Early in June 2013, a major news story was the revelation of a government program called PRISM, which taps into electronic communications in an effort to identify and disrupt threats to America. The controversy over this discovery sent me reaching to my bookshelf for David Brin’s 1998 work, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Re-reading it made me realize that Brin articulated more than just an unusual approach for addressing the issue of surveillance technology. He offers a perspective on the relationship of citizens and the state which challenges conventional libertarian thinking.
Read the whole thing. I really enjoyed going back to Brin’s book and writing this essay.
UPDATE: Here is Brin on Snowden.
Snowden — and Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks) — are part of a vital trend. I do not find either spectacularly admirable. Given that the heinous things they have revealed were kind of yawners, it strikes me both were propelled by today’s addictive high — self-righteous sanctimony.
The last sentence of your essay, re Brin’s response — that’s pretty much “where markets fail, seek more market”, isn’t it?
“If we are able to monitor, free to criticize, entitled to complain, and responsible for seeking improvement, then we can have liberty, even if government is strong and even if it has surveillance technology.”
I’m not sure how this statement ever passed muster on a libertarian site like EconLib. It’s okay for government to be “strong” as long as we can criticize and improve it? Might as well hand in your libertarian credentials right there.
I’ve never understood your comfort with surveillance, particularly by the govt, seems like an overreaction to 9/11. There have been such bombings and shootings for centuries, yet there is some magic notion that somehow they’re more dangerous today. I don’t see why citizens having surveillance but the govt not having it leads to “unstable government” or has any analogy to 1933 Germany. It simply seems like an argument to empower govt in order that they don’t grab power later in a 9/11-type situation: it is no solution to grant the politicians power now so they don’t grab it later.
Finally, there is a lot of oversimplification with your quadrants, saying that the govt must either use or not use surveillance, as though there couldn’t be degrees. Citizens or private organizations can obviously surveil their own property or narrow public spaces outside of it, like sidewalks or streets. I see almost no reason why the govt should do much surveillance, beyond having every govt agent, like police officers, tape themselves so that we have it for public inspection later, if necessary.
The notion that they should be able to build a vast database of emails and phone call logs, just in case they want to search it later, is beyond the pale, yet that is exactly what the public seems to support. Oh well, they will learn when that power is inevitably abused by the govt.