Perspective: A tech tool for future tyrants?
By Tom Giovanetti
December 4, 2002, 4:00 AM PT
A healthy distrust of government was a hallmark of this country's founding,
and has protected us from much harm over the last 226 years. The founders
may have disagreed about many things, but they all agreed that limited
government power was a key to freedom.
Distrust of central government power was among the primary reasons for the
designs of both our system of separation of powers and our system of
federalism.
The founders distrusted government because they had firsthand experience
with tyrants. They had seen that "power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely." Note the logical order in the phase. It isn't the
corruption that comes first--it is power that comes first. When power is
amassed and available, corruption comes as a result. So the trick is to
limit power up-front--to prevent the amassing of too much power by any
single person, or any single agency, or department, or government.
Another famous quotation, "knowledge is power," adorns (in its Latin form)
the logo of the Total Information Awareness project at the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency. A visit to the TIA Web site will take your breath
away. Its name, slogan and logo reek of Orwellian elements. In fact, the
Web site looks like either a parody Web site, or every civil libertarian's
nightmare.
But it is not a parody. Nor is this a simple case of unwise choices of
agency name and logo design. Rather, the name, logo, slogan and Web site
contents are all a pretty accurate description of the intentions behind the
TIA.
Distrust of government has also been a hallmark of conservatism in the
United States. Yet today, we have a conservative president and a
Republican-controlled Congress advocating and defending a program that says
it will amass a vast database of information on the American people. Even
some conservative organizations are telling us that we have nothing to fear
from the "total information" system.
It is a fact that the worst violators of Web site privacy policies are
federal government Web sites.
It is particularly odd for conservatives to be defending this
plan--particularly supply-side conservatives. For supply-side logic, which
states that "supply creates its own demand," does not apply exclusively to
tax policy. "If you build it, they will come." If you build it, they will
use it. If we allow a great amount of financial capital, or bandwidth, or
rubber bands, someone will find a creative use for it. That's good. But if
we amass an enormous database of the personal information of American
citizens, someone will find a creative use for it, too. The problem is that
we cannot assume that the people who later use the tool will have the same
integrity and assumptions as those who created the tool.
Consider this: It is a fact that the Clinton administration used the
Internal Revenue Service to harass its political opponents, and that they
obtained classified FBI files on their perceived enemies. Both were
illegal. Both were supposedly made impossible by legal firewalls.
It is a fact that the worst violators of Web site privacy policies are
federal government Web sites. It is a fact that information is routinely
shared between federal departments, despite the fact that such information
sharing is illegal.
It is a fact that the Social Security number was legally never supposed to
become a de facto national identification number, but when is the last time
you went a week without someone asking you for your Social Security number?
It is a fact that the Internal Revenue Service has, within the past five
years, on more than one occasion released tax information to the public
that was legally private and protected.
To those who say it will be impossible to use the database to violate the
privacy of citizens, well, it's just a matter of who is sitting at the
console.
In my own state of Texas, we were sold on a state lottery plan to fund
education, but not a dime of the money was ever specifically earmarked for
education.
In my own county, several years ago, voters approved a bond election for a
specific purpose, but county officials arbitrarily decided to use the money
for some other purpose instead.
You can't trust governments to do what they promise. You can't trust them
to police themselves. You can't assume that, because something is not
supposed to happen, it won't happen. So what you do is refuse to allow
government to amass power. You don't let them develop the tools that can be
used by future tyrants.
To those who say that safeguards will be built into the system, I say that
the government has a pretty poor track record of following such safeguards.
To those who say it will be impossible to use the database to violate the
privacy of citizens, well, it's just a matter of who is sitting at the
console. Your privacy policy is only as good as your most disgruntled
employee with access to your database.
Yes, we are under a new threat of terrorism, and we must take steps to
protect ourselves. But, in defending America, we should not betray our
founding principles and turn America into the founders' worst nightmare.
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