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For example, a Wall Street Journal survey revealed that Americans today are more concerned about invasions of their personal privacy than they are

[Page: S14536]  GPO's PDF

   One final note: given that privacy is not an easy issue and that it appears in so many other contexts, I invite all interested parties to help us improve our legislation to create a Commission. We need to forge a middle ground consensus with our approach, and the door is open to all who share this goal.

   Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the previously cited material be printed in the RECORD.

   There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD as follows:

   The End of Privacy

   Remember, they are always watching you. Use cash when you can. Do not give your phone number, social-security number or address, unless you absolutely have to. Do not fill in questionnaires or respond to telemarketers. Demand that credit and datamarketing firms produce all information they have on you, correct errors and remove you from marketing lists. Check your medical records often. If you suspect a government agency has a file on you, demand to see it. Block caller ID on your phone, and keep your number unlisted. Never use electronic tollbooths on roads. Never leave your mobile phone on--your movements can be traced. Do not use store credit or discount cards. If you must use the Internet, encrypt your e-mail, reject all ``cookies'' and never give your real name when registering at websites. Better still, use somebody else's computer. At work, assume that calls, voice mail, e-mail and computer use are all monitored.

   This sounds like a paranoid ravings of the Unabomber. In fact, it is advice being offered by the more zealous of today's privacy campaigners. In an increasingly wired world, people are continually creating information about themselves that is recorded and often sold or pooled with information from other sources. The goal of privacy advocates is not extreme. Anyone who took these precautions would merely be seeking a level of privacy available to all 20 years ago. And yet such behaviour now would seem obsessive and paranoid indeed.

   That is a clue to how fast things have changed. To try to restore the privacy that was universal in the 1970s is to chase a chimera. Computer technology is developing so rapidly that it is hard to predict how it will be applied. But some trends are unmistakable. The volume of data recorded about people will continue to expand dramatically (see pages 21-23). Disputes about privacy will become more bitter. Attempts to restrain the surveillance society through new laws will intensify. Consumers will pay more for services that offer a privacy pledge. And the market for privacy -protection technology will grow.

   Always observed

   Yet there is a bold prediction: all these efforts to hold back the rising tide of electronic intrusion into privacy will fail. They may offer a brief respite for those determined, whatever the trouble or cost, to protect themselves. But 20 years hence most people will find that the privacy they take for granted today will be just as elusive as the privacy of the 1970s now seems. Some will shrug and say: ``Who cares? I have nothing to hide.'' But many others will be disturbed by the idea that most of their behaviour leaves a permanent and easily traceable record. People will have to start assuming that they simply have no privacy . This will constitute one of the greatest social changes of modern times.

   Privacy is doomed for the same reason that it has been eroded so fast over the past two decades. Presented with the prospect of its loss, many might prefer to eschew even the huge benefits that the new information economy promises. But they will not, in practice, be offered that choice. Instead, each benefit--safer streets, cheaper communications, more entertainment, better government services, more convenient shopping, a wider selection of products--will seem worth the surrender of a bit more personal information . Privacy is a residual value, hard to define or protect in the abstract. The cumulative effect of these bargains--each attractive on their own--will be the end of privacy .

   For a similar reason, attempts to protect privacy through new laws will fail--as they have done in the past. The European Union's data protection directive, the most sweeping recent attempt, gives individuals unprecedented control over information about themselves. This could provide remedies against the most egregious intrusions. But it is doubtful whether the law can be applied in practice, if too many people try to use it. Already the Europeans are hinting that they will not enforce the strict terms of the directive against America, which has less stringent protections.

   Policing the proliferating number of databases and the thriving trade in information would not only be costly in itself, it would also impose huge burdens on the economy. Moreover, such laws are based on a novel concept: that individuals have a property right in information about themselves. Broadly enforced, such a property right would be antithetical to an open society. It would pose a threat not only to commerce, but also to a free press and to much political activity, to say nothing of everyday conversation.

   It is more likely that laws will be used not to obstruct the recording and collection of information , but to catch those who use it to do harm. Fortunately, the same technology that is destroying privacy also makes it easier to trap stalkers, detect fraud, prosecute criminals and hold the government to account. The result could be less privacy , certainly--but also more security for the law-abiding.

   Whatever new legal remedies emerge, opting out of information -gathering is bound to become ever harder and less attractive. If most urban streets are monitored by intelligent video cameras that can identify criminals, who will want to live on a street without one? If most people carry their entire medical history on a plastic card that the emergency services come to rely on, a refusal to carry the card could be life-threatening. To get a foretaste of what is to come, try hiring a car or booking a room at a top hotel without a credit card.

