Abstract
No Place to Hide, by Robert O'Harrow Jr., Free Press, 2005, 348 pages, $26.
One can all too easily get caught up in today's atmosphere of desperate worry. Democrats and Republicans who disagree over many things seem to share a perception that civilization is plunging into crisis. Post-9/11 unease goes beyond airport inconvenience, economic disruption, and military conflict, all the way to jeremiads warning against technological innovations.
Amid this gloom, I take solace from that most discomforting of symbols, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which helped crystallize an earlier generation's end-of-the-world parable. The day still has not yet come when any combination of terror attacks could wreak as much harm as the lethal cargo of a single ballistic missile submarine. So should not our worry level be lower than it was in, say, 1980?
But people don't use game theory to weigh their fears, and the new science of threat psychology explains why. The Cold War was run mostly by professionals, but terror attacks seem unguided by logic. It is the unpredictable and irrational threat, above all, that makes us shiver.
Does this explain why we hear so many commentators expressing fear of technological change? Take Francis Fukuyama, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, whose The End of History and the Last Man (1992) suggested that the collapse of communism might be the final event worth chronicling before Earth slides, happily ever after, into blithe liberal democracy. Alas, short-lived jubilation swiftly gave way to pessimism in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), in which Fukuyama condemns a wide range of potentially disruptive biological advances. People cannot be trusted to make wise use of, for example, genetic therapy, he says. Human “improvability” is so perilous a concept that he prescribes joint government-industry panels to control or ban whole avenues of scientific investigation. Fukuyama is hardly alone in fretting over technological innovation gone amok. Popular authors Margaret Atwood and Michael Crichton have probably never voted for the same party or candidate. Yet their novels share a persistent theme with many other antimodernists, both left and right, who doubt human ability to solve problems or to cope. Pondering the challenges of tomorrow, they say, “Don't go there.”
No issue has stoked this ecumenical sense of alienation more than the Great Big Privacy Scare. While the information age seems on one level benign–the internet can't blast, kill, mutate, or infect us–social repercussions of new data-handling technologies seem daunting. Pundits, spanning the spectrum from William Safire to Jeffrey Rosen, have proclaimed this to be our ultimate test. I don't disagree.
Every day, powerful, interconnected databases fill with information about you and about me, fed by inputs from our every purchase and telephone call. New sensor technologies add cascades of detail, not just from the vast proliferation of cameras (which are getting cheaper, smaller, faster, and more mobile every year), but also from radio frequency identification tags that identify and track objects (as well as the people who happen to be wearing, riding, or chatting into them), along with biometric devices that identify people by their irises, retinas, fingerprints, voices, or dozens of other physical markers. These gadgets' torrential output will feed into the internet's sophisticated successors–government and corporate databases that hunt for connections and make inferences based on them.
It all sounds pretty dreadful, and Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow Jr. reinforces this disheartening view with copious detail in his new book, No Place to Hide, offering one of the most thorough litanies of information and privacy abuse since Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century (2000).
O'Harrow's complaints about the behavior of voracious data-mining groups, such as Acxiom, LexisNexis, and ChoicePoint, are accurate and timely. Just after No Place to Hide was published, several companies were caught violating either their own privacy-protection rules or their legal obligations to safeguard private data. Security breaches at Choice-Point and LexisNexis exposed tens of thousands of supposedly secure private records, including credit card information and Social Security numbers. Such events steadily erode trust and increase the near-term danger that we all face from crimes like identity theft.
O'Harrow shows that privacy problems are nothing new, giving readers a historical context that builds on Vance Packard's The Naked Society (1964) and Arthur R. Miller's Assault on Privacy (1971) and includes a rundown of post-Watergate reforms that were supposed to end surveillance abuses. Indeed, many of today's arguments about the proper balance between privacy rights and law enforcement needs are rooted in the pre-internet era. But today, the government is vastly better equipped, with aptly named tools like “Carnivore” and “The Matrix” that empower the agencies of our paid protector caste to penetrate telephone lines, e-mail traffic, myriad databases, and more, sifting for anything that their constantly shifting criteria might deem threat-related.
The government can penetrate telephone lines, e-mail traffic, myriad databases, and more, sifting for anything it might deem threat-related.
The post-9/11 era, which spawned angst over an amorphous and ill-defined enemy, has aggravated a political divide that has been around for years. This chasm separates those who emphasize a need for enhanced security from those who urge that we accept a little added risk in order to preserve traditional liberties. Nowhere has this edgy debate swirled more bitterly than around provisions of the PATRIOT Act, which dramatically bolstered the federal government's wiretap and surveillance powers while at the same time shrouding law enforcement activity in a haze of heightened secrecy.
O'Harrow chronicles the evolution of this landmark law in New Journalism style, “through the eyes of” such players as Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh (who both pushed for different versions of an anti-terrorism bill after 9/11), following them at breakfast, in the car, and through the meetings in which adamant, no-compromise positions took form. Forsaking any pretense of impartiality, O'Harrow venerates the ACLU lobbyists who “grasped the difficulty of their position. They were trying to persuade Americans to hold fast to concerns about individual freedom and privacy while the vast majority of people were terrified.”
