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Control freaks are winning the financial-privacy battle
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 09:25:45 -0500
Dan Gillmor: Control freaks are winning the financial-privacy battle By Dan Gillmor Mercury News Technology Columnist News and views, culled and edited from my online eJournal (www.dangillmor.com): PRIVACY WRONGS The drive to kill all privacy in financial dealings and communications is nearing a conclusion. The control freaks are winning, and your privacy is just about gone. The imminent signing of the Homeland Security bill, a governmental reorganization with many anti-privacy provisions, is just one more blow. It follows last year's ill-named USA Patriot Act, which shredded civil liberties in its zeal to give law enforcement and security people every tool they needed to investigate terrorism threats. As usual, key provisions have had no debate or scrutiny. Meanwhile, a secretive court has sided with the Bush administration -- easily the most hostile to liberty in our lifetime -- in greatly expanding law enforcement's surveillance capabilities. The decision blows new holes in what was left of the Fourth Amendment, even as it pretends to support constitutional rights. More alarming yet, and also with the full support of the administration, former National Security Adviser John Poindexter is pushing ahead with a plan to scoop all of our electronic communications, financial transactions and more into a huge, linked collection of databases. This is police-state stuff. (Poindexter, you'll recall, was convicted of several felonies in the Iran-Contra scandal. He got off on what conservative critics of the legal system like to call a technicality and what civil libertarians like to call basic constitutional rights that protect us all.) There will be gross abuse of these new powers. There is no recorded case in history where governments got more powers and didn't abuse them. But it seems there's too little organized constituency for privacy or liberty these days. Corporate interests don't really believe in privacy, anyway. As these databases grow, business will be given access to the information, or much of it, to feed its marketing hunger. Increasingly, government exists to please corporate and police interests, and as those converge, everyone -- everyone except people who care about liberty -- will be happy. The word ironic is insufficient to describe the renewed assault on privacy. No government in recent history has been more secretive in its own dealings than this one -- and the administration is pushing for new rules to hide what the government is doing with your money and on your behalf. The Homeland Security bill includes many new limitations on public access to government records. Simultaneously, but not coincidentally, the administration has tried to water down rules to make public companies more transparent in their financial dealings. Privacy rights are for the rich and powerful, not the rest of us. The government reorganization almost failed in the Senate when those pesky Democrats tried to remove some slippery provisions, inserted without debate in the House, that did special favors for Republican campaign contributors. The most egregious of these could stop efforts to deter American companies from setting up offshore mail drops and call them headquarters to duck U.S. taxes. The majority party apparently believes it is patriotic to be a tax cheat -- and this in a professed time of war when security spending is rising through the roof, tax revenues are plummeting and huge budget deficits have returned. This isn't patriotism. It's economic treason, but it's the way things work these days. HACKERS AND LIBERTY Liberty is on the decline in America but may be on the rise elsewhere. A collection of activist hackers is about to release software designed to thwart governmental censors of the Internet. The pro-democracy Six/Four project from Hacktivismo (http://hacktivismo.com/) is a potentially valuable step to protect political dissidents and other people who have the quaint idea that their access to information shouldn't be thwarted by government-run firewalls in places like China and Saudi Arabia. The technical details provided by the Toronto-based project are too complicated to discuss here. But the basic idea is to use the Internet's decentralized nature in a way that lets people create anonymous, secure data tunnels from here to there and everywhere. If this works, governments will be harder-pressed to prevent their people from communicating freely and seeing online material that, for whatever reason, is considered objectionable. In a novel but possibly futile gesture, the activists and their legal advisers have written a license for the software that, in theory, could make governments liable for damages if they tamper with the code or otherwise use it to harm human rights. The language in the draft I've seen is stern, but I'm not clear on how anyone expects to enforce it. Oxblood Ruffin, the project leader, says he won't be surprised if China becomes the first scofflaw. But he also says one goal in creating the new license, not to mention the entire effort, was to bring more public attention to the promotion of political freedom around the world. Growing U.S. moves to control the Internet may make the Hacktivismo projects (Six/Four is the second) more global than anyone expected. It will be truly ironic if these tools end up being equally vital on the continent from which they originated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal (www.siliconvalley.com /dangillmor). E-mail dgillmor () sjmercury com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To unsubscribe or update your address, click http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Control freaks are winning the financial-privacy battle Dave Farber (Nov 20)