I think Bob made some great points about my book, but it's clear that
this debate
is revolving around a few sentences in Bob's review. Perhaps he miscategorizes
Brin, perhaps he doesn't. I haven't read _Transparent Society_ in some time.
Still, it's important to realize that this isn't just a battle
between the state
and its citizens. Encryption can provide a practical tool and a great option
for the data management engineers. Brin has a good point about the value
of openness, but I'm sure he doesn't extend it to things like people's credit
card numbers. Brin would probably be interested in the book and the way
it leaves some things in the clear. It's all about translucency,
which is, after
all, partially transparent. The glass is half empty or full. So maybe there's
something in common here?
The right use of encryption (and any anonymity that comes along with it) can
protect businesses, customers, clients, employees and others. I'm sure it
might also be used to by a few elites to avoid scrutiny, but that doesn't have
to be the case.
For me, the mathematics of on-line anonymity are essential parts of
on-line security. While I think that there are plenty of personal and
emotional reasons to embrace anonymity, one of the best is the higher
amount of security the systems offer. Simply put, identity-based
systems are more fragile because identity theft is so easy. Systems
designed for anonymity avoid that weakness because they're designed,
a priori, to work without names. So I think they're just bound to be
a bit safer.
It should be noted that the anonymous techniques developed by Chaum,
Brands and others do not have to be used to avoid scrutiny. You can
always tack on your true name in an additional field. To me, the
systems just avoid relying on the the name field to keep people
honest.
I'm glad Bob sees the resonance between _Translucent Databases_ and
the world of cypherpunk paranoia, but I would like to avoid a strong
connection. It's not that there's no relationship. There is. But the
book is meant to be much more practical. It explores how to use the
right amount of encryption to lock up the personal stuff in a
database without scrambling all of it. In the right situations, the
results can be fast, efficient, and very secure. So the techniques
are good for the paranoids as well as the apolitical DBAs who just
want to do a good job.
It is particularly dishonest of a so-called reviewer not only to
misinterpret and misconvey another person's position, but to abuse
quotation marks in the way Robert Hettinga has done in his review of
Translucent Databases By Peter Wayner. Openly and publicly, I defy
Hettinga to find any place where I used the word trust in the fashion or
meaning he attributes to me.
In fact, my argument is diametrically opposite to the one that he portrays
as mine. For him to say that 'Brin seems to want, trust of state
force-monopolists... their lawyers and apparatchiks. demonstrates either
profound laziness - having never read a word I wrote - or else deliberate
calumny. In either event, I now openly hold him accountable by calling it
a damnable lie. This is not a person to be trusted or listened-to by
people who value credibility.
Without intending-to, he laid bare one of the 'false dichotomies that
trap even bright people into either-or - or zero-sum - kinds of
thinking. For example, across the political spectrum, a Strong Privacy
movement claims that liberty and personal privacy are best defended by
anonymity and encryption, or else by ornate laws restricting what people
may know. This approach may seem appealing, but there are no historical
examples of it ever having worked.
INdeed, those mired in these two approaches seem unable to see outside the
dichotomy. Hettinga thinks that, because I am skeptical of the right
wing's passion for cowboy anonymity, that I am therefore automatically an
advocate of the left wing's prescription of privacy through state
coercive information management'. Baloney. A plague on both houses of
people who seem obsessed with policing what other people are allowed to know.
Strong Privacy advocates bears a severe burden of proof when they claim
that a world of secrets will protect freedom... even privacy... better
than what has worked for us so far - general openness.
Indeed, it's a burden of proof that can sometimes be met! Certainly there
are circumstances when/where secrecy is the only recourse... in concealing
the location of shelters for battered wives, for instance, or in fiercely
defending psychiatric records. These examples stand at one end of a
sliding scale whose principal measure is the amount of harm that a piece
of information might plausibly do, if released in an unfair manner. At
the other end of the scale, new technologies seem to make it likely that
we'll just have to get used to changes in our definition of privacy. What
salad dressing you use may be as widely known as what
