Privacy Under Attack

Author Simson Garfinkel Explores A Chilling Vision Of The Future In An Excerpt From His New Book, 'Database Nation: The Death Of Privacy In The 21st Century.'

YOU WAKE TO the sound of a ringing telephone -- but how could that happen?

Several months ago, you reprogrammed your home telephone system so the phone would never ring before the civilized hour of 8 a.m. But it's barely 6:45 a.m. Who could be calling at this time? More importantly, who was able to bypass your phone's programming?

Excerpted with permission from "Database Nation: The Death Of Privacy In The 21st Century" by Simson Garfinkel (O'Reilly & Associates, $24.95). All rights reserved.
You pick up the telephone receiver, then slam it down a moment later. It's one of those marketing machines playing a prerecorded message. Computerized telemarketing calls have been illegal within the United States for more than a decade now, but ever since international long-distance prices dropped below 10 cents a minute, calls have been pouring in to North America from all over the world. And they're nearly all marketing calls -- hence the popularity of programmable phones today. What's troubling you now is how this call got past the filters you set up. Later on, you'll discover how: the company that sold you the phone created an undocumented "back door"; last week, the phone codes were sold in an online auction. Because you weren't paying attention, you lost the chance to buy back your privacy.

Oops.

Now that you're awake, you decide to go through yesterday's mail. There's a letter from the neighborhood hospital you visited last month. "We're pleased that our emergency room could serve you in your time of need," the letter begins. "As you know, our fees (based on our agreement with your HMO) do not cover the cost of treatment. To make up the difference, a number of hospitals have started selling patient records to medical researchers and consumer marketing firms. Rather than mimic this distasteful behavior, we have decided to ask you to help us make up the difference. We are recommending a tax-deductible contribution of $275 to help defray the cost of your visit."

The veiled threat isn't empty, but you decide you don't really care who finds out about your sprained wrist. You fold the letter in half and drop it into your shredder. Also into the shredder goes a trio of low-interest credit card offers.

Why a shredder? A few years ago you would have never thought of shredding your junk mail -- until a friend in your apartment complex had his identity "stolen" by the building's superintendent. As best as anybody can figure out, the super picked one of those preapproved credit-card applications out of the trash, called the toll-free number, and picked up the card when it was delivered. He's in Mexico now, with a lot of expensive clothing and electronics, all at your friend's expense.

On that cheery note, you grab your bag and head out the door, which automatically locks behind you.

When you enter the apartment's elevator, a hidden video camera scans your face, approves your identity, and takes you to the garage in the basement. You hope nobody else gets in the elevator -- you don't relish a repeat of what happened last week to that poor fellow in 4G. It turns out that a neighbor recently broke up with her violent boyfriend and got a restraining order against him. Naturally, the elevator was programmed to recognize the man and, if he was spotted, to notify the police and keep the doors locked until they arrived. Too bad somebody else was in the elevator when it happened. Nobody realized the boyfriend was an undiagnosed (and claustrophobic) psychotic. A hostage situation quickly developed. Too bad for Mr. 4G. Fortunately, everything was captured on videotape.

Your car computer suggests three recommended approaches to your office this morning. You choose wrong, and a freak accident leaves you tied up in traffic for more than half an hour. As you wait, the computer plays an advertisement for a nearby burger joint every five minutes. You can't turn it off, of course: your car computer was free, paid for by the advertising.

Arriving late at work, you receive a polite e-mail message from the company's timecard system; it knows when you showed up, and it gives you several options for making up the missed time. You can forgo lunch today, work an extra 45 minutes this evening, or take the 45 minutes out of your ever-dwindling vacation time. The choice is yours.

You look up and force a smile. A little video camera on your computer screen records your smile and broadcasts it to your boss and your co-workers. They've told you that Workplace Video Wallpaper (TM) builds camaraderie -- but the company that sells the software also claims that the pervasive monitoring cuts down on workplace violence, romances, and even drug use. Nowadays, everybody smiles at work -- it's too dangerous to do otherwise.

The cameras are just one of the ways you're being continually monitored at work. It started with electronic tags in all the company's books and magazines, designed to stop the steady pilferage from the library. Then, in the aftermath of a bomb scare, employees were told they'd have to wear badges at all times, and that desks and drawers would be subject to random searches. (Rumor has it that the chief of security herself called in the bomb threat -- a ploy to justify the new policies.)

Next month, the company is installing devices in the bathrooms to make sure people wash their hands. Although the devices were originally intended for the healthcare and food industries, a recent study found that routine washing can also cut down on disease transmission among white-collar workers. So the machines are coming, and with them you'll lose just a little bit more of your privacy and your dignity.


