Page 119 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

LIBERAL COMMUNITARIAN APPROACH TO PRIVACY AND SECURITY 107

ways to reduce the conflict between these two core values. One major way
is to draw a sharp line between what is stored in and processed by
computers—and what is revealed to human agents. Computers, per se, do
not violate privacy. They do not gossip. They see no evil, hear no evil, and
speak no evil. They can (vastly) facilitate privacy violations—but only as
perpetrated by human agents. (Indeed, with respect to much of the data
collected by the NSA, “they park stuff in storage in the hopes they will
eventually have time to get to it or that they’ll find something that they
need to go back and look for in the masses of data . . . most of it sits and is
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never looked at by anyone.” ) Hence, those who are concerned with find-
ing a reasonable balance between security and privacy should focus on the
interface between computers and human agents. That is, we should ensure
that once the computers flag particular individuals, this information is
revealed only to law enforcement authorities and used by them in legal and
accountable ways.
Thus, computers can pull out all those who purchased a one-way ticket,
paid with cash, and got the ticket at the last moment. It is far from clear,
at least to this sociologist, that finding such patterns can suffice to identify
terrorists. However, such searches could lead to closer computerized scru-
tiny (e.g., to see if those who drew attention have also made calls to areas
in which terrorists train, have traveled to those same areas, or have visited
al Qaeda websites) and, if suspicious activity is found, the computers could
then alert a human agent.

D. Trust but Verify

1. Curb Abuses

Critics have strong reason to hold that, if the government is granted the
power to collect information about the private lives of individuals, the gov-
ernment will abuse it. Among possible abuses are the use of data to find
and prosecute people of opposing political views, which some have called
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the Nixon effect; to stigmatize people whose conduct violates established
norms but not the law, such as those who have adulterous affairs, abortions,
or unusual sexual preferences, which one might call the “Scarlet Letter”
effect; to keep information that, in the past, would have been slowly forgot-
ten, thereby allowing people to develop new identities, such as a person
whose “conviction of graffiti vandalism at age 19 will still be there at age 29
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when [they’re] a solid citizen trying to get a job and raise a family” ; and
to go after crimes other than terrorist acts.
There is no question that, in the past, all of these abuses have taken
place. One should also note that they are not one and the same kind. The