FC: Slate privacy roundtable (#2) -- Privacy, technology, free speech

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Here are some excerpts. Check out the URL for the full exchange. --Declan]


http://slate.msn.com/code/BookClub/BookClub.asp?Show=6/7/00&idMessage=5461&idBio=174

   From: Eugene Volokh
   To: Declan McCullagh and Jeffrey Rosen
   Subject: Privacy vs. Free Speech
   Posted: Wednesday, June 7, 2000, at 8:26 a.m. PT

   Dear Jeff and Declan:

   I much enjoyed both of your posts, and I must say you both paint
   tempting pictures. Jeff, the way you describe it, it might seem to
   some (though your book is often far more cautious than this) that much
   privacy-destroying investigation is actually useless to the
   investigators themselves. Had Starr not probed so deeply into
   Lewinsky's life, he wouldn't have been misled by his "confus[ing
   information] with knowledge." Tearing away our masks isn't just cruel
   but also doesn't really show anyone our "true sel[ves]." So we can
   have privacy and better decisionmaking, too--such a deal!

   But I'm not sure I can be so sanguine. Life is a long string of
   decisions based on necessarily imperfect information. Do we trust
   someone in business? Should we send our child to a particular
   preschool? Is this witness telling the truth? Should we support this
   candidate or this judicial nominee?

   Virtually none of these decisions can ever be based on a full
   understanding of people "in all of their complicated dimensions." Some
   of the decisions will be rich in some kinds of context, but of course
   all will always omit something. We don't fully know ourselves, much
   less anyone else!

[...]


  From: Declan McCullagh
   To: Jeffrey Rosen and Eugene Volokh
   Subject: Do the Math
   Posted: Wednesday, June 7, 2000, at 1:40 p.m. PT
   Dear Jeff and Eugene,

   Many thanks for your thoughtful posts. Let me try to respond to the
   points both of you raise about how effective privacy-protecting
   technologies can be.

   Just to be clear, I'm talking about email-scrambling services like
   Hushmail, hard-drive-encrypting programs like PGPdisk, and distributed
   systems like the one Zero Knowledge Systems has created to provide at
   least somewhat-anonymous Web browsing.

   In all three cases, the underlying encryption technology is based on
   the laws of mathematics--so if you use these products and the
   programmers did their jobs, your privacy no longer depends on the
   whims of Congress or society.

   Jeff correctly says these technologies can protect "responses to
   clickstream data collection in cyberspace," but in truth they're much
   more useful than that.

   For example, if I'm chatting with friends using Hushmail, my e-mail
   will be stored in scrambled form on their servers--and the company
   won't be able to decrypt them even in response to a subpoena. If
   nothing else, that would have given Monica Lewinsky additional
   protections from Kenneth Starr. Compare this to Microsoft's
   notoriously snoopable Hotmail service, or Yahoo's practice of turning
   over information in response to subpoenas without notifying its users.

   Another example: We can choose to trust police not to do illegal
   wiretaps, even though history and the recent LAPD scandal suggest that
   would be unwise. Or--and I argue this is a better idea--we can use
   technology instead of the law to shield our privacy. Starium is
   designing a product to scramble phone calls, and Speak Freely does it
   for Internet telephony users. I'll bet Newt Gingrich wished he had
   cell phone conversation--even though such snooping was illegal.

[...]

   Let me take this up one level of abstraction, if I may. It seems to me
   that there are at least three ways to protect privacy:

   1. Prohibit people from collecting personal information (restrictions
   on using scanners to eavesdrop on cell phones, for instance).

   2. Prohibit people from disclosing personal information (reference
   Jeff's discussion about laws passed in response to Robert Bork's video
   rental records being disclosed, or Brandeis, for that matter.).

   Given the technologies--extant and forthcoming--we now have, it seems
   to me that the third is the most appropriate one for the future:

   3. Never give out your personal information in the first place.

   Best,
   Declan



   To: Declan McCullagh and Eugene Volokh
   Subject: The World Wide Water Cooler
   Posted: Wednesday, June 7, 2000, at 3:22 p.m. PT

   Dear Eugene and Declan,

   I've been misunderstood and taken out of context! (Not by you,
   gentlemen, but indulge me for a moment.)

   What author hasn't felt this after reading a book review? To be
   reviewed, by definition, is to be narrowed and simplified, to have
   your arguments presented through someone else's filter. But it's
   impossible for authors to avoid subjecting themselves to this sort of
   indignity, because reviews are necessary to persuade people to buy
   books and evaluate the arguments on their own. It would be silly for
   me to demand privacy after writing a book, because the point of
   writing a book is to express myself, to speak to readers, and perhaps
   to influence the way they think. (Now is the time for the wanted
   gaze.) Still, if I got a bad review in a very prominent publication, I
   would feel like my dignity had been assaulted and my public face had
   been misdefined, and I would use all the resources at my disposal to
   correct the misrepresentation. But no one would suggest that I should
   be able to sue the reviewer and have a judge settle the question,
   because ultimately the merits of my arguments and the true nature of
   my personality would be a matter of opinion, and mine might not be the
   most reliable.

[...]

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