What is the proper way to look at privacy, secrecy and freedom?
I've already written one entry inspired by a recent Conversation article in which Graham Murdock suggested that "surveillance threatens us with a new serfdom". It's not an easy article to understand, and I'm still uncertain if he is trying to cover too much in too little space, or has just mashed choice bits of history, politics and modern technology into an incoherent fantasy of totalitarian government. Whatever Murdock's intent, an alien reading the comments on the article would be certain that Australia and countries like it are totalitarian states.
I dithered for a while over whether I'd bother to write a comment of my own, in part because I wasn't sure I understood Murdock's point, in part because I wasn't sure I had anything (new) to say, and in part because I feared that questioning anti-surveillance rhetoric would have me perceived as a champion of totalitarian surveillance. The last motivation is the most interesting to me now, and ultimately led me to decide that I should comment by way of accepting my own criticism of the idea that secrecy protects us from discrimination. The same might be said of my previous blog entry, which contained a few rhetorical questions that I can imagine being answered with contemptuous and/or increduluous rants from anti-surveillance commenters and cyberlibertarians.
As it turned out, no one replied to my comment at all, so I either didn't offend as many people as I feared, wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped, or didn't make enough sense of my own. So what did I have to fear, if not ridicule from commenters who I've dismissed as ranters and fantasists anyway?
In working through my previous blog entry, I came to realise that a large part of my difficulty came from from trying to confront anti-surveillance rhetoric on its own terms, in which "surveillance" is presumed to imply arbitrary discrimination and persecution, and "privacy" is presumed to imply freedom. But the whole purpose of my critique is that this view is confused and unhelpful, not to mention absurd if its adherents really hold that Australia is a totalitarian state or anything close to one.
One cure might then be to eschew terms like "surveillance" and "discrimination", and instead draw on terminology developed within a more nuanced worldview. Of course I can't make everyone else adopt whatever terminology or worldview I choose, certainly not within the scope of a comment on an article. But this challenge does encourage me to think carefully about how I present my ideas.
Responding to Murdock's article, I cobbled together something about control of information, which is a bit of mish-mash of an idea that appeared (somewhat vaguely) in the article, and the view of privacy as being about use of information that we used when I was developing experimental privacy protection systems. I'm ultimately not all that happy with this response, though I hope I at least indicated that "privacy", "secrecy" and "liberty" might not have quite the straightforward relationship that anti-surveillance rhetoric supposes.
