Privacy Lecture Series, November 26, 2001

A World Filled With Cameras: Security at the Cost of Freedom? Or Can We Have Both?

Presented by David Brin, Ph.D.

(author of the 1998 book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? With a triple career as scientist, public speaker, and author, Brin is a self-described "crackpot and prolific science-fiction writer." He has a Ph.D. in physics, but is best known for his science fiction, including the New York Times bestseller The Uplift War, Hugo Award-winner Startide Rising, and The Postman.)

Paraphrased by Joseph T. Bernstein

Ideas are dangerous because they are like viruses; if you tell someone an idea, she might tell someone else, who might tell someone else, and so on, until everyone has ``caught" the idea. Throughout history, societies have adopted one of two models to solve this problem. The first approach, followed by most societies, is to restrict ideas. Under this model, because ideas have the capacity to damage individuals morally or damage the fabric of society itself, an elite class capable of deciding which ideas are acceptable and which are not acts as a filter. The elite protects the society by allowing it to receive only permissable ideas.

The second model, embraced by the West generally and the United States specifically, has been to trust society with information. Under this approach, ideas are given to everyone, and the public is assumed to have the maturity requisite to decide for itself which are good and which are not. Ours is the first society in the history of the world to embrace freedom of ideas as its official value system. After all, ours is a society in which ``weird" is a complement.

To the extent that any society's success can be attributed to its system of values, America arouses hatred in other societies because its success means that it has found a better system: We accept ideas that are different, and are successful. America itself is an explicit endorsment of this second model, and thus its opponents attack its hedonism without examining the virtues that have made it successful.

Almost every society in history has held the belief that some Golden Age existed in the past. Modern Western civilization is the first in history to believe that if a human golden age exists at all, it exists in the future. The belief is that today is slightly better than yesterday, and tomorrow will likely be better than today. The current struggle between America and its opponents is thus nothing short of of a struggle over the fundamental assumptions of human character.

The most heavily propagandized values in all of American society are suspicion of authority and promotion of tolerance; virtually every popular movie, sitcom, and book of the last twenty years has featured these themes prominently. Among intelligent people speaking about Western civilization, the only accepted topic of conversation is to criticize our society instead of reveling in how good we already are. We spend more time criticizing ourselves and each other than we do extolling our successes.

Suspicion of authority plays an important role in our expectation of privacy. In the book 1984, by George Orwell, the ``telescreen", a one-way camera in every room of every building, allows the government to keep tabs on every person in the nation. Naturally, the first response of the reader is a desire to destroy the telescreen to recapture some privacy. The American response, however, has not been to destroy the telescreen. Our response has been to place a telescreen on the shoulder of our government; they watch us, but we watch them, too. This approach has been highly effective; it destroyed Richard Nixon and stripped naked Bill Clinton. Ours is the first society to hold its elite accountable; not perfectly, but decently, well.

The restriction of information in the hands of people has never been as effective as giving information to people to use to their benefit. On September 11, for example, the only effective videotapes of the events in New York were recorded by private citizens. Aboard the flight which crashed in Pennsylvania, it was not the military which stopped the terrorists, but a group of average citizens at the back of the plane with information and a plan. Private citizens with lots of information has always made America successful. The recent trend to prevent the flow of information threatens to retard this system.

Criticism as a value makes the system work, because people on the right and left of the political spectrum constantly criticize each other. It acts as an immune system, lobbing off extremism and those who would impose their views upon the rest. Criticism valued, coupled with a suspicion of authority and tolerance of others results in a polity constantly keeping itself in check. A system like this can only work when most of the people have most of the information most of the time.

America is at war, but not in Afghanistan. The war is being fought in every bedroom in America every night when parents tell their children what to value. People should be trusted with information, not kept from it. The only real way to prevent our success is to restrict the flow of information between ourselves.