Personal privacy has long been important to Americans because most of our forebears came to this country to escape a government that was both intrusive and oppressive. Privacy has always been perceived as an important defense against a powerful government.
It sometimes comes as a surprise to citizens that privacy is not explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution, yet most experts agree that privacy is implicitly protected in various amendments. Furthermore, many individual state constitutions recognize privacy rights for individuals. Many privacy rights experts insist that we need to start speaking in terms of limiting surveillance instead of protecting individual privacy in order to put the issue in proper perspective.
Do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces? If so, certainly not for long. A former aerospace engineer, David Aviv, has patented a surveillance system that he intends to market as a crime deterrent. Aviv’s system, called Public Eye, uses pattern recognition to distinguish between an innocuous event (like withdrawing cash from an automatic teller machine) and a violent one (like a mugging).
In Aviv’s system, a series of cameras in a variety of public spaces send real-time images to a computer that compares the image to a database of threatening gestures. If the computer determines the act to be malevolent, an alarm notifies the police or a guard. One has to wonder if the system is specially tuned to properly interpret physical gestures of the handicapped.
Aviv has also used a specialized form of computerized pattern recognition called “word gisting” to distinguish between innocuous and malevolent speech. It’s reasonable to wonder how the system deals with all the linguistics of non-English speaking people.
The varied ways in which technology can germinate privacy abuses is well substantiated. The other side of the argument, however, is usually given short shrift. Advancement in technology can strengthen an individual’s privacy every bit as much as it can increase the likelihood that an individual may be subjected to surveillance.
A multitude of transactions that used to be carried out in person, face-to-face, are now handled remotely: home shopping, computer conferencing, telecommuting, and online banking, to name just a few. Concerned individuals who enjoy a vast diversity of interests can communicate very rapidly over networks to unite in support of a common cause. Because this can occur without personal identification information being tied to the activity, activists and whistle-blowers can voice concerns without fear of undue retaliation.
Of course, detaching personal identification information from statements can also make false representations more frequent and potentially more problematic.
The solution for protecting personal privacy as well as ensuring accountability is quite simple: ubiquitous strong public key cryptography and digital signatures. If messages can be exchanged in a manner that guarantees privacy and authenticity, false representations will quickly disappear. (For more information, see “Cryptography” on page 237.)
