January 24, 2006--Post-Privacy America
For those of you worrying about the National Security Agency’s domestic “eavesdropping” program, relax. Every day there’s another story about it in the NY Times (see link below for just one example), every day there’s another speech by President Bust or VP Chaney (they know the polls show this is a “good” issue for them). I’m here to tell you that there is no need to surrender--we already have.
We live in a post-privacy world where I think we all assume that everything to be know about us, every email we send, everything we say on the phone, every document we transmit, is easily accessible to even the dispassionate. Let me share a few stories and then offer some advice about this.
I have worked closely with a U.S. Senator who got concerned about identity theft. He is a man of some years and thus not as familiar, as are his young staff members ,with computing, the Internet, and cyberspace. Thus he asked them to see what they could learn about him and his family—especially personal information about finances, health issues, even misdemeanors. He said, “Take a few days and get back to me about this.”
Well, within an hour they returned to his office hauling stacks of print outs—about his own investments, mortgages, health insurance, and hospitalizations (no misdemeanors--he's one of the good guys). They had similar information about his daughter and son.
Faced with this, he said, “Well, I guess that just about does it. The cork is out of the bottle.”
Shortly after he told me about this I was in line at my bank, needing to get a certified check. The line was crawling and while shuffling forward I couldn’t help but listen in, without the help of the NSA, to cell phone calls of the women ahead of and behind me. In a voice considerably less than a whisper, the woman in front of me was talking with her sister, telling her in very explicit detail about the beating she received from her husband the night before. The other women, also broadcasting, was talking to a friend about her daughter’s boyfriend and how she was upset that he was refusing to contribute to the rent on the apartment they were sharing.
As someone who grew up at a time when there were things called phone booths that actually had doors on them so you could make calls in private, all this public chatter is disconcerting. But it also suggests that old notions of privacy are as obsolete as rotary phones.
Thus my suggestion—again, relax. Let it all hang out because it already is.
We live in a post-privacy world where I think we all assume that everything to be know about us, every email we send, everything we say on the phone, every document we transmit, is easily accessible to even the dispassionate. Let me share a few stories and then offer some advice about this.
I have worked closely with a U.S. Senator who got concerned about identity theft. He is a man of some years and thus not as familiar, as are his young staff members ,with computing, the Internet, and cyberspace. Thus he asked them to see what they could learn about him and his family—especially personal information about finances, health issues, even misdemeanors. He said, “Take a few days and get back to me about this.”
Well, within an hour they returned to his office hauling stacks of print outs—about his own investments, mortgages, health insurance, and hospitalizations (no misdemeanors--he's one of the good guys). They had similar information about his daughter and son.
Faced with this, he said, “Well, I guess that just about does it. The cork is out of the bottle.”
Shortly after he told me about this I was in line at my bank, needing to get a certified check. The line was crawling and while shuffling forward I couldn’t help but listen in, without the help of the NSA, to cell phone calls of the women ahead of and behind me. In a voice considerably less than a whisper, the woman in front of me was talking with her sister, telling her in very explicit detail about the beating she received from her husband the night before. The other women, also broadcasting, was talking to a friend about her daughter’s boyfriend and how she was upset that he was refusing to contribute to the rent on the apartment they were sharing.
As someone who grew up at a time when there were things called phone booths that actually had doors on them so you could make calls in private, all this public chatter is disconcerting. But it also suggests that old notions of privacy are as obsolete as rotary phones.
Thus my suggestion—again, relax. Let it all hang out because it already is.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:56 AM
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