Science fiction writer and biologist Peter Watts gave a spectacular talk to the Symposium of the International Association of Privacy Professional, called The Scorched Earth Society: A Suicide Bomber's Guide to Online Privacy (PDF); Watts draws on his two disciplines to produce a stirring, darkly comic picture of the psychological toll of the surveillance society.
Watts is the writer who was beaten, maced, and convicted of a felony for asking a US border guard why he'd walked up behind his rental car and opened his trunk without any discussion or notice. His take on surveillance and its relationship to control, authoritarianism and corruption is both sharp-edged and nuanced. And his proposal for a remedy is provocative and difficult to argue with. I only wish I'd been in the room to give the talk, as he's a remarkable and acerbic storyteller.
So
when we talk about "privacy"
we're
probably
not talking about some abstract
cultural
artifact
that emerged wholesale from the Victorian era.
That's the first take-home message:
The link
between
surveillance
and fear is a lot older, and a lot deeper, than your average post-
privacy
advocate
is
likely to admit.The usual suspects have done
a bang-up job
of
amping
the fear side of the equation
in recent
years. But of course, that
also
amps
up our
sensitivity to
potential
surveillance; and
despite the
official
narrative, when we look around we do not see
brown-skinned terrorists doing the tiger's
share of the surveilling.What we
do
see is
the
invocation of "Terrorism" to cover up the fact
that an innocent person's
life was ruined for eight
years because of a typo
on the no-fly list.
We see
a woman
denied entry to
the states because US
Customs has access to
her confidential
psychiatric records.
I
even
experienced
something similar
myself; back in 1991,
while I was living
in
Guelph, I
got caught
turning
right on a red while
riding a
bicycle
at 2a.m.
I asked some impertinent questions about
my rights that got me hauled in for the night. I was
never
convicted
of anything; it was such a
trivial infraction that
when
we
went looking we
couldn't
find a record of it in the Canadian
archives. But two
decades later
US prosecutors
cited that event
to
try and
have me classed as a
"repeat offender"
.
That gives you some sense of the granularity of the data our
masters were
sharing
a solid decade
before
9/11
made
it fashionable.
The Scorched Earth Society: A Suicide Bomber's Guide to Online Privacy
