Freedom a noisy pursuit

BURLINGAME, Calif. – David Brin missed his calling.

Oh, sure, he's made a nice living as a best-selling science fiction author, and he's influenced millions of people doing it. But when you see him in front of a roomful of skeptics, waving his arms and getting in their faces as he challenges their most deeply held beliefs, well, you realize he should have been a professor.

Or maybe a preacher.

Regardless, here was Brin arguing to a bunch of computer libertarians that privacy is overblown as a formula for safeguarding our freedoms.

You had to admire his chutzpah – here he was at the seventh Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy arguing that maybe we need a little less emphasis on privacy and little more on openness and accountability.

Next door, a self-proclaimed "crypto-anarchist" was saying that absolute anonymity was the only way to keep the government hounds at bay. Earlier, privacy activists had demanded government intervention to protect consumers from prying corporate eyes. And that night, the Electronic Freedom Foundation gave a pioneer award to Johan Helsingius, the Finn who created and ran the first anonymous e-mail service.

So David Brin got in their faces. He took on the prevailing ethos of the 'Net and argued that openness, not privacy, is the best formula for preserving freedom.

"We live in a society in which the government knows more about its citizens than any government in history – and we are the freest people in history," Brin told a lunchtime gathering of more than one hundred.

He argued that technological advances will make it more and more difficult to remain anonymous in our society.

He explained that in several towns in England, with Baltimore soon to join them stateside, small video cameras keep vast stretches of urban areas under constant surveillance. And that the public loves them as an effective crime deterrent.

We can't stop this technology, Brin argued – we can, however, work to make it accessible to all. If you want to keep society free, he said, make sure that we all can watch the watchers: Put cameras inside the police station and feed the video to the Internet so that the police who are watching us know it's a two-way street.

What we need, says Brin, is a "transparent society."

In fact, in Brin's model, it is the endless debate over policy that marks us as a free nation. When President Clinton and his supporters complain that the "divisiveness" of politics is preventing him from getting down to important business, whatever that may be, Brin would argue that the divisiveness itself marks the health of our nation.

Freedom is noisy, because the endless bickering is a sign of mass authority; all of us are busily engaged finding the flaws in each others' arguments and holding one another accountable. It is, Brin said, akin to living in a pre-industrial village, where everyone knew everyone else, where criminals could not hide behind the anonymity of a large city.

In fact, what makes us free is not our Constitution, not the Bill of Rights, not any of the privacy laws on the books, says Brin. "It's our cantankerous tradition of suspicion of authority."

And, of course, that comment caused a lot of grumbling among the audience members. After all, Brin is rich and famous; practically an authority.