Protecting Privacy in a Surveillance Society

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Julie (or is it Julia or Julietta?) writes:

> 	I guess I have been too immersed in surveillance theory lately
> - I'm begining to get a bit paranoid! However, I do sometimes wonder if
> some of the new technologies (such as "interactive TV") which will be be
> brought into the homes of the populus could in fact be used for more
> insidious purposes than was the original intent (I am generously assuming
> the original intent was as it was presented to the consumer).
> I mean- what's to stop the government- or perhaps the big capitalists-
> from utilizing the technologies, such as that suggested by the Neilson
> people, to monitor citizens *not* part of some voluntary rating program. 
> Are you suggesting that since Denning et al aren't "argueing for it"
> that it is inconceivable? Hmm....

Let me make an important clarification: there *is* a privacy danger
that multimedia/cable companies will use information...they already do
in the sense that they get real-time feedback on who's ordering which
premium pay-per-view channels. (My brother-in-law was marketing
manager for a cable company in San Luis Obispo and he maintained that
the cable companies could not tell which channel was being watched via
the box, but that new 2-way boxes, coming Real Soon Now, would allow
this.)

This is the same "privacy" danger faced by subcribers to magazines, by
purchasers of goods by mail order, and by any other system that allows
purchasing or renting preferences to be correlated to True Names.

(In the special case of videotape rentals, a specific law was passed
to make compiling of rental records a crime. This was during the Bork
imbroglio of some several years back.)

The "cryptographic" solution, the one that does not involve passing a
mess of new laws which will likely be ignored and exploited, is to
allow the following, either separately or in combination:

* receiver anonymity, via cryptographic codes which descramble some
widely-broadcast transmission (complicated issues of how to ensure
only one customer can view it, suggesting some Chaumian tie-ins and
"is-a-person" credentialling, albeit identity-blinded).

* digital money, so that goods and services may be bought over the
cable system without any explicit mapping to viewer identity (e.g., no
billing to the home address or VISA card is needed).

(Example: coin-operated televisions are already this way, in airports
and bus stations. Could extend to dorm rooms, hotels, etc., using
either coins (a theft problem, hence digital cash a better idea) or
tokens.)

* blinding protocols a la Chaum, whereby one proves ownership of some
credential (one's age, when entering a bar, for example) without
providing a name which could too easily be entered into a database.

Anyone interested in ways to defeat Orwellian surveillance technology
(and it goes without saying that all Cypherpunks should read "1984,"
as Julie has just done) should run out and find David Chaum's paper
"Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete," November 1985,
"Communications of the ACM." This paper has been cited _so_ many times
here, but it remains the single most important paper I can think of.

A slightly updated version was published in the First Computers,
Freedom, and Privacy Conference Proceedings.

Both of these sources should be findable in any large university
science library.

(It's not been scanned and OCRed and placed in the soda archives
because it's a very long paper, and the diagrams are pretty much
essential for figuring out the paper.)

Crypto technology wins out over well-intentioned privacy laws any day.

Locality of reference, and self-empowerment...if you buy books from
me with a credit card, should there be a "privacy law" saying I can't
keep a record of your purchases? That's the route some European
countries are going. All kinds of problems, and not something most
Cypherpunks would want, as it involves other invasions of
privacy: "Open up! This is the Privacy Protection Police."

The better solution: pay with cash for your books and then I _can't_
keep a record of who bought what. That's method over law.


--Tim May


-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
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