIP calls, your collaborative Wiki conversations, IMs, e-mails, and all the social networking programs you will ever sign up for.

Will MySpace and FaceBook be asked to put in filters that look for key words the government thinks are suspect? We already know that Uncle Sam asked Google to reveal what their customers were searching for in order to track down pedophiles.

What will the government do with the millions of bytes of information it can now gather?

By monitoring the history of your searches and running it against a predictive analytics engine, the government will be able to determine that there is a better than 90 percent likelihood you will commit some kind of crime or sabotage. Maybe, as in the movie Minority Report, it will arrest people pre-emptively. The scary thing is the government could be right sometimes, but does that mean we should go ahead with the program?

In a sense, it is already happening. Not in terms of actual arrests, but certainly still pre-emptive action against assumed future behaviors: In addition to the telecom companies and the search engine companies, the Feds are also asking for the cooperation of the airline industry so that if the government suspects you might do something, you're put on a "no fly" list.

When the Feds finally go high-tech, an alert might be sent out that pops up on every computer screen in the nation with a picture and last known address of a perpetrator of some past or future crime.

Perhaps the real issue here is that we have yet to truly reconcile 21st century technology and its capabilities with our 18th century credo, the Bill of Rights. We need to gain a better understanding of how to make the new conform to the old. At least that would be preferred to the other way around.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on August 28, 2007 03:00 AM

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