On freedom in the ninja-costume state
In responding to a recent Conversation article on surveillance, I drew an analogy between the wearing of ninja costumes and secrecy-centred approaches to privacy. I've used this analagy several times elsewhere on this blog, but writing on The Conversation — where even comments probably receive far more attention than this blog — forced me to focus on the quality of the analogy.
In trying to portray rants about surveillance as simplistic and beside the point, I worked out a brief description of a world in which we used ninja costumes and ID numbers to prevent anyone finding out about us. I later wondered, off-line, if the imagined world was not just as absurd as I intended it to be, but also just as bad for freedom as the totalitarian state being imagined by the author of the article (Graham Murdock) and most of the other commenters. On the face of it, feeling compelled to wear ninja costumes and answer to ID numbers sounds very much like the dehumanised totalitarianism that Murdock and commentators say they fear.
Of course surveilling electronic networks doesn't work quite the same way as surveilling the streets: the kind of information involved is quite different, and computers can process and record much greater quantities of information than street-walking spies. But nor is it entirely different: both forms of surveillance can support the kind of arbitrary discrimination that anti-surveillance rants presume to be the goal of surveillance systems, and both can be combatted by a tell-nobody approach.
Re-reading my previous blog entries on privacy, I realised that I'd come across the key point in a Conversation article from Ashlin Lee and Peta Cook: a large part of freedom concerns the freedom to express oneself, and it is exactly this freedom that would be threatened by the ninja-costume state. Sure, the government would be unable to persecute any of its ninja-citizens, but no one would be able to do what they wanted to do anyway (unless all they wanted to do was to dress as ninjas).
Now suppose I encrypted and anonymised all of the entries in the blog, and all of my comments on the Conversation, just to make sure that no government or corporate overlords could pick me up in a crackdown on people with English names, long hair, or sceptical views on technology boosterism. I'd be free to have all the views I liked, but no one would be able to read them (they're encrypted), and no one would know that I'm a person who identifies with these characteristics. Is this a freedom worth having?
I suppose that critics of Lee and Cook's idea might argue that they want to express themselves to certain chosen people, but not to the world at large for fear of embarrassment or persecution. I can see a certain amount of pragmatic appeal in this position under various circumstances, but how does one identify those chosen people in the first place? And would not limiting our expression to only a select few like-minded fellow citizens leave us in a filter bubble from which we were unable to see perspectives other than our own?
Or perhaps we'd like to express ourselves to the world at large, but have the government and corporations politely ignore us. But, again, how do we choose those whose attention we want to attract and those by whom we wish to be politely ignored, and how do those parties know what we want of them? And, come to think of it, do we really want a government that ignores us anyway?
