From: Jonah Bossewitch <jonah@ccnmtl.columbia.edu>
  To  : <cpc@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:30:51 -0500

Paper 1 - Becoming your Own Big Brother

Jonah Bossewitch
Computers Privacy and the Constitution
Prof. Eben Moglen
Paper #1, Spring 2005

Becoming Your Own Big Brother:
A Paradoxical Approach for Retaining Control of Personal Freedom

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major 
and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing has 
ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, a 
redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past -- which is to say 
only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its 
moments. Each moment it has lived becomes acitation 'a l'orddre du 
jour— and that day is Judgment Day.

— Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History 
[1]

 
In the age of information, the possibility for omniscient surveillance 
has become a reality
[2]. The ramifications and scope of this development are just beginning 
to be felt and understood by the general population. Life in a 
surveillance culture will redefine the existing social order and will 
radically alter our sense of privacy, anonymity, individuality, and 
identity
[3]. Many visionaries have foreseen these changes unfolding in ways 
that threaten our rights and liberties, but their warnings have been 
systematically dismissed as paranoid and delusional
[4]. 

In the past decade we have witnessed this wave of surveillance 
beginning to crest and break. The vast proliferation of digital, 
networked devices, combined with a centralized infrastructure providing 
services to those devices, and virtually limitless storage, has given a 
new and expanded meaning to memory itself. By default, we must now 
assume that our actions, positions, and relations, in both physical and 
virtual spaces, are always being tracked and recorded in their every 
detail
[5].

The prospective situation is better understood by contemplating that, 
unlike matter or energy, information does not obey any conservation 
laws. As far as the laws of physics are concerned, information can be 
shuffled around and duplicated freely without affecting the original.
[6] Furthermore, we need to tease apart what is happening, and 
separately analyze the interrelated issues of ubiquitous data 
collection, widespread unchecked dissemination, and the ever-improving 
means to transform this data into information through smart querying, 
data mining, and predictive modeling.

An Alternative Strategy

Many of the sources we have read this semester grappled with strategies 
for protecting and controlling the data that constitutes our selves. 
Understandably, we have focused on formulating legislative measures 
—either to insure that data is not collected in the first place, or to 
insure that once it is collected, it cannot fall into the wrong hands, 
or be used in particular nefarious ways. Here I will introduce and 
explore an alternate strategy - a technological blitzkrieg to combat 
the inversion of control that is taking place with regards to our own 
histories. This approach will probably need legislative support to 
guarantee that it does not backfire, and render the situation more 
dangerous than it started.

Consider a piece of vaporware called the BioPort (Biography Portal). 
All of the components required to write this software currently exist, 
and shadows of this software are already under heavy development
[7], albeit without a conscious awareness of the privacy and the 
security issues at stake.

The basic idea for this software begins with a combination blog, diary, 
and appointment book. Think of this tool as constructing your 
autobiography for you in real time  —similar to the scrap books that 
parents use to record Baby's first smile, first lock of hair, first 
word, etc. Thanks to Moore and his law
[8], storing reams of information won't be a problem – automatically 
harvesting data, and being able to easily extract meaningful 
information are the real challenges.

In terms of getting information into the system, it is easy to imagine 
ways in which this application might automatically cull data from your 
ordinary machine interactions.
[9] Initially, it could make simple inferences based on activities 
conducted within other desktop applications
[10], but soon, other BioPort aware applications may start sending it 
direct messages. It is also easy to imagine portable digital appliances 
coming into play
[11] - carry around a gps device, sync it with your BioPort, and maybe 
you can find your lost keys. 

The real leap happens when we imagine a network-aware BioPort, one 
which is capable of recording transactions it receives over the 
network. At first, the BioPort might just be used between family and 
friends. For example, at a family reunion a few people might take 
photographs, but an entirely different group might decide caption them, 
while everyone in the family will want access to these snapshots and 
captions.

But this architecture could also conceivably support an encryption 
strategy which might allow trusted (or even untrusted) parties to 
update your BioPort for you, on your behalf. Such a system might even 
give some corporations a competitive advantage – maybe a consumer would 
be more interested in using a pharmacy coupon card if they knew that 
those transactions would eventually make their way back into their 
BioPort. They might even choose to shop at particular sites and stores 
that facilitated the transfer of information back into their BioPort, 
so that it becomes easier for them to track and manage the information 
in their own lives.

The personally utility of having this repository available is very 
clear. With the right suite of visualization and analysis tools
[12], the BioPort could become the ultimate psychoanalytic device – one 
which allows individuals to know themselves better by helping them 
identify and discern recurring behavioral patterns in their own lives. 
It could also transform social spaces, by allowing communities to come 
together and securely share slices of each others BioPorts.

