There are a lot of problems with this picture. Individuals are not isolated and autonomous but are inevitably products of and participants in society. Furthermore, few individuals can be said to have genuinely agreed to their place in society — as if there is any real alternative!
Another problem with the focus on privacy is that privacy means different things to different people and means different things in different cultures. (Even so, there may be commonalities in attitudes to privacy across the most divergent cultures.[4]) But people who have different concepts of privacy may agree to oppose particular types of surveillance.
A focus on privacy directs attention to the individual whose privacy is invaded; a focus on surveillance directs attention to the exercise of power and to the groups that undertake it. Whether antisurveillance is a better rallying point than privacy, though, remains to be seen.
Reform solutions
One way proposed to protect privacy is to ensure that all the people who have access to information collected about members of the public deal with it in a “responsible” fashion. This means that those who deal with or have responsibility for information — such as computer administrators, police, government bureaucrats, telephone technicians and personnel managers — should have the highest personal standards. For example, they should use the information only for the purposes for which it was collected. Codes of ethics are sometimes proposed to set a standard of behaviour.
Most bank managers, marketeers, hospital administrators, government officials and the like are responsible people who are unlikely to misuse the information at their disposal. But all it takes is a minority of less responsible people for serious breaches of confidentiality to occur.
However, even if every single person with access to confidential data was absolutely trustworthy, this would not solve the problem. This is because there are enormous bureaucratic pressures to extend the use of data about individuals for, from the organisation’s point of view, very sound reasons. The tax office wants to collect data to ensure that all pay their fair share of tax, so that enough money is available for essential public spending. Government bureaucracies keep data on welfare recipients in order to make sure that only those who really need benefits actually receive them; with limited funds, making payments to those who don’t need them means less for those who do. Marketeers collect information on consumers in order to increase their profits, to be sure, but they sincerely believe they are aiming to provide a better service or product to those who really need it. Police see surveillance as necessary to protect the community from serious crime.
One may argue that these attitudes are rationalisations for policies that benefit those defending the surveillance, namely the salaries of government bureaucrats, etc. But it would be unfair to accuse people of bad intentions. It is only a tiny minority of snoopers who gather information for the purpose of blackmail. Almost all surveillance is carried out by well-meaning people with what they believe are the most worthy ends in mind.
Furthermore, there is a lot of public support for surveillance to stop cheats and crooks. Bureaucratic and popular pressures often reinforce each other, egged on by media stories of welfare abuse or dangerous criminals.
When a government department proposes to compare tax records with lists of recipients of unemployment benefits, a central motivation is to save money by exposing those on good salaries who are also improperly obtaining unemployment payments. What could be more sensible, indeed laudable? Ensuring that everyone in the system is highly responsible will eliminate some of the abuses but will not address the bureaucratic and commercial pressures for ever greater collection and combination of data about individuals. In summary, codes of ethics and other methods to ensure responsible use of information are all very well but don’t address institutional pressures to expand surveillance.
Another way of opposing surveillance is for governments to pass laws and establish agencies and systems to protect privacy. Many writers on privacy favour this approach. Laws, regulations and privacy commissions can, indeed, accomplish many things. They can allow citizens to see and correct files held on them; they can outlaw certain practices, such as sharing of databases; they can ensure that privacy considerations become a factor in policy making; they can establish organisations that keep tabs on technical developments; they can impose penalties on violators of people’s privacy.
This sounds well and good. The people who propose and implement these solutions are undoubtedly well-intentioned. But the whole approach is fundamentally flawed.
One big problem is that the path of legal regulation assumes a trade-off between privacy and other benefits, such as profit or bureaucratic efficiency. In the balance, privacy usually comes off second best. There are clear and direct advantages to corporations and government departments in expanding their capacities to gather and manipulate information on citizens. By contrast, there are few powerful groups with any direct interest in protecting the privacy of the “ordinary citizen.” The result is that privacy concerns are routinely squashed by the steamroller of surveillance.
It is risky to rely mainly on governments to provide protection against surveillance when governments themselves are responsible for much of it. The very existence of the government depends on collecting taxes. So when government needs for tax money meet citizen resistance to further impositions, it becomes difficult to argue against extra measures to stop “tax cheats,” even when these measures involve accumulating ever more information about individuals. The state also depends for its existence on the police, military and spy agencies to detect and thwart external and internal challenges. These arms of the state are well known to thrive on information collected through surveillance.
In practice, the main role of laws protecting privacy may be to give the illusion that the problem is being dealt with. Certainly that is the case for the Privacy Commission in Australia, whose task is to make recommendations on how to maintain privacy within the present laws. The Commission can do nothing to challenge existing laws. So when the Australian government decided to allow tax records and other records to be combined — something it had earlier promised not to do — the Privacy Commission could only sit there and make recommendations within the framework of the new policy.[5]
It is unrealistic to expect governments to take the lead in countering the driving forces behind increasing surveillance. True, the state is not a unified entity, so there can be groups inside pushing against as well as for surveillance. But as long as the state depends fundamentally on maintaining power over citizens — and it must, in order to extract resources to support itself and to defend itself against internal and external enemies — the state cannot be a reliable ally against surveillance, since surveillance grows out of and supports the power of the state.
The power to undertake surveillance and use the information obtained is corrupting. That explains why reform solutions are inadequate.
Technical solutions
Another way to deal with problems of surveillance is to implement technical fixes. An example is public key encryption for electronic communications.
Consider a person who uses a computer to generate a message that is communicated through the telephone network to another computer. Surveillance of this message is possible by tapping into the network and deciphering the computer text. Now add encryption: the sender uses a little program to turn their message into code, using their own private key and the receiver’s public key. The receiver is able to decipher the message by using the receiver’s private key and the sender’s public key. The receiver also knows that the message could only have come from the sender, for whom the key thus is an electronic signature. This can be done using ordinary desktop computers using freely available software.
4
Barrington Moore, Jr.,