Expert Schneier: Individual liberties threatened after Sept. 11

Expert Schneier: Individual liberties threatened after Sept. 11

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Individual liberty — a hallmark of Western civilization — is increasingly threatened by the coalescence of technological and social forces in the wake of Sept. 11, cryptographer Bruce Schneier said.

In describing this problem for approximately 150 people at Rice Feb. 8, best-selling author Schneier attributed the problem to a wide range of developments in technology, law, politics and business, and he urged technologists in the audience to become outspoken advocates for individual liberties.

“Data is the pollution of the information society,” Schneier said. “All computerized processes create it. It stays around, and if you don’t dispose of it, it will pile up.”

Data about each person is amassed on a huge scale as they go about their daily lives. Schneier described in detail how information is collected when a person makes credit card purchases, conducts a search online, visits Web sites, buys groceries, makes cell phone calls and more. Invisible watermarks, unique identifiers, are embedded inside every photo taken with a digital camera or every page printed on a photocopier. Images are captured countless times per day on surveillance cameras people never even see.

“In the United States, the data about you is not owned by you; it is owned by the people who collect it,” Schneier said.
Data about individuals is particularly valuable to two groups in society: corporations, who primarily want it for marketing, and police, who want to use it to investigate and solve crimes.

It is in a corporation’s best interest to identify its best customers and focus more attention on them. By the same token, companies and the police want to identify potential criminals so they can watch them.

Schneier demonized neither group for this, pointing out that consumers — including himself — like to be kept safe and often like to have companies point them to products they would be interested in.

“I kind of like it when Amazon tells me what books I might want to buy, and sometimes I buy them,” Schneier said.

Schneier said the debate after Sept. 11 over privacy in the U.S. has too often been characterized as a trade-off between security and privacy. He said the debate is more accurately characterized as “liberty versus control.” Although pundits have proclaimed the “death of privacy” for decades, Schneier said the legal system has historically provided protection from abuses.

“You can’t uninvent anything but you can put laws in place to prevent them from being abused,” Schneier said.
Laws in the U.S. have typically provided privacy protection for individuals at the expense of both corporations and government, he said. But the legal system has not kept pace with technology. Laws protecting the content of mail do not apply to e-mail, and laws protecting eavesdropping on telephone calls do not apply to calls transmitted over the Internet.

“When the less powerful know more about what the powerful are doing, that’s good. That’s the basis of open government,” he said. “When the powerful exert forced openness on the less powerful, that’s bad; that’s a police state.”

Schneier said the rapid pace of technological change makes it difficult to write laws that will provide adequate protection over time, and he expressed concern that fears in the wake of Sept. 11 have tipped the balance on Capitol Hill in favor of powerful interests — like police and corporations — that want to collect data about individuals.

“I want the police to have their agenda, but I don’t want their agenda to rule,” Schneier said. “I want it to get melded into a whole, along with everyone else’s.”

Schneier’s speech was part of Rice’s Technology, Society and Public Policy Lecture Series, which was sponsored by Rice’s Computer and Information Technology Institute, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the vice provost and university librarian.