THIS IS THE future -- not a far-off future, but one that's just around the corner. It's a future in which what little privacy we now have will be gone. Some people call this loss of privacy "Orwellian," harking back to 1984, George Orwell's classic work on privacy and autonomy. In that book, Orwell imagined a future in which privacy was decimated by a totalitarian state that used spies, video surveillance, historical revisionism, and control over the media to maintain its power. But the age of monolithic state control is over. The future we're rushing towards isn't one where our every move is watched and recorded by some all-knowing "Big Brother." It is instead a future of a hundred kid brothers that constantly watch and interrupt our daily lives. George Orwell thought that the Communist system represented the ultimate threat to individual liberty. Over the next 50 years, we will see new kinds of threats to privacy that don't find their roots in totalitarianism, but in capitalism, the free market, advanced technology, and the unbridled exchange of electronic information.

The concept of privacy is central to this book, yet I wish I had a better word to express the aspect of individual liberty that is under attack by advanced technology as we enter the new millennium.

For decades, people have warned that pervasive databanks and surveillance technology are leading inevitably to the death of privacy and democracy. But these days, many people who hear the word "privacy" think about those kooks living off in the woods with their shotguns: these folks get their mail at post office boxes registered under assumed names, grow their own food, use cash to buy what they can't grow for themselves, and constantly worry about being attacked by the federal government -- or by space aliens. If you are not one of these people, you may well ask, "Why should I worry about my privacy? I have nothing to hide."

The problem with this word "privacy" is that it falls short of conveying the really big picture. Privacy isn't just about hiding things. It's about self-possession, autonomy and integrity. As we move into the computerized world of the 21st century, privacy will be one of our most important civil rights. But this right of privacy isn't the right of people to close their doors and pull down their window shades -- perhaps because they want to engage in some sort of illicit or illegal activity. It's the right of people to control what details about their lives stay inside their own houses and what leaks to the outside.

To understand privacy in the next century, we need to rethink what privacy really means today:

· It's not about the man who wants to watch pornography in complete anonymity over the Internet. It's about the woman who's afraid to use the Internet to organize her community against a proposed toxic dump -- afraid because the dump's investors are sure to dig through her past if she becomes too much of a nuisance.

· It's not about people speeding on the nation's highways who get automatically generated tickets mailed to them thanks to a computerized speed trap. It's about lovers who will take less joy in walking around city streets or visiting stores because they know they're being photographed by surveillance cameras everywhere they step.

· It's not about the special prosecutors who leave no stone unturned in their search for corruption or political misdeeds. It's about good, upstanding citizens who are now refusing to enter public service because they don't want a bloodthirsty press rummaging through their old school reports, computerized medical records, and e-mail.

· It's not about the searches, metal detectors and inquisitions that have become a routine part of our daily lives at airports, schools and federal buildings. It's about a society that views law-abiding citizens as potential terrorists, yet does little to effectively protect its citizens from the real threats to their safety.

Today, more than ever before, we are witnessing the daily erosion of personal privacy and freedom. We're victims of a war on privacy that's being waged by government eavesdroppers, business marketers, and nosy neighbors.

Most of us recognize that our privacy is at risk. According to a 1996 nationwide poll conducted by Louis Harris & Associates, one in four Americans (24 percent) has "personally experienced a privacy invasion," up from 19 percent in 1978. In 1995, the same survey found that 80 percent of Americans felt that "consumers have lost all control over how personal information about them is circulated and used by companies."

Ironically, both the 1995 and 1996 surveys were paid for by Equifax, a company that earns nearly $2 billion dollars each year from collecting and distributing personal information.

We know our privacy is under attack. The problem is that we don't know how to fight back.


TODAY'S WAR ON privacy is intimately related to the dramatic advances in technology we've seen in recent years. As we'll see time and again in this book, unrestrained technology ends privacy. Video cameras observe personal moments; computers store personal facts; and communications networks make personal information widely available throughout the world. Although some specialty technology may be used to protect personal information and autonomy, the overwhelming tendency of advanced technology is to do the reverse.

Privacy is fundamentally about the power of the individual. In many ways, the story of technology's attack on privacy is really the story of how institutions and the people who run them use technology to gain control over the human spirit, for good and ill. That's because technology by itself doesn't violate our privacy or anything else: it's the people using this technology and the policies they carry out that create violations.

Many people today say that in order to enjoy the benefits of modern society, we must necessarily relinquish some degree of privacy. If we want the convenience of paying for a meal by credit card, or paying for a toll with an electronic tag mounted on our rear-view mirror, then we must accept the routine collection of our purchases and driving habits in a large database over which we have no control. It's a simple bargain, albeit a Faustian one.

I think this tradeoff is both unnecessary and wrong. It reminds me of another crisis our society faced back in the 1950s and 1960s -- the environmental crisis. Then, advocates of big business said that poisoned rivers and lakes were the necessary costs of economic development, jobs, and an improved standard of living. Poison was progress: anybody who argued otherwise simply didn't understand the facts.

