For several years, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has had a venture-capital business called In-Q-Tel, named after—if you can believe this—a James Bond character. According to a story in the New York Times magazine by Jeffrey Rosen, the CIA thinks it’s a good idea to invest US$30 million per year in Internet startups. The reason behind the folly? The same software that Internet sites use to track, profile, and target their customers is useful for tracking, profiling, and targeting terrorists.
And the CIA’s US$30 million per year is going to look like chump change next to the US$38 billion the Bush administration wants to spend on homeland security. Some analysts are predicting that federal spending on security technology will grow at 30% a year, reaching a whopping US$62 billion by 2006.
Only our privacy rights stand between the geeks and their access to the spooks’ venture money. In order to track, profile, and target terrorists, the geeks’ software is going to have to be capable of tracking, profiling, and targeting all of us. For that to happen, a few laws will have to be repealed and they’ll probably also have to muck about with a couple of the Constitutional amendments. But why worry? We’ve already lost our privacy to the corporations, so what harm is done by letting the government share access to those bits? It’s all in the name of safety.
This is exactly what Benjamin Franklin warned about when he wrote, “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” in the Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
To make matters worse, the profiling systems won’t work because there simply aren’t enough known terrorists from which to build an accurate profile. So says Lawrence Lessig, who certainly ought to know.
That the profiling systems are unworkable doesn’t seem to be much of a hindrance for the geeks. Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, for example insists that the problem is that there are too many disparate databases in use today by federal, state, and local agencies. The Ellison solution is to have one big honking database that integrates all of the information currently collected by government agencies. An Oracle database, of course. He says he’ll even donate the software free (upgrades and maintenance would be extra).
Specialized versions of some of these systems are already in place. Oracle, for example, provided its Lightweight Epidemiology Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System (LEADERS) that monitored every New York hospital for disease anomalies that might signal a bioterrorism attack within a day of the 11 September 2001 attacks. Oracle wants to expand the system to include every medical lab, clinic, and hospital in the country. As a dialysis patient, I find the reporting and storage of the minutiae of my medical condition in a national centralized database to be almost overwhelmingly disturbing. When coupled with Ellison’s proposal for a national identification card, it puts me right over the top.
Rosen offers an alarming quote from Tim Hoechst, Oracle’s senior vice president for technology, outlining the database company’s approach to arriving at the Ellison solution: “We think of it as a triangle [holding up a Dorito corn chip]. At one corner is privacy, at one corner is assurance of security—how safe is the data—and at another corner is usability. It’s all a matter of trade-offs. What we focus on is making the Dorito here, and putting you in any corner that you feel comfortable with. On Sept. 12, most Americans would say, Privacy out the window; go catch the folks. So we would have moved it all the way to usability. But maybe day to day, we move it a little bit more toward security.”
Somehow I think we can do better than Doritos and forced choices in corners.
What’s even more disturbingly pathetic is Oracle’s monolithic response to questions about public policy. They clam up like a constipated catatonic. “You’ll notice that we all became suspiciously quiet when we started talking about policy questions,” Rosen quotes Hoechst as saying. “At Oracle, we leave that to our customers to decide. We become a little stymied when we start talking about the ‘should wes’ and the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows,’ because it’s not our expertise.”
The lower Oracleans suggested that Rosen would get a better answer from an audience with the High Oracle Ellison himself. Ellison was unabashedly frank in his assessment of privacy: “I really don’t understand. Centralized databases already exist. Privacy is already gone.”
Computer matching—or the records consolidation proposed by Ellison—is a prima facie violation of the Fourth Amendment. The courts have consistently disallowed “fishing expeditions” in homes or businesses and similar protections should be afforded against electronic information safaris. Computer matching of unrelated data is intentionally designed as a general search and is not based on any pre-existing evidence.
Nonetheless, in classic Orwellian doublespeak, The Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act amended the Privacy Act to allow information collected for one purpose (welfare eligibility, for example) to be used for a different purpose (tax compliance, for example).
Ellison hand-waves concerns like this away with juicy quotes like, “it’s our lives that are at risk, not our liberties,” and “everyone’s got this amorphous idea that the government will somehow misuse this, but no one has given me a substantive example of what will happen that’s bad.”
Of course it’s our liberty that’s at risk here. Once liberty is lost, there’s nothing left to secure and Ellison’s little Atherton fortress and beefy body guards will be of little value and even less use.
But the greater threat here is the geeks’ Achilles’ heel as illustrated by the Oracle acolytes’ discomfort with “policy questions.” It’s time geeks started thinking about the repercussions of their developments instead of just the coolness quotient of latest neat hack. In other words, it’s high time to start answering those “should we,” “why,” and “how” questions instead of leaving them to incompetent politicians and megalomaniacs like Ellison.
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