A Bill of Privacy Rights

Governments (mostly ours), private data scrapers who sell information to anyone, criminal hackers, high-traffic websites who use “metadata” to boost and focus their marketing efforts, advertisers, employers, schools and voyeurs. They pretty much know if you are straight or gay, depressed, an alcoholic, marriage on the rocks, experiencing an income surge or decline, whether you like porn or are having an affair, whom you associate with, your driving and arrest records, etc.

Spend money on a marriage counselor or charge drinks at a gay bar, start buying cheaper cuts of meat, etc… and all of this tracks. They can assemble data from different sources and through very sophisticated cross-referencing software – tracking patterns on credit card purchases plus publicly-available data as well as your own communications – and come up with a personal profile that often presents a clearer picture of “you” than even you might have of yourself. Credit agencies generate massive data and make it virtually impossible to reverse information that they have gathered, accurate or not. As shoppers trade the purchasing information for discounts, some retail establishments are finding their profits generated from selling data to professional data scrapers exceed those from their old-world retail sales.

As various Congressional committees and subcommittees begin investigating the biggest “Big Data” aggregators, the push-back from lobbyists from the data industry is massive. They claim most of their information comes with consumer consent, often based on usage and a blind “I accept” checkmark that users click without reading the fine print. Does anyone read the fine print? As the fine print changes – a Facebook pattern? If you don’t “accept,” that website won’t accept you. They argue that the ability of marketers to generate sales, employers to verify they are getting the best available in a world where chronic unemployment has destroyed too many American lives are essential in a modern, commercially linked business universe.

There appears to be absolutely no privacy. For those willing to pay for the information, the available details on most American adults are staggering. It’s really hard for a government to attempt to put limits on private data-tracking, when the pattern for personal violations actually seems to stem from the government itself. Fairly obviously, the most recent escalation into the lives of Americans came after the 9/11/01 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. But instead of subsiding after the initial panic and passage of the oft-reverse “Patriot Act,” the government’s efforts to intrude only seemed to accelerate as new technological and data storage capacities increased. The temptation to use the “new next” to generate more information was and continues to be irresistible.

“Ten months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation’s surveillance court delivered a ruling that intelligence officials consider a milestone in the secret history of American spying and privacy law. Called the ‘Raw Take’ order — classified docket No. 02-431 — it weakened restrictions on sharing private information about Americans, according to documents and interviews.

“The administration of President George W. Bush, intent on not overlooking clues about Al Qaeda, had sought the July 22, 2002, order. It is one of several still-classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court described in documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

“Previously, with narrow exceptions, an intelligence agency was permitted to disseminate information gathered from court-approved wiretaps only after deleting irrelevant private details and masking the names of innocent Americans who came into contact with a terrorism suspect. The Raw Take order significantly changed that system, documents show, allowing counterterrorism analysts at the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. to share unfiltered personal information.” New York Times, March 11th.

Senator Diane Feinstein (Democrat, California) has tread lightly on limiting the N.S.A. and other security-charged governmental agencies until she accused the C.I.A. of searching though the electronic communications of Congress itself. Vehemently denied by the C.I.A., Feinstein pressed her claims. Given the government’s shameless track record on everything from denying their Abu Ghraib interrogation techniques to sidestepping any genuine efforts towards transparency, promised by President Obama in recent speeches, it’s hard to believe just about anything these security agencies have to say on the issue.

Years after our constitution was ratified, our forefathers felt that we need to add an additional “Bill of Rights” (the first ten amendments to the constitution), which included efforts to protect free speech and against warrantless searches. But they most certainly could never have contemplated wars being wages by stateless terrorists or a ubiquitous electronics network where just about everything about everybody is stored and where commerce and communications among and between virtually all Americans flow. Is it time for us to accept that there are boundaries against surveillance and privacy-intrusions (private and governmental) that are a bigger threat to democracy than the terrorism they are meant to protect us from? Would anything short of constitutional reform accomplish this goal? And is this a cause where there is substantial support from both sides of the aisle?

In less-than-jolly-old England, the U.K. scientist who is considered one of the forefathers of the Worldwide Web, seems to think that this has become a necessity. But from a European perspective, this may require a new “Magna Carta” – their version of a Bill of Rights. “The inventor of the world wide web believes an online ‘Magna Carta’ is needed to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created and the rights of its users worldwide.

“Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian the web had come under increasing attack from governments and corporate influence and that new rules were needed to protect the ‘open, neutral’ system…  Speaking exactly 25 years after he wrote the first draft of the first proposal for what would become the world wide web, the computer scientist said: ‘We need a global constitution – a bill of rights.’

“Berners-Lee's Magna Carta plan is to be taken up as part of an initiative called ‘the web we want,’ which calls on people to generate a digital bill of rights in each country – a statement of principles he hopes will be supported by public institutions, government officials and corporations… ‘Unless we have an open, neutral internet we can rely on without worrying about what's happening at the back door, we can't have open government, good democracy, good healthcare, connected communities and diversity of culture. It's not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive to think we can just sit back and get it.’” theGuardian.com, March 12th. Do you think it’s time for constitutional limits? And exactly how is the balance between democracy/ privacy and national security get resolved? What are your thoughts?

I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly how much better or worse would we be with greater transparency and tighter protections on individual privacy?