Stepping back for a moment to consider what we have just conjured, begs 
important questions about how software like the BioPort might change 
the privacy equation. It would certainly accelerate and complete the 
surveillance cycle, making more information than ever available to 
anyone with unlimited access to your BioPort.

Would it give us any leverage or allow us to regain any kinds of 
control over our data identities? It might, and this is a topic I will 
continue to explore in more depth in the second half of this semester.

When people first hear about the BioPort they express shock and 
indignation at the idea of software becoming responsible for something 
as important as an individual’s identity. Some reassurance could be 
offered in the form of a promise that the BioPort software remain free 
and open. But the most important realization for the public is that in 
the information age, the collection of personal information is 
inevitable. We have a choice between 1) corporations gathering 
information about us, and keeping it from us, in order to market to us 
more effectively and 2) becoming our own big brothers and gathering and 
keeping this information about ourselves.

Surely this knowledge will forever change our concept of self. There is 
a real concern that omniscient historical knowledge gives external 
agencies a deterministic power over individuals that threatens their 
freedom, in the deepest sense — their freedom of will
[13]. Could self-awareness be one of the most powerful safeguards of 
our freedom? We need to know what they know about us, not only to 
contest it, but to anticipate the “Monster’s” maneuvers, thereby 
rendering it more harmless. But is self-awareness enough, or does 
society, and the law, need to go further to insure that our most basic 
freedoms are preserved?

 



[1] Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Edited and with 
Introduction by Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 254.


[2] Robert O'Harrow, Jr., No Place To Hide (2005).


[3] Demonstrating this assertion is beyond the scope of this short 
paper. The number of Science Fiction books and movies that have taken 
up this theme are too numerous to cite, and philosophers, political 
theorists, and artists have also extrapolated this idea extensively.


[4] Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt, Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains, 
The Growth of an American Surveillance Society, ACLU Technology and 
Liberty Program, January 2003.


[5] There are no technological barriers remaining to a virtually 
omniscient data collection system. With the exception of our thoughts, 
any activities which are currently (to our knowledge) private, will not 
be for much longer.


[6] Tom Siegfried. The Bit and the Pendulum: How the New Physics of  
Information is Revolutionizing Science. (New York: John Wiley & Sons,  
2000). See also, Elements of Reality: A Dialogue, by Hut, P. & van  
Fraassen, B. 1997, J. of Consc. Stud.4, No. 2, 167-180.

 [7] Examples of various known efforts underway to create similar kinds  
of applications :

Microsoft’s My Life Bits-  
http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx
MIT's Haystack- http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/
Nokia’s Lifeblogs- http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,54628,00.html
Life Caching - http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/LIFE CACHING.htm
OSAF’s Chandler-  
http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler Compelling Vision.htm
The Lifestream Metaphor -  
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi96/proceedings/videos/Fertig/etf.htm
After the IBM Deal, Where Is the "PC" Business Headed?  
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,955951,00.html? 
cnn=yes Fortune, December 9, 2004


[8] Moore, G. Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits. 
Electrionics, Volume 8, April 19, 1965. 
http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm.


[9] See Ximian’s (not Apple’s) Dashboard Project 
http://www.nat.org/dashboard or the Growl project http://growl.info/ 
for examples of software which allows desktop applications to notify 
each other of important events.


[10] Parsing emails alone might enable the BioPort to reconstruct 
travel itineraries, grocery purchases, movie and concert attendance, 
etc. People might also change their usage habits towards existing 
Personal Information Tools (Outlook, PDAs) to intentionally tag and 
track significant events in their lives. Then again, existing 
inter-relationships could also be exploited - ie the existence of 
digital photographs with timestamps, cross-referenced with gps data, 
and an appointment book, would probably yield rich results.


 [11] 
Biever, C. Cell Phones turn into Personal Assistants. New Scientist, 
November 27 2004. 
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424753.100


[12] For example, envision a query interface akin to a gant chart, 
which would allow the user view the information stored in the system 
arranged chronologically at varying levels of granularity - day, month, 
year, decades. If the information where displayed intelligently, such a 
system might allow people to observe patterns in their lives that may 
otherwise have gone undetected - correlations between shifts in 
careers, relationships, travel, expenditures, whatever. This is just 
the start. Artificially intelligent data mining tools and modeling 
could also be implemented to assist people in understanding themselves 
as well as the corporations and government agencies already do.


[13] See, Herbert Marcuse. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology 
of Advanced Industrial Society. (1964) Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.



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