I'm a huge proponent of this core idea -- that networked technologies have changed the cost structure that underpins our 20th century implicit understandings about privacy, and that one stopgap approach is to rework the economics of surveillance in a way that re-approximates the cost structure under which our legal and moral consensus was developed.
For example, it was never possible to read, secretly and automatically, in bulk, everyone's correspondence in the 20th century. With email, it's a commonplace that governments do it routinely. Encryption doesn't make it impossible to figure out what someone's corresponding about, it just makes it more expensive (as the investigator may need to devote resources to shoulder-surfing or other means instead of auto-collection). It used to be fairly expensive to have to go to the post office and steam open an envelope, copy it, and seal it back up without detection.
Likewise for various other surveillance technologies, such as the ALPR/ANPRs. The people who (still) write our laws were raised watching TV cops listen for a radio APB on a license plate. For their intuitions about this matter to be valid, it should be roughly as costly in manpower, time, and attention to do a "live alert" on a license plate today as it was for those TV cops.
A pen register used to be an actual box you put at the central office on a specific bad guy of interest, not an excuse to sweep up and cross-correlate every dialed number ever. Again, several orders of magnitude cost difference here, in a way where the difference of degree (cost) becomes a difference of kind.
The big danger IMO is when you have well-meaning legislators and jurists opining about network-enabled privacy intrusions using intuitions and examples formed with 20th century cost expectations.
Eventually those expectations will need to reflect current technology, but in the meantime, anything that can be done to raise the cost of pervasive surveillance is IMO a good thing as it buys time for legal and moral intuitions (much slower rate of change) to adapt.
Comments
I'm a huge proponent of this core idea -- that networked technologies have changed the cost structure that underpins our 20th century implicit understandings about privacy, and that one stopgap approach is to rework the economics of surveillance in a way that re-approximates the cost structure under which our legal and moral consensus was developed.
For example, it was never possible to read, secretly and automatically, in bulk, everyone's correspondence in the 20th century. With email, it's a commonplace that governments do it routinely. Encryption doesn't make it impossible to figure out what someone's corresponding about, it just makes it more expensive (as the investigator may need to devote resources to shoulder-surfing or other means instead of auto-collection). It used to be fairly expensive to have to go to the post office and steam open an envelope, copy it, and seal it back up without detection.
Likewise for various other surveillance technologies, such as the ALPR/ANPRs. The people who (still) write our laws were raised watching TV cops listen for a radio APB on a license plate. For their intuitions about this matter to be valid, it should be roughly as costly in manpower, time, and attention to do a "live alert" on a license plate today as it was for those TV cops.
A pen register used to be an actual box you put at the central office on a specific bad guy of interest, not an excuse to sweep up and cross-correlate every dialed number ever. Again, several orders of magnitude cost difference here, in a way where the difference of degree (cost) becomes a difference of kind.
The big danger IMO is when you have well-meaning legislators and jurists opining about network-enabled privacy intrusions using intuitions and examples formed with 20th century cost expectations.
Eventually those expectations will need to reflect current technology, but in the meantime, anything that can be done to raise the cost of pervasive surveillance is IMO a good thing as it buys time for legal and moral intuitions (much slower rate of change) to adapt.
That was such a great comment that I sent it to a few of my friends. Thank you.