Privacy
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Privacy
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Privacy concerns are not unique to Abiomed. Time Magazine just ran a cover story about Internet intrusion. Super Bowl attendees last winter had their faces photographed and compared to fugitives' mug shots, and every time we get caught with our pants down, in the back of our minds we have to wonder if we're on that newest network phenom-- Spy TV. No wonder a Lou Harris poll last year revealed that 92 percent of Americans are suddenly worried about their privacy. Is it possible that for the first time in the life of the American citizen we have ceased to be flesh and blood but merely the accumulation of our personal data?
BOB GARFIELD:I can answer that question. The answer is: No! Not because we shouldn't be concerned about surveillance and the long arm of the data base in the year 2001, but because we've always had to worry about it! I speak from experience here. [KIDS PLAYING ON PLAYGROUND] The year was 1965. I was 10 when I-- tossed a snowball against the brick facade of Kingwood Elementary School-- [WHISTLE BLOWS] and got caught. My insane act of violence against masonry got me dragged into the principal's office to be read the riot act.
STERN PRINCIPAL: Bobby-- you better straighten up. This is going on your-- permanent record.
BOB GARFIELD: Permanent record?! [GLOOMY MUSIC UP AND UNDER] Next year's teacher. Colleges! Employers! The military!-- they'd all know. I was doomed to a life of rejection -- revulsion -- fear. ECHOING VOICE: Rejection -- revulsion -- fear.
BOB GARFIELD:[ECHOING VOICE CONTINUING UNDER] I would never make colonel or Phi Beta Kappa! My dream to be undersecretary of commerce would go out the window! The snowball incident would-- snowball into my own ever-lasting hell!!!!
BOB GARFIELD:So-- for the next 8 years, I was disgustingly well-behaved -- blackmailed, basically, with my permanent record. And with all due respect for Time Magazine and the opinion poll industry, there is nothing new about that. For all the hand-wringing about a brave new world of intrusion, public records have always been public! Marketers have always collected data to understand and sell to us. Wiretaps and intimidation by dossier -- J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. Furthermore Spy TV? -- Hah! CANDID CAMERA TV SHOW SONG: WHEN IT'S LEAST EXPECTED, YOU'RE ELECTED, YOU'RE THE STAR TODAY-- SMILE! YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA. IN THE HOCUS POCUS....
BOB GARFIELD:Richard Smith, chief technology officer of a research group called The Privacy Foundation makes a living by sounding alarms, but he understands what has never changed.
RICHARD SMITH: Human beings naturally like to snoop. [LAUGHS] It's part of our makeup.
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah. 225 years into the life of the Republic, we're all worried about our privacy. Why?! What all of a sudden is so different?! Actually -- I can answer that question too. [MUSIC] Technology. It's not just that the intelligence community purportedly has a system called Echelon that scans every e-mail and satellite transmission foraging for security threats. It's that I myself went on the Internet the other day to a people-search site and within 5 seconds located my address and phone number. With that I went to a site called Acudata.com. For 30 dollars, giving that information, I was supplied my social security number. Then I went to a site called U. S. Search where for 69 colleague I obtained the names, addresses and phone numbers of everyone I'd been in a real estate transaction with in the past 10 years. If I'd had any bankruptcies, a criminal record, tax liens, civil judgments or a merchant registered with the Coast Guard, they'd have found that too. Then years ago they'd have had to root around a fusty courthouse file room for two days. Big Brother, Big Smuther. Now any clown can sit naked in his den and for a hundred bucks terrorize me, steal my identity or God knows what.
BETH GIVENS: Government, corporations, nosy neighbors, criminals who are committing identity theft. What we have today are lots and lots of Little Brothers.
BOB GARFIELD:Beth Givens, founder and director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse isn't Chicken Little exactly. Just put her down for guardedly apocalyptic.
BETH GIVENS: A tremendous amount of information is being collected on us, and in the end it's being used in the same kind of way that George Orwell described in his book!
BOB GARFIELD: The book, by the way, is 1984. [MUSIC]
TV ANCHOR PETER JENNINGS: Police now have the ability to discover evidence of crimes inside a home without ever walking through the door.
WOMAN: The technology allows the FBI to sift through thousands of private e-mails, selecting out--
MAN: ...the rental car company Acme uses global positioning systems.... [AMBIENT SOUNDS OUTDOORS, VEHICLES PASSING]
BILL BROWN:Good morning. My name is Bill Brown. In this area there are approximately 139 different surveillance cameras of all different sorts, and we can be seen simultaneously by three different surveilling authorities.
BOB GARFIELD:Bill Brown, a currently out of work proofreader and self-described anarchist, leads a unique tour of New York's Time Square, pointing out for appalled visitors just how much they are being watched. Some of the camera emplacements are innocuous, like the ones ABC uses for sidewalk shots on Good Morning America. But in the aggregate, Brown believes, this is ground zero for citizen repression.
BILL BROWN: The first and most important is directly above us -- is a globe-shaped camera operated by the New York City Police Department. This is circular and hidden behind a translucent globe, and that spares us from the trauma of seeing a unit swerving around and staring right at us while we point back at it. Up to our right, about a hundred feet....
BOB GARFIELD:The truly chilling thing he says is that video images are increasingly digital and storable in perpetuity, there to cross-reference against any other data in any other file. And it's all happening so gently, so incrementally Brown says, we scarcely notice -- until one day we wake up as slaves. The analogy he likes is frog soup.
BILL BROWN: The way you make frog soup is you don't boil a frog all at once; you raise the temperature very gradually so the frog never realizes that it's being boiled. You could find yourself swimming in totalitarianism and think that you were having a nice bath!
BOB GARFIELD:He may have something there! I saw some Chicago high school girls clotted outside of the MTV studios on 44th and Broadway. They were making arrangements to be in the studio audience for the next day's broadcast of Total Request Live. I told them they were already on Times Square TV.
WOMAN: It's exciting! We love TV!
BOB GARFIELD: Does it bother you that Big Brother's watching you?
WOMAN: No!
BOB GARFIELD: You have any idea what I'm talking about when I say Big