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EPIC Alert 10.13 [2003] EPICAlert 13

EPIC ALERT

David Chaum
Today, individuals provide substantially the same identifyinginformation to each organization with which they have a relationship.
In a new paradigm, individuals provide different "pseudonyms" oralternate names to each organization. A critical advantage of systemsbased on such pseudonyms is that the information associated with eachpseudonym can be insufficient to allow data on an individual to belinked and collected together, and thus they can prevent the formationof a dossier society reminiscent of Orwell's "1984".

A system is proposed in which an individual's pseudonyms are createdand stored in a computer held and trusted only by the individual. Newcryptographic techniques allow an organization to securely exchangemessages or payments with an individual known under apseudonym
--
without the communication or payments systems providersbeing able to trace messages or payments. Other new techniques allow adigitally signed credential to be transformed by the individual, fromthe individual's pseudonym with the issuing organization, to theindividual's pseudonym with a recipient organization. Credentials canbe transformed only between pseudonyms of a single individual, and anindividual can obtain at most one pseudonym with a particularorganization, but even a conspiracy of all organizations can gain noinformation from the pseudonyms about their correspondence. Thecombination of these systems can prevent abuses by individuals, whileaverting the potential for a dossier society.

A New Paradigm for Individuals in the Information Age, 1984 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, April 29 - May 02,
1984,
http://www.computer.org/proceedings/sp/0532/05320099abs.htm

Simon Davies
Each week that passes sees one more strand of the web completed. Everystrand is woven delicately, and we are told each time that the effortis all for our benefit. True, every strand catches another tax dollaror snares another criminal. But every strand binds honest citizensmore tightly to the administration of government...Your finances,
purchases, employment, interests, telephone activity and even yourgeographical movements are losing their anonymity. Not everything willbe bad, however; technology will bring wonderful possibilities. Itwill also bring the nightmare of total nakedness.

Big Brother: Australia's Growing Web of Surveillance (Simon & Schuster 1992)

David H. Flaherty
There appears to be a consensus against a totalitarian society or apolice state, because of the regrettable precedents for each. All ofus shudder at living in the fictional worlds of George Orwell's "1984"
or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. At what point doessurveillance become unacceptable, whether by private detectives, thepolice, or welfare and taxation authorities? At what point doessurveillance actually take place, when data are collected or when theyare used? The shaping of appropriate answers is the concern of thisentire volume. Officials privacy protectors have a basic role to playin crafting society's answers to these questions, in part becausegovernment created their agencies in order "to protect privacy," butalso because since data protectors were first established, problems ofsurveillance have become more severe owing to the exponential growthin automation. The questions did not admit a one-time solution.

Protecting privacy in Surveillance Societies: The Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden, France, Canada, and the United States (University of North Carolina Press 1989)

Oscar Gandy
Public policy deliberations about privacy in Congress, or the spectreof the much feared "1984" and the dominance by "big brother," can beseen to be linked closely to increases in the number of citizens whoare concerned about privacy. A question that asked respondents toindicate how close had come to the society that George Orwell haddescribed in his book 1984 found the proportion who though that we hadalready arrived at such a society to have more than doubled between1983 and 1988 and to have trippled between 1983 and 1989 (from 6percent to 19 percent). p.140.

The Panoptic Sort (Westview Press 1993)

Jerry Kang
Extensive, undesired observation
--
what may be called "surveillance"--
interferes with this exercise of choice because knowledge ofobservation "brings one to a new consciousness of oneself, assomething seen through another's eyes." Simply put, surveillance leadsto self-censorship. This is true even when the observable informationwould not be otherwise misused or disclosed.

Information collection in cyberspace is more like surveillance thanlike casual observation. As explained above, data collection incyberspace produces data that are detailed, computer-processable,
indexed to the individual, and permanent. Combine this with the factthat cyberspace makes data collection and analysis exponentiallycheaper than in real space, and we have what Roger Clarke hasidentified as the genuine threat of dataveillance.

