This
is
another
excerpt from my book on technology, terrorism, and
DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts." (If you want to
read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the categories on the
right labeled "Excerpts from the book." I'm afraid I can't fix the bug
in TypePad that prevents me from putting them in the category in
reverse-chronological order, but I have started putting chapters up in
pdf form from time to time.) Comments and factual quibbles
are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:
fact.check.baker@gmail.com. If you're dying to order the book, send
mail to the same address.
--Stewart Baker
It’s remarkable when you think about it. Right now, this minute,
agents of an authoritarian government are covertly turning on cameras and
microphones in homes and offices all across America, spying on the unsuspecting
and the innocent. They’re recording our every thought, our every keystroke, as
we prepare private documents or visit websites.
And they’re able to do that today thanks to the hard work of privacy advocates.
How did the privacy community end up facilitating surveillance and
espionage on an unprecedented scale?
History, mainly, and a lack of imagination.
The men and women who built the computer industry grew up in a
very different era from those who pioneered the air travel industry. Air travel enthusiasts first launched
commercial flights between the two world wars, when government was big and
military risks were on everyone’s mind. The pioneers were children of their
age. They foresaw a world in which air
travel was used for military and espionage purposes; they understood that
unregulated flights could lead to disaster as the skies filled up. To manage
those risks, they helped the government fashion a comprehensive regulatory
scheme for pilots, airlines, and airplanes.
Computer technology, in contrast, was born in the wake of World
War II, at a time when the challenge of totalitarianism was on everyone’s mind.
The men and women who built the earliest computers were children of a different
era. They most feared that their
machines would be misused by authoritarian governments. Unlike an earlier
generation of technologists, they struggled to limit government’s role in their
industry. And they succeeded. From electronic intercepts to information
processing practices, for the next forty years, laws on information technology
were aimed as much at regulating the government as at regulating the industry.
By the time the threat of widespread computer misuse finally
arrived, the privacy groups already had a narrative fixed in their mind. They
could not imagine any threat to computer users’ privacy that could be worse
than the one they saw in the United States government. Saying no to the
government was their default position.
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