Today we know better. Today we know that sustainable economic development depends on preserving the environment. Indeed, preserving the environment is a prerequisite to the survivability of the human race. Without clean air to breathe and clean water to drink, we will all surely die. Similarly, in order to reap the benefits of technology, it is more important than ever for us to use technology to protect personal freedom.

Blaming technology for the death of privacy isn't new. In 1890, two Boston lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, argued in the Harvard Law Review that privacy was under attack by "recent inventions and business methods." They contended that the pressures of modern society required the creation of a "right of privacy," which would help protect what they called "the right to be let alone." Warren and Brandeis refused to believe that privacy had to die for technology to flourish. Today, the Warren/Brandeis article is regarded as one of the most influential law review articles ever published. And the article's significance has increased with each passing year, as the technological invasions that worried Warren and Brandeis have become more commonplace.

Privacy-invasive technology does not exist in a vacuum, of course. That's because technology itself exists at a junction between science, the market, and society. People create technology to fill specific needs, real or otherwise. And technology is regulated, or not, as people and society see fit.

Few engineers set out to build systems designed to crush privacy and autonomy, and few businesses or consumers would willingly use or purchase these systems if they understood the consequences. What happens more often is that the privacy implications of a new technology go unnoticed. Or if the privacy implications are considered, they are misunderstood. Or if they are understood correctly, errors are made in implementation. In practice, just a few mistakes can turn a system designed to protect personal information into one that destroys our secrets.

How can we keep technology and the free market from killing our privacy? One way is by being careful and informed consumers. But I believe that government has an equally important role to play.


WITH EVERYTHING WE'VE heard about Big Brother, how can we think of government as anything but the enemy of privacy? While it's true that federal laws and actions have often damaged the cause of privacy, I believe that the federal government may be our best hope for privacy protection as we move into the new millennium.

The biggest privacy failure of American government has been its failure to carry through with the impressive privacy groundwork that was laid in the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. It's worth taking a look back at that groundwork and how it may serve us today.

The 1970s were a good decade for privacy protection and consumer rights. In 1970, Congress passed the Code of Fair Information Practices. Richardson, who at the time was President Nixon's secretary of health, education and welfare, created a commission in 1973 to study the impact of computers on privacy. After years of testimony in Congress, the commission found all the more reason for alarm and issued a landmark report in 1973.

The most important contribution of the Richardson report was a bill of rights for the computer age, which it called the Code of Fair Information Practices (see the black box). That Code remains the most significant American thinking on the topic of computers and privacy to this day.

The biggest impact of the HEW report wasn't in the United States, but in Europe. In the years after the report was published, practically every European country passed laws based on these principles. Many created data protection commissions and commissioners to enforce the laws. Some believe that one reason for this interest in electronic privacy was Europe's experience with Nazi Germany in the 1940s. Hitler's secret police used the records of governments and private organizations in the countries he invaded to round up people who posed the greatest threat to the German occupation; postwar Europe realized the danger of allowing potentially threatening private information to be collected, even by democratic governments that might be responsive to public opinion.

But here in the United States, the idea of institutionalized data protection faltered. President Jimmy Carter showed interest in improving medical privacy, but he was quickly overtaken by economic and political events. Carter lost the election of 1980 to Ronald Reagan, whose aides saw privacy protection as yet another failed Carter initiative. Although several privacy protection laws were signed during the Reagan/Bush era, the leadership for these bills came from Congress, not the White House. The lack of leadership stifled any chance of passing a nationwide data protection act.

In fact, while most people in the federal government were ignoring the cause of privacy, some were actually pursuing an antiprivacy agenda. In the early 1980s, the federal government initiated numerous "computer matching" programs designed to catch fraud and abuse. (Unfortunately, because of erroneous data, these programs often penalized innocent individuals.) In 1994, Congress passed the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, which gave the government dramatic new powers for wiretapping digital communications. In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring states to display Social Security numbers on driver's licenses, and another law requiring that all medical patients in the U.S. be issued unique numerical identifiers, even if they paid their own bills. Fortunately, the implementation of those 1996 laws has been delayed, largely thanks to a citizen backlash.

Continuing the assault, both the Bush and Clinton administrations waged an all-out war against the rights of computer users to engage in private and secure communications. Starting in 1991, both administrations floated proposals for use of "Clipper" encryption systems that would have given the government access to encrypted personal communications. President Clinton also backed the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which made it a crime to transmit sexually explicit information to minors -- and, as a result, might have required Internet providers to deploy far-reaching monitoring and censorship systems. When a court in Philadelphia found the CDA unconstitutional, the Clinton administration appealed the decision all the way to the Supreme Court -- and lost.

Finally, the U.S. government's restrictions on the export of encryption technology have effectively restrained the widespread use of this technology for personal privacy protection within the United States.

As we move forward into the 21st century, the United States needs to take personal privacy seriously again. The final chapter of this book explores ways our government might get back on track, and suggests a federal privacy agenda for the 21st century.