   LEADERS

   In a way, the future may be like the past, when few except the rich enjoyed much privacy . To earlier generations, escaping the claustrophobic all-knowingness of a village for the relative anonymity of the city was one of the more liberating aspects of modern life. But the era of urban anonymity already looks like a mere historical interlude. There is, however one difference between past and future. In the village, everybody knew everybody else's business. In the future, nobody will know for certain who knows what about them. That will be uncomfortable. But the best advice may be: get used to it.

   THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

   New information technology offers huge benefits--higher productivity, better crime prevention, improved medical care, dazzling entertainment, more convenience. But it comes at a price: less and less privacy

   ``The right to be left alone.'' For many this phrase, made famous by Louis Brandeis, an American Supreme Court justice, captures the essence of a notoriously slippery, but crucial concept. Drawing the boundaries of privacy has always been tricky. Most people have long accepted the need to provide some information about themselves in order to vote, work, shop, pursue a business, socialise or even borrow a library book. But exercising control over who knows what about you has also come to be seen as an essential feature of a civilised society.

   Totalitarian excesses have made ``Big Brother'' one of the 20th century's most frightening bogeyman. Some right of privacy , however qualified, has been a major difference between democracies and dictatorships. An explicit right to privacy is now enshrined in scores of national constitutions as well as in international human-rights treaties. Without the ``right to be left alone,'' to shut out on occasion the prying eyes and importunities of both government and society, other political and civil liberties seem fragile. Today most people in rich societies assume that, provided they obey the law, they have a right to enjoy privacy whenever it suits them.

   They are wrong. Despite a raft of laws, treaties and constitutional provisions, privacy has been eroded for decades. This trend is now likely to accelerate sharply. The cause is the same as that which alarmed Brandeis when he first popularized his phrase in an article in 1890; technological change. In his day it was the spread of photography and cheap printing that posed the most immediate threat to privacy . In our day it is the computer. The quantity of information that is now available to governments and companies about individuals would have horrified Brandeis. But the power to gather and disseminate data electronically is growing so fast that it raises an even more unsettling question: in 20 years' time, will there be any privacy left to protect?

   Most privacy debates concern media intrusion, which is also what bothered Brandeis. And yet the greatest threat to privacy today comes not from the media, whose antics affect few people, but from the mundane business of recording and collecting an ever-expanding number of everyday transactions. Most people know that information is collected about them, but are not certain how much. Many are puzzled or annoyed by unsolicited junk mail coming through their letter boxes. And yet junk mail is just the visible tip of an information iceberg. The volume of personal data in both commercial and government databases has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years along with advances in computer technology. The United States, perhaps the most computerized society in the world, is leading the way, but other countries are not far behind.

   Advances in computing are having a twin effect. They are not only making it possible to collect information that once went largely unrecorded, but are also making it relatively easy to store, analyze and retrieve this information in ways which, until quite recently, were impossible.

   Just consider the amount of information already being collected as a matter of routine--any spending that involves a credit or

[Page: S14537]  GPO's PDF

   Firms are as interested in their employees as in their customers. A 1997 survey by the American Management Association of 900 large companies found that nearly two-thirds admitted to some form of electronic surveillance of their own workers. Powerful new software makes it easy for bosses to monitor and record not only all telephone conversations, but every keystroke and e-mail message as well.

   Information is power, so its hardly surprising that governments are as keen as companies to use data-processing technology. They do this for many entirely legitimate reasons--tracking benefit claimants, delivering better health care, fighting crime, pursuing terrorists. But it inevitable means more government surveillance.

   A controversial law passed in 1994 to aid law enforcement requires telecoms firms operating in America to install equipment that allows the government to intercept and monitor all telephone and data communications, although disputes between the firms and the FBI have delayed its implementation. Intelligence agencies from America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand jointly monitor all international satellite-telecommunications traffic via a system called ``Echelon'' that can pick specific words or phrases from hundreds of thousands of messages.

   America, Britain, Canada and Australia are also compiling national DNA databases of convicted criminals. Many other countries are considering following suit. The idea of DNA databases that cover entire populations is still highly controversial, but those databases would be such a powerful tool for fighting crime and disease that pressure for their creation seems inevitable. Iceland's parliament has agreed a plan to sell the DNA database of its population to a medical-research firm, a move bitterly opposed by some on privacy grounds.

