The bad guys are the enemy of the good guys, and vice versa
Recent articles on surveillance and privacy from Ashlin Lee and Peta Cook on The Conversation and John Leyden (quoting Art Coviello) on the The Register provoked some fairly predictable responses from anti-surveillance commenters. Said commenters insist that surveillance is self-evidently something that Big Bad Government does and should be stopped, and seem confused that anyone else would think otherwise.
Lee and Cook's argument, as I understand it, is that many of us like displaying certain aspects of ourselves to others, including people who we do not know beforehand, and that we therefore cannot simply reject all surveillance out-of-hand as "Orwellian". This idea, however, seems to be incomprehensible to commenters like Ben Marshall and Damien Hayden, who attempt to define the problem out of existence by insisting that "surveillance" refers only to watching someone without that person's permission, and that such a thing is self-evidently bad. We could, indeed, reserve the word "surveillance" only for whatever kinds of watching we don't like. But this won't eliminate our desire to express ourselves by exhibiting chosen characteristics, with the implication that we actually want people to pay attention to us when we do so.
Leyden reports the view of Art Coviello, the executive chair of RSA Security, that "anonymity is the enemy of privacy". Such a statement, of course, makes no sense to the classical security technologist's view that privacy is about never revealing anything, and that privacy and anonymity go hand-in-hand in protecting computer users from interference. Coviello's argument, as it is described in Leyden's article, isn't completely clear to me, but seems to be something like: anonymous miscreants are able to attack security systems with impunity, thus revealing the private data protected by said systems. Perhaps Coviello meant to say that anonymity is the enemy of security, and allude to the well-known tension between freedom and security that appears in nearly all debates on law enforcement.
While working in information security myself, I came to the view that security technologies can be used both by the good guys to protect themselves from the bad guys, and by the bad guys to protect themselves from the good guys. I therefore don't see much sense in making sweeping statements about the moral or political merits of anonymisation technologies, surveillance technologies, and other such things without reference to the context in which they are used. The statement attributed to Coviello is an example, and is difficult to interpret for this reason. But sweeping anti-surveillance statements are no more enlightening: how many people dress in ninja costumes whenever they're outside the house, lest others "surveil" what kind of t-shirts and haircuts they like to wear? And if people like to express themselves off-line, why wouldn't they want to do it on-line as well?
