“Privacy is dead; deal with it.” So said Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy in the year 2000. McNealy is no doubt privy to more than a little inside information, as his company has long been a traditional supplier of powerful computers to big businesses and big government agencies alike. Many people, considering privacy a right to which they are reasonably entitled, took great exception to McNealy’s point of view. Like it or not, it appears to me that McNealy was simply being bluntly and brutally honest.
People were similarly alarmed by remarks attributed to Donald M. Kerr, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, allegedly made during a speech at the annual Geospatial Intelligence conference in October. In typical “don’t check the facts for yourself” fashion, media outlets around the country (including the Norman Transcript) simply regurgitated the deceptive reporting of Associated Press writer Pamela Hess, who, in an apparent effort to make Kerr appear as an anti-pricacy ogre, stated, “Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.”
Unfortunately, that’s not what Kerr actually said. The actual text of Kerr’s speech may be found on his department’s website (www.dni.gov) and, while still disturbing, the speech should have provided more food for thought rather than deceptive and alarmist reporting. Consider the following quotes from Kerr’s speech.
“Safety and privacy – it’s common thinking that, in order to have more safety, you get less privacy. I don’t agree with that. I work from the assumption that you need to have both. When we try to make it an either/or proposition, we’re bound to fail. You can be perfectly safe in a prison, but you certainly aren’t free. And you can be perfectly free in an anarchist society, but you certainly aren’t safe.”
“Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it’s an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Anonymity results from a lack of identifying features. Nowadays, when so much correlated data is collected and available – and I’m just talking about profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube here – the set of identifiable features has grown beyond where most of us can comprehend. We need to move beyond the construct that equates anonymity with privacy and focus more on how we can protect essential privacy in this interconnected environment. Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. I think people here, at least people close to my age, recognize that those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs.”
Kerr went on to note that our society must decide if the notion of personal privacy will remain an important American value, or be discarded in the pursuit of a totally safe environment. Said Kerr, “It’s a debate we need to have in the United States. It’s not necessarily best carried out in hearing rooms; it’s certainly not best carried out in television environments where people just scream at each other. But I think it’s going to take serious, longterm debate for us to all get it right.”
The question that remains is simple: will you become involved in the privacy debate, or will you allow the issue to be defined and decided by government bureaucrats and boneheaded politicians? Do you have an answer?