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PRIVACY 101
THEORY & PHILOSOPHY OF PRIVACY
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By way of introduction to our Seminar, we each offer our views
on, (1) the need for privacy, and (2) the prospects of achieving
it. Later, we will provide more detailed lectures on specific
privacy topics. After each such presentation, you will have an
opportunity to ask questions, contribute ideas, argue with us or
whatever. The venue will be a moderated list.
Thank you for signing up for Privacy 101. We hope you will find
it provocative, enlightening and rewarding.
Sandy Sandfort
Duncan Frissell
September 1994
(c) 1994, Frissell and Sandfort
332 Bleecker St., #F-34
New York, NY 10014 USA
Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute
any or all of "Privacy 101" provided this statement and
the above copyright notice and address are included.
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PRIVACY, WHO NEEDS IT?
by
Sandy Sandfort
Curiously, I've never had much interest in privacy, per se. In
part, this is because extreme, personal openness is an almost
uniquely American cultural trait. For me, it's a personal one
as well. It is one, however, from which I have been weaned by
sometimes bitter personal experience and the "horror stories" of
others.
THE BAD NEWS
What I'm concerned about is freedom. Unfortunately, there are
those who are offended by the freedom of others, and seek to
rectify the "problem." And information about you is one of the
most effective weapons they have. Protecting your privacy keeps
that weapon out of their hands. Whether you seek privacy for its
own sake or to keep vital information out of the hands of
enemies, your privacy is imperative.
The "intelligence" in the names of the CIA, DIA and various law
enforcement agency departments refers to the gathering of secret
information for military or police purposes. Non-governmental
organizations and individuals seek and use intelligence, too.
Without the ability to gather intelligence, none of them can have
much power over you. With good intelligence, it's another story.
It can tell them your habits, your routine, your strengths, your
weaknesses, where you sleep at night... where your family sleeps
at night. There are wolves in the woods whether we choose to
admit it or not. Unless you are absolutely sure you have--nor
ever will have--any enemies, prudence dictates a low profile.
It is clear that information about you in the wrong hands, puts
you at risk. By the same token, it is NOT clear that information
about you in anyone's hands does you much good. Promiscuous
dissemination of personal information makes you vulnerable to
every sort of societal predator. To address such risks, you need
to organize your life such that your personal information can be
made available only on a limited and conditional need-to-know
basis. In addition, proactive steps can be taken to enhance,
alter, duplicate, substitute or camouflage such information.
More on this later in the Seminar.)
What information should you protect? "Everything" is a good
first approximation. For years, the amount of peanut butter used
at military bases has been classified. The reason? It's trivial
to determine manpower deployment if you have base-by-base figures
for peanut butter consumption. A similar correlation has been
made between late-night pizza orders from the Pentagon and the
initiation of hostilities in such places at Granada, Panama and
the Arabian Gulf.
Obviously, though, some types of information are more critical
than others. We will be discussing specific areas of concern in
upcoming lectures. But what is far more important than merely
enumerating specific threats, is getting yourself in the habit of
"thinking privacy." If you are like me, "thinking privacy" does
not come naturally, it must be learned. Hopefully, by the end of
this Seminar, you will be automatically identifying and avoiding
privacy pitfalls in your everyday life.
THE GOOD NEWS
There are those who profess to believe that a decade after the
symbolic "1984," it is impossible to keep your affairs private.
They are wrong, but such negativism acts as an insidious
self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps them from trying. Even
worse, their negativism often dissuade others from trying as
well.
How do I know privacy is possible? Well, for obvious reasons,
identifying privacy "role models" is difficult. (Would the
picture of the 1994 "Privacy Poster Boy" be just a blank 3'x4'
piece of card stock? How about a picture of the Cayman Islands
with a human silhouette superimposed on it?) Nevertheless, I
have read about, communicated with, met and assisted many such
"Privacy Poster Boys." I won't tell you most of their names, but
I will verify their existence and share their secrets. The funny
thing is, it's not that big a deal. Piece of cake, really.
This is a seminar for optimists. Not because of the power of
"positive thinking," but because the power of the individual is
growing. Because there are many more of us (good guys) than them
(bad guys). And because there are millions of folks in the world
who are already successfully using the techniques we will be
discussing. While there is no reward without risk, the pioneers
have already blazed the trail.
(c) 1994, Sandfort
Please remember that specific threats and their solutions will
come later. At this point we only want to shake the naysayers
out of the trees. If you either doubt the threat or doubt that
anything can be done about it, PLEASE state your case on the
list. We want to address your real concerns rather than just
guess what they may be.
You may also start asking specific privacy questions at this
time. We probably won't address them at this time, but we will
have something to say about them later in the Seminar when we
cover related subjects. All questions will be treated as
confidential. In our public discussions, we will paraphrase,
edit and generalize your questions to render them as anonymous as
possible. We recommend you encrypt and mail forward questions
containing sensitive personal information. You do not need to
know your identity.
My public key is:
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WHY PRIVACY?
That's the easy one to answer. People who are trying to invade your
privacy, always ask, "If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have
to hide?" The answer -- "If I knew what I had to hide, I certainly would.
Since I don't, I need my privacy."
No one can predict what personal characteristics or behaviors will be
punished in years to come. When I was born in the 1950s after all, smoking
was a virtue and sodomy a vice. At some time and in some place during the
last 200 years in Europe, virtually every human characteristic has led
someone to kill someone else. Race, sex, creed, political philosophy,
social or economic class -- all these factors have been used to attack
people at certain times in certain places.
Since some innocent fact about you may at some time put you at risk, and
since no one can predict what that critical fact will be, a general habit of
privacy preservation pays real dividends.
Another answer to the question "why privacy?" is "why not." What right do
others have to demand information from you? It costs you time and worry to
surrender the intimate details of your life to strangers. If you can get
what you want *and* preserve your privacy, you might as well do so. Let the
busybodies that want to know all about your life find something else to do.
Put the personal details of your life on a "need to know" basis. You'll
save time and worry and frustrate those who are trying to get you to give
them free information about you.
PRIVACY YESTERDAY - PRIVACY TOMORROW
Even though you may feel that your privacy is under attack as never before,
it's simply not true. A few years ago, humorist P. J. O'Rourke moved to a
small town in New Hampshire. After he had been living there for about 6
months, he had occasion to go into a local store to buy some underwear. As
he was paying for his purchase, the sales clerk observed, "That's not your
usual brand of underwear."
The fact is that throughout most of human history, we've lived in tiny
communities in which everyone knew everything worth knowing about everyone
else. If the authorities wanted any information about anyone, they had
merely to ask. Today's world allows many more opportunities to protect your
privacy. Even though it may seem that all of us are wrapped in a web of
computer databanks, much of that information is unlinked to us and hence
unable to harm us. As we shall see in this seminar, there are many
additional steps that you can take to protect yourself from modern attempts
to rebuild the social control mechanisms of the ancient village.
We will also have an opportunity to talk about how some of the traditional
privacy techniques - residential ambiguity, multiplication of entities,
offshore financial services, etc. can be combined with the latest in net
tech to frustrate the attempts of control freaks to "make me dance as they
desire with jail, and gallows, and hellfire."
HOUSEKEEPING
This is a moderated list. Most of the major posts will be essays by Sandy
and me. We will be editing some of the posts we receive to frame questions
that we can answer but if you have general privacy comments, there are other
newsgroups and mailing lists which are a better forum for same. We can also
be contacted personally if you have individual questions. If you don't know
how to use the Majordomo software, send the message -- help -- to
majordomo@c2.org.
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