The Achill Island Essays 11
No Place to Hide
The beast forced all the people, small and great, rich and poor, slave and free, to have a mark placed on their right hands or foreheads. No one could buy or sell unless he had this mark, that is, the beast's name or the number that stands for the beast's name.
Revelations 13:16-17
Several nights ago, as I was sitting out under the stars on a clear moonless night, I tracked a satellite passing overhead. Watching it move across the sky, I wondered if someone in a control room in Washington or Moscow was watching me.
Its unlikely that anyone was sitting at a monitor saying "Oh, there's Brendan!". However, the fact of my presence on this secluded Irish island is now contained in numerous databases around the world. With the airline ticket that brought me to Belfast, car rental agency records and the phone calls charged to my calling card from the local phone booth, anyone with half a mind and a computer could figure out my location to within half a kilometre. For the really ambitious, commercial satellites scanning the area could probably pick out my rental car, the red Rover 416i, sitting in front of the cottage. Those with access to military satellites could figure out which room of the cottage I was in from measuring the heat of my body. On top of that, thanks to the foreign exchange company's records one could find out how much money I had with me, and what goods and services I had purchased on my credit cards. So much for privacy and seclusion.
As a member of the road crew on the information superhighway, I have a better understanding than most about the potential and limitations of information technology. Quite frankly, what I know scares the hell out me. Not the technology itself. Technology is benign. There are untold benefits to the use of information technology. I know, because I regularly extol these benefits in feasibility studies and research papers. Less costly government and business administration, improved health care, a wider range of goods and services for consumers...the list is literally endless. The problem is that such benefits can only accrue in a society where justice, law and order prevail. The same technology placed in the hands of malevolent forces is very scary indeed.
My mother has a friend named Anna, a Romanian refugee, who fled Romania before the collapse of communism. She lived a pretty normal, uneventful life in Romania. When she applied to the government for an exit permit to take a holiday outside of the country, she was shocked to see the size of the file that had been kept on her. She didn't see the contents, but the sheer volume indicated that much of her life had been documented. The information was no doubt of importance in deciding whether or not to grant her a permit, or in making any other decision that would have affected her life.
How much easier it would have been for the Romanian government if they had had a sophisticated telephone system, electronic networks, and ready access to multiple databases. How useful it would have been to have had records of every telephone call, every purchase, every trip to the doctor, every event attended. It would have been much easier to determine whether or not she was a suitable candidate for an exit permit. Perhaps she wouldn't have received one. Perhaps she would never have had the opportunity to leave Romania.
It's not my intention to lie in front of the charging freight train of the new information age. I'm convinced that there is no way to stop it. I'm also convinced that personal privacy is a thing of the past. Privacy was a quaint invention of our democratic, individualistic age. Today it is virtually non-existent, though we often make grand gestures to convince ourselves that some modicum of privacy and confidentiality exists. Privacy and confidentiality of personal information exists only at the convenience of those who possess the information.
This might be alright if those who possess information are subject to some strict code of conduct with respect to the use of personal information. Unfortunately, in most parts of the world, such standards do not exist. Even in those parts of the world where serious efforts are being made to contain the use of personal information, such as in Europe, there is no way of ensuring that some future government or force won't change the rules.
We have less and less choice about the capture of our private information. Just try to check into a hotel or rent a car without a credit card. When I called the taxi to take me to the airport, they didn't ask for my name, they called up my file using my telephone number. Electronic cash, full-service electronic kiosks for government services, E-mail; conducting any form of transaction in the future will require your number.
Even where privacy is protected, we're often required to waive our rights to gain access to some essential resource or service. Those collecting the information are rarely accountable to an elected government. In this era of government downsizing and de-regulation, it's unlikely that we'll see any effective controls placed on the collection and use of personal information.
During my brief stint as a marketing executive, I learned the power of information for direct target marketing. Want to sell diapers to incontinent seniors, up-scale automobiles to young upwardly mobile executives, or baby formula to new mothers? Databases can be combined to cull a list of likely candidates for your campaign. If such profiles can be established for business purposes, how difficult would it be to identify people who might be considered "undesirable" or "potential problems". Is there anyone who might want to identify university students with democratic leanings, or gays, or people who are concerned about human rights or the environment?
We know that many parts of the world are run by ruthless regimes that will use every tool available to route out any hint of opposition. What a boon it would be to a dictator to be able to identify anyone who might be a potential problem, and then be able to monitor every move that those people make. How easy it would be to harass those people, cutting off credit or privileges necessary to live everyday life in the electronic age. And when the regime can't buy or scare the person off, how easy it would be for the death squad to find and eliminate the "trouble-maker".
Yet western leaders and businessmen are falling all over each other in their drive to sell every piece of available technology to these "emerging economies". Where in the cold-war era we supplied these evil empires with weapons, we are now in a rush to provide the ultimate tools of oppression, information technology. The great tragedy of western foreign policy in the last decade has been severing of trade and human rights issues. We never had a great track record, even in the best of times. But as we enter the information era, the potential for human rights abuse rises to a magnitude never before imagined.
And lest we in the Western world become too smug about our constitutions and charters of rights and freedoms, think of what our own governments might do as they tackle issues of rising public expenditures, deficits and law and order. As our society swings to the right and becomes less tolerant of those who are perceived as taking advantage of our system, perhaps a little electronic surveillance of those welfare cheats and other potential troublemakers might be in order. To curb health care costs, maybe we could rely on some expert system (we can't afford bureaucrats in the electronic age) to tell the doctor what kind of treatment they can provide to us. And who needs prisons when we can slap an electronic collar on anyone we want to control?
While we have laws to protect us, laws can be changed. In recent years governments have not been at all reluctant to change laws to reduce expenditures, or to give themselves more ability to control the levers of power.
And what if our own social order broke down in the coming decades? Twelve years ago I watched the winter Olympics televised from that jewel of central Europe, Sarajevo. Who would have expected then that within a decade, Sarajevo would become the symbol of disintegration in the modern world? Are we so naive to think that it can never happen here?
So this is what I believe will be the fundamental challenge for every human being in the information age. How will one live in a world where every action is recorded? How will one relate to structures of authority, good and bad, which will have the ability to monitor, in minute detail, our day-to-day life? How will one live in a world where there is no place to hide?
March 1996
About the Photograph: My Achill Island Retreat.