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  From: <agb2104@columbia.edu>
  To  : <CPC@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 17:27:38 -0500

Paper: Hal & the Central Computer

Hal and the Central Computer

“What it is, the main thing that [keeps me] walking around free is
what we call, in the trade, the Fourth Amendment.  That’s the
series of computer programs that—”
“I’ve heard the term.”
“Right.  Searches and seizures.  An all-powerful, pervasive computer
that, if we let him loose, would make Big Brother seem like my
maiden aunt Vickie listening with a teacup against the bedroom
door.”
       — Liz, in Steel Beach by John Varley [1]

I wrote my first email ever on June 15, 1998.  I was a late bloomer.
 A friend introduced me to Yahoo! so that we could keep in touch
while she went to California for several weeks.  The tag on the
bottom of the email, which I saved, read remarkably similar to how
it does eight years later: “DO YOU YAHOO!?  Get your free
@yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com.”  I didn’t question
Yahoo! for providing me its service free of monetary charge.  The
information age spawned a land of plenty.

Eight years later I still Yahoo!, but I also Google and Lexis and
New York Times.  In each case I have bartered my security for
convenience and connectivity in what I gamble in my ignorance is a
decent price.  Like most cybernauts, I have grown to mostly ignore
the cookies and unread privacy policies that hover like drones in
the background while companies such as Seisint and ChoicePoint
quietly sell my identity to the highest penny-ante bidder.

I am not alone.  Younger and more frequent users of the Internet are
less likely to be troubled by privacy concerns, and more likely to
find online tracking helpful rather than harmful.[2]  If you ask
us, we care about privacy; just not enough to curb our growing
dependency on ubiquitous information and networking.  The rise of
this dependency is not likely to stop as long as progress marches
on.

In John Varley’s novel, Steel Beach, humanity depends as completely
on the Central Computer as does a suckling babe on its mother.  The
CC is in the walls, it’s in the air – it’s in people’s heads.  The
bargain was not security in place of liberty, as so many of us
today assume is the case.  The very survival of civilization on
Varley’s airless Luna hinges on technology too complex to leave in
frail organic hands.  Lunar society enjoys more liberties than
21st-century America, but the CC monitors them all.  Citizens trust
that the CC will hold off from wielding its godlike powers to their
harm, and go about their lives largely innocent of the privacy
concerns we discuss in class.

This is our future if we’re lucky.  Steel Beach tracks the
dependence on and omnipresence of computer and communication
networks today towards its logical end.  The crucial difference is
that in the novel the trust of the citizenry is largely warranted. 
Every morning’s news in this country brings in another story
questioning the basis for our trust: the Justice Department
subpoenaing Google for search records; the NSA conducting
warrantless wiretaps with the help of the Who’s Who of the telecom
industry [3]; the Justice Department considering a proposal by data
giant Acxiom to trawl the web for “extreme” sites about “abortion,
racial superiority, politics, religion, immigration, and foreign
affairs,” and extract personal information found in them. [4] Still
most people do nothing.  We may murmur “what about privacy?” but we
buy from the same websites, post on the same blogs, search for the
same scandalous material.

My contention is not that Americans are dumb.  Not even that we’re
particularly ignorant, although I know my eyes have only slowly
opened to the point where I understand why Yahoo! Mail is free and
what can be done with the personal data I have traded away.  There
is simply no perfect surveillance shield we can employ while
enjoying an ever more technological society.  We might use
cryptography online and we might scramble our phone messages, but
are we going to line our houses with lead?  Wear masks in the
street?  File down our fingerprints?  Every step we take to
anonymize ourselves distances us from the very network we have
sought to embrace.

We have only two options as we drift into the future: universal
computing and networking with the potential for no privacy; and the
same but with the reality of no privacy.  That is, the CC or Hal
9000.  This country’s current path looks to be curving sharply
towards the latter.  Fourth Amendment jurisprudence allows the Feds
to essentially contract out the surveillance work that they can’t
legally do themselves to private actors who can.  Therein lies the
magic of the subpoena.  When subpoenas don’t suffice, the
government has shown its willingness to flout the law and conduct
warrantless searches of its own.  Nor are we better off in the
hands of the private actors themselves, the identity paparazzi who
hawk the most intimate details of our lives, stored in vast, leaky
vaults.

Curbing technology will get us nowhere.  We need a good set of rules
that all the major players play by.  The logic of the Fourth
Amendment and Griswold’s penumbras, if interpreted properly and
rigorously enforced by a zealous citizenry, would do the trick
quite nicely for the government.  As for the private realm, privacy
runs smack into the wall of freedom of speech and the press. 
Carefully crafted statutes and better public education may help
stem the worst excesses, but I have no solution here.

Ideally those in power would cherish privacy as you and I do.  Alas.
 On Luna “Big Brother is most definitely there, but only when invite
him in, and a century of him living with us all has convinced us
that he really does love us, that he really has only our best
interests at heart.” [5] If only our leaders were benevolent
computer overlords like that.


[1]  John Varley.  Steel Beach, 219.  New York: Berkeley Publishing
Group, 1992.
[2]  Susanna Fox, “The Internet Life Report,” The Pew Internet &
American Life Project, (August 20, 2000),
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP Trust Privacy Report.pdf
[3]  Leslie Cauley and John Diamond, “Telecoms let NSA spy on
calls,” USA Today, (February 6, 2006),
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20060206/1a lede06.art.htm
[4]  Angela Gunn, “Acxiom pitched feds on large-scale
Web-surveillance project,” Computerworld, (February 2, 2006),
http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2006/0,4814,108348,00.html
[5]  Varley, 115.

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