Wired: Regulating Privacy: At What Cost?
Owen Blacker
ukcrypto at maillist.ox.ac.uk
Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:00:05 +0100
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Regulating Privacy: At What Cost?
by Declan McCullagh <mailto:declan@wired.com>
3:00 a.m. Sep. 19, 2000 PDT
WASHINGTON -- Privacy advocates who successfully transformed such
previously arcane matters as credit bureau databases and DoubleClick
cookies into mainstream concerns are close to winning a truly epic
battle.
After years of agitating by liberal groups like the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center
<http://www.epic.org>, both Democrats and Republicans are suddenly
expressing their support
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38810,00.html> for
sweeping new regulations of US businesses.
Yet schemes like a federal privacy commission -- suggested
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34968,00.html> this year
by a bipartisan duo in Congress -- don't exactly cheer free-market
organizations, which have been largely silent in this debate so far.
In response to increasingly aggressive bills and shifting public
opinion, libertarian groups in Washington and elsewhere have begun to
quietly gird themselves for an all-out battle in new and unfamiliar
terrain.
George Mason University's Mercatus Center will hold a privacy event
<http://www.mercatus.org/courses/privacy/> on Tuesday populated with
laissez-faire economists, while the Competitive Enterprise Institute
<http://www.cei.org/> is about to publish a book titled /The Future
of Financial Privacy/, which blasts private-sector regulations.
"Why did it take so long? Because there are more of 'them' than there
are of us -- advocates of liberty and limited government have too
many battlements to defend," says David Boaz, vice president of the
Cato Institute <http://www.cato.org/>.
The Cato Institute and other like-minded groups generally oppose
government regulation of what information firms can and cannot
collect, arguing that consumers should make up their own minds
instead.
Some libertarians also stress the economic benefits of
information-sharing by saying it lowers prices. "What the
privacy-regulation advocates just don't get is the benefits of
information," Boaz says. "There's a positive value to being offered
things that will interest you, and it's hardly something to be
feared."
Sonia Arrison, director of technology policy at the Pacific Research
Institute <http://www.pacificresearch.org/>, says her group and
others were slow to realize the public impact of their opponents'
arguments.
"I think libertarians were slow off the mark because they simply
couldn't believe that the public could be convinced that government
is best in protecting privacy," Arrison said. "Throughout history,
government has been one of the biggest violators of privacy, so some
libertarians cannot fathom why anyone would think that government
should now be trusted to protect it."
Last week, former Republican Hill staffer Jim Harper launched a
libertarian privacy website, privacilla.org
<http://www.privacilla.org/>. A half-dozen groups, including the
Heritage Foundation and Citizens Against Government Waste, paid small
sums to support his effort.
Its theme, as described in the title of a report on the site: /The
Government Sector -- Greatest Menace to Privacy by Far/.
"I'm not at all certain that EPIC et al. captured public opinion so
much as correctly assessed the public's appreciation for anonymity,"
says Erick Gustafson of Citizens for a Sound Economy
<http://www.cse.org/n_index.html>, which is chaired by former White
House counsel C Boyden Gray
<http://www.cse.org/know/board/cgray.html>, who served during former
President George Bush's term.
"An individual has free-floating anxiety about others knowing too
much about him or her -- a general predilection toward paranoia --
but individuals don't care enough to (take their business
elsewhere)," Gustafson says.
Business-world allies of Citizens for a Sound Economy can be
notoriously fickle.
Last month the group condemned
<http://www.cse.org/informed/1129.html> a speech by Hewlett-Packard
CEO Carly Fiorina in which she called for government regulation.
Groused CSE: "Privacy legislation will only serve to empower
government at the expense of liberty."
Gustafson says that another useful tactic is to compile a list of
government privacy misdeeds -- a move that's consistent with
libertarians' general focus on limiting state power.
Liberal groups also oppose government surveillance such as Carnivore,
the Clipper Chip, and mandatory backdoors in encryption software. But
they see corporations as the real -- and growing -- problem.
Marc Rotenberg, director of EPIC and a careful student of privacy
trends, says: "I don't doubt that government is a real threat. But I
think increasingly the tools of surveillance will come from the
private sector. Things have changed a lot since the days of Clipper."
Adds EPIC General Counsel David Sobel: "I think that libertarian
focus on the government to the exclusion of the private sector is
short-sighted, because increasingly what we're seeing is that the
government is (obtaining information from) the private sector
collectors of information."
Cato's Boaz replies: "We need strong protections against government
access to information about individuals, including strong protections
for companies that don't want to give information about their
customers to the government. But I wouldn't want to ban money just
because the government might try to get it."
Making a tough fight even more difficult for libertarian groups is
that some conservatives -- their usual allies in opposing regulations
- -- have sided with liberals.
"If the private sector is so callous with regard to the identities
they've collected, then I think the government needs to step in and
rein in the private sector," says Lisa Dean, vice president of the
Free Congress Foundation <http://www.freecongress.org/>. The group
was founded by legendary conservative Paul Weyrich
<http://www.freecongress.org/fcf/weyrich.htm>, who also was the first
president of the Heritage Foundation.
"I think people (at other groups) have jumped on the bandwagon here
because it's a money-maker for their organization," Dean says.
That's not a surprise, says Arrison of the Pacific Research
Institute. "Conservatives will always have a problem with privacy
because they are not consistent in saying that government should stay
out of the lives of citizens," Arrison says. "They allow for
government meddling in issues such as abortion and religion -- two
things most people consider private."
Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation <http://www.eff.org/>, with
board members that include Net-libertarian icons John Perry Barlow
and John Gilmore, supports government regulation.
"We aren't against the whole concept of creating laws. We don't
believe that self-regulation is working," says EFF executive director
Shari Steele <http://www.eff.org/homes/steele.html>. "Self-regulation
as far as privacy is concerned has proven itself to be a huge flop."
One staunch friend that libertarians have inside the federal
government is FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle, often a lone
free-market voice inside the commission.
"I think the advocates have claimed the high ground because privacy
is an easy issue to demagogue and play on emotions," says a source
close to Swindle.
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Owen Blacker
Senior Internet Developer and InfoSec Consultant, pres.co
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