   To each a number

   The general public may be only vaguely aware of the mushrooming growth of information- gathering, but when they are offered a glimpse, most people do not like what they see. A survey by America's Federal Trade Commission found that 80% of Americans are worried about what happens to information c ollected about them. Skirmishes between privacy a dvocates and those collecting information a re occurring with increasing frequency.

   This year both intel and Microsoft have run into a storm of criticism when it was revealed that their products--the chips and software at the heart of most personal c omputers--transmitted unique identification numbers whenever a personal-c omputer user logged on to the Internet. Both companies hastily offered software to allow users to turn the identifying numbers off, but their critics maintain that any software fix can be breached. In fact, a growing number of electronic devices and software packages contain identifying numbers to help them interact with each other.

   In February an outcry greeted news that image Data, a small New Hampshire firm, had received finance and technical assistance from the American Secret Service to build a national database of photographs used on drivers' licenses. As a first step, the company had already bought the photographs of more than 22m drivers from state governments in South Carolina, Florida and Colorado. Image Data insists that the database, which would allow retailers or police across the country instantly to match a name and photograph, is primarily designed to fight cheque and credit-card fraud. But in response to more than 14,000 e-mail complaints, all three state moved quickly to cancel the sale.

   It is always hard to predict the impact of new technology, but there are several developments already on the horizon which, if the recent past is anything to go by, are bound to be used for monitoring of one sort or another. The paraphernalia of snooping, whether legal or not, is becoming both frighteningly sophisticated and easily affordable. Already, tiny microphones are capable of recording whispered conversations from across the street. Conversations can even be monitored from the normally imperceptible vibrations of window glass. Some technologists think that the tiny battlefield reconnaissance drones being developed by the American armed forces will be easy to commercialize. Small video cameras the size of a large wasp may some day be able to fly into a room, attach themselves to a wall or ceiling and record everything that goes on there.

   Overt monitoring is likely to grow as well. Intelligent software systems are already able to scan and identify individuals from video images. Combined with the plummeting price and size of cameras, such software should eventually make video surveillance possible almost anywhere, at any time. Street criminals might then be observed and traced with ease.

   The burgeoning field of ``biometrics'' will make possible cheap and fool-proof systems that can identify people from their voices, eyeballs, thumbprints or any other measurable part of their anatomy. That could mean doing away with today's cumbersome array of security passes, tickets and even credit cards. Alternatively, pocket-sized ``smart' cards might soon be able to store all of a person's medical or credit history, among other things, together with physical data needed to verify his or her identity.

   In a few years' time utilities might be able to monitor the performance of home appliances, sending repairmen or replacements even before they break down. Local supermarkets could check the contents of customers' refrigerators, compiling a shopping list as they run out of supplies of butter, cheese or milk. Or office workers might check up on the children at home from their desktop computers.

   But all of these benefits, from better medical care and crime prevention to the more banal delights of the ``intelligent'' home, come with one obvious drawback--an ever-widening trail of electronic data. Because the cost of storing and analysing the data is also plummeting, almost any action will leave a near-permanent record. However ingeniously information-p rocessing technology is used, what seems certain is that threats to traditional notions of privacy w ill proliferate.

   This prospect provokes a range of responses, none of them entirely adequate. More laws. Brandeis's article was a plea for a right to sue for damages against intrusions of privacy. It spawned a burst of privacy s tatutes in America and elsewhere. And yet privacy l awsuits hardly ever succeed, except in France, and even there they are rare. Courts find it almost impossible to pin down a precise enough legal definition of privacy.

   America's consumer-credit laws, passed in the 1970s, give individuals the right to example their credit records and to demand corrections. The European Union has recently gone a lot further. The EU Data Protection directive, which came into force last October, aims to give people control over their data, requiring ``unambiguous'' consent before a company or agency can process it, and barring the use of the data for any purpose other than that for which it was originally collected. Each EU country, is pledged to appoint a privacy c ommissioner to act on behalf of citizens whose rights have been violated. The directive also bars the export of data to countries that do not have comparably stringent protections.

   Most EU countries have yet to pass the domestic laws needs to implement the directive, so it is difficult to say how it will work in practice. But the Americans view it as Draconian, and a trade row has blown up about the EU's threat to stop data exports to the United States. A compromise may be reached that enables American firms to follow voluntary guidelines; but that merely could create a big loophole. If, on the other hand, the EU insist on barring data exports, not only might a trade war be started but also the development of electronic commerce in Europe could come screeching to a complete halt, inflicting a huge cost on the EU's economy.

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