No passage better illustrates O'Harrow's approach to this serious issue, typifying the snobbery of those on both right and left who share a common need to portray the American people as hapless sheep who either require protection from terrorists, or protection from overprotection. Only a few commentators, notably the Boston Globe's Elaine Scarry, have pointed out that in fact most Americans did not panic or act terrified on, or after, 9/11.
If you want a detailed series of anecdotes showing how databases and data mining can be surreptitiously abused, then read No Place to Hide and find out how many groups, from industry to government to criminal gangs, are trying to gather information on you. Campaigns to control this information-gathering frenzy–for example, when Congress stopped the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's efforts to achieve “total information awareness”–simply drive the trend toward universal data collection underground. Meanwhile, supposedly secure systems, like those at LexisNexis, are breached with apparent regularity. And once information floats free, there is no calling it back.
As O'Harrow follows real-life characters, showing their quirky hobbies and their passionate battles for or against privacy rights, another common theme emerges. Everyone appears to accept the underlying premise of a zero-sum game, a “great dichotomy”–the notion that one must choose, or strike some balance, between freedom and safety.
BOOK NOTE
Rebirth of nuclear?
Nuclear Renaissance: Technologies and Policies for the Future of Nuclear Power, by W. J. Nuttall. Institute of Physics, 2005, 322 pages, $65.
Suddenly, nuclear power has something for everyone. Whether promoted as a carbon emission-free energy source to combat global warming or as a means to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil, nuclear energy is making strange bedfellows of environmental, energy, and national security policy makers. A draft bipartisan bill in the U.S. Senate and a leaked British Labour Party strategy document both officially contemplate a new wave of nuclear power construction, suggesting the potential reemergence of a once-moribund industry.
How this renewed enthusiasm for nuclear energy might translate into policy and action is the subject of W. J. Nuttall's Nuclear Renaissance. Nuttall, a physicist by training and a lecturer at Cambridge University, refuses to prognosticate and instead lays out for readers a sound foundation to understanding the current state of the nuclear power industry and the ways in which it might expand. A nuclear renaissance is unlikely to be a revolution in nuclear technology, he says, but will rather be an evolutionary process, starting with established light-water reactor fission technology using a once-through uranium fuel cycle (in which spent fuel is not reprocessed).
Nuttall's intelligent policy overview deals succinctly with issues of nuclear safety, energy economics, and waste management, but the majority of the book is devoted to a thoughtful survey of nuclear fission and fusion technologies. Absent, however, is any discussion of the changing markets for natural uranium and the enrichment services required to prepare uranium as fuel in most commercial reactors.
Wide-ranging and technically grounded, Nuclear Renaissance offers a useful introduction to the newly revitalized debate over the role of nuclear power in the years to come.
One can hardly blame O'Harrow for imbuing his book with an assumption that seems both widespread and intuitively obvious. Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold, a very smart man, nevertheless accepted this trade-off during the PATRIOT Act debates: “There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time, for any reason…. But that would not be a country in which we would want to live.”
A truism–but truisms can mislead. The notion of a freedom-security trade-off insidiously serves the interests of those who oppose freedom, because there will inevitably come days when security seems paramount to a frightened public. Liberty will lose any resulting ratchet effect. But the dismal “trade-off” notion is disproved by a simple counter-example–us. In all of history, no people were ever so safe and so free. A civilization of vigilant, technologically empowered problem-solvers can and should make safety and freedom codependent. Citizens may learn to thrive, even in an environment where various elites know much about them.
“Surveillance comes with a price,” O'Harrow writes. “It dulls the edge of public debate, imposes a sense of conformity, introduces a feeling of being watched. It chills culture and stifles dissent.” This, too, sounds intuitively obvious, and it was almost certainly true in most other societies, in which narrow elites monopolized both power and the flow of information. But should we accept it, unex-amined, as a valid assumption about the United States today?
One might hope that after listing numerous threats to privacy, O'Harrow would offer some solutions or ideas for change. Unfortunately, he goes from introduction to conclusion without ever proposing a single suggestion, or even a palliative, to remedy burgeoning surveillance and its accompanying trends. The book lives up to its gloomy title and premise–its implicit prescription is “grumble at the inevitable.”
It did not have to be that way. Early in No Place to Hide, O'Harrow quotes a prophetic speech in which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex.” (Former Clinton administration privacy counselor Peter Swire has echoed this famous admonition by referring to a security-industrial complex–an apt comparison.) O'Harrow then continues with an even more cogent excerpt from the same speech: “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
There it is–an alternative to grumbling and to the dichotomy of gloom. Alas, O'Harrow offers the quotation and then moves quickly on, never commenting on how Eisenhower's statement differs so vastly from others in the book. For while warning of danger, Ike also spoke of opportunity and offered pragmatic ingredients for a genuine solution–a positive-sum solution based on Americans doing what they do best–living both safe and free.
Human destiny is not predetermined by any of the flourishing surveillance technologies that O'Harrow details. I agree that nothing we can do will stop the ballooning growth of databases and microscopic cameras, proliferating across the land like crocuses after a spring rain. And yet I remain optimistic because educated citizens of a modern civilization may be capable of playing a different role than the one plotted out for them by smug elites, a role other than as bleating sheep.