Information Privacy in Cyberspace Transactions, 50 Stan. L.
Rev. 1193, 1261 (1998)

Gary T. Marx
In considering current developments and trends in the study of socialcontrol, I have suggested the idea of the "maximum securitysociety"with clear indebtedness to Bentham and Foucault I have foundit useful to note some parallels between control themes found in themaximum security prison and the broader society. The maximum securitysociety is made up of six subcomponents: the engineered, dossier,
actuarial, suspicious, self-monitored, and transparent societies.

George Orwell equated Big Brother with the harsh reality of a boot ona human face. The concept of the maximum security society is meant tocharacterize some softer social-control processes that have increasedin importance and sophistication in recent decades, as the velvetglove continues to gain ascendancy over the iron fist. In contemporarysociety these forms of control are uncoupled and the former is clearlydominant-using the creation and manipulation of culture through themass media, therapeutic and labeling efforts, the redistributiverewards of the welfare state, the use of deception (e.g., undercovertechniques and informers), and the engineering away of infractions.

The Engineering of Social Control: The Search for the Silver Bullet Published in J. Hagan and R. Peterson, Crime and Inequality (Stanford University Press 1995)
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/bullet.html

Pamela Samuelson
George Orwell once wrote that "[g]ood prose is like a window pane."
What I take Orwell to have meant by that remark is that when peopleread good prose, it makes them feel as if they've `seen' something(whatever the author was trying to convey) more clearly. Put anotherway, if a writer can induce his or her reader to feel that the readerwould have come to the same conclusion that the author reached had thereader done his or her own investigation of the subject matter, thewriter has achieved a kind of "window pane" effect on the reader.

Good Legal Writing: of Orwell and Window Panes, 46 University of Pittsburgh Law Review 149, Fall 1984,
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.html

Paul M. Schwartz
George Orwell carried out the classic analysis of how surveillance canexert this negative pressure. In the novel 1984, first published in1949, Orwell imagined a machine called the "telescreen." Thisomnipresent device broadcasted propaganda on a nonstop basis andallowed the state officials, the "Thought Police," to observe thepopulace. Computers on the Internet are reminiscent of the telescreen;
under current conditions, it is impossible to know if and when thecyber-Thought Police are plugged in on any individual wire. To extendOrwell's thought, one can say that as habit becomes instinct andpeople on the Internet gain a sense that their every mouse click andkey stroke might be observed, the necessary insulation for individualself-determination will vanish.

Privacy and Democracy in Cyberspace, 52 Vand. L. Rev. 1609,
1657 (1999)

Barbara Simons
Numerous articles were written in 1984 boasting about how the worldhad escaped Orwell's dire predictions of governmental surveillance andthe elimination of privacy. Many people rejoiced about the lack ofomnipresent telescreens and the Thought Police, but far fewer peoplepaid attention to the development of technologies that facilitate BigBrother-style surveillance. Most U.S. citizens feel that we are allprotected by the Bill of Rights from secret governmental surveillance.
Unfortunately, that has not always been the case historically, nor isit necessarily true today; worse, it may be still less true in thefuture if we fail to be continually on guard against creepinggovernmental intrusion into our private lives.

Building Big Brother, Information Impacts Magazine, February 2000,
http://www.cisp.org/imp/february_2000/02_00simons-insight.htm.

Robert Ellis Smith
We should remember that the laureates of the cybernetic nightmare
--
Kafka, Orwell, Huxley
--
were in fact rebelling against impersonalbureaucracies more than computerization. The anti-utopias in GeorgeOrwell's "1984," Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We," and Aldous Huxley's "BraveNew World: are _bureaucratic tyrannies_, not necessarily _computerizedtyrannies_.

Our Vanishing Privacy and What You Can Do to Protect Yours (Loompanics Unlimited 1993)

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