Privacy Shift to be Social, Not High-Tech
The U.S. privacy and security regime will look far different in a decade, but near term, “the goal is to lose [civil liberties] as slowly as possible,” said security expert Bruce Schneier. His remarks at a Tues. ACLU workshop came as a National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping program and other govt.-backed antiterror and surveillance efforts have unsettled free speech and privacy defenders.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Once the post-9/11 and Patriot Act dust settles, the U.S. will rethink its approach to security and its impact on privacy, Schneier said: “I don’t think society can survive with that kind of invasiveness.” Despite technology’s key role in monitoring everything from e-mail to air travel, the shift won’t be technological but social, he said. The change will be generational, led by those who have grown up in the Internet age.
Since terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, “a lot of snapshots of threats to privacy” have emerged, Schneier said, and the once-secret NSA wiretapping is only the most recent. Efforts surrounding national ID cards, RFID chips, GPS and other identifiers have worried groups like the ACLU. Rapidly advancing video, audio and Internet-based surveillance technology has made civil liberties activists -- and the public -- even more skittish, he said. But the situation is only going to worsen before it gets better, said the author of the best-selling Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World.
“Everything we do creates a record,” Schneier said, from Web surfing and e-mail to phone calls and text messaging. Even grocery store purchases using affinity cards and one- click ordering on Amazon.com create virtual paper trails, he said. “These records have value” for the company employing them and for the consumer, he acknowledged. Meanwhile, data storage and processing costs have dropped to near zero, he said. “It’s cheaper to keep this stuff than throw it away,” Schneier said.
Those “digital footprints” stored by companies, govt. entities and 3rd parties, like information brokers, can create a virtual dossier on every American. And the person on whom files are kept can’t read or change the records, he said. All of this has led to a booming data broker industry and advanced data mining technologies, which produce new records that could be bought, sold or swapped between govt. and private entities, he said.
The security guru’s talk kicked off an ACLU series, the Forum on Technology & the Future, that will feature experts discussing cutting-edge technologies and civil liberties implications. Events will be held roughly every 2 months in D.C. A June 20 panel will examine functional magnetic resonance imaging, a recently developed form of neuroimaging.
Americans are living through “a time of churning change” with a govt. that has little respect for civil liberties, said ACLU Technology & Liberty Project Dir. Barry Steinhardt. It’s a society not too distant from George Orwell’s groundbreaking book 1984 or the controversial Total Information Awareness Office, established by DARPA in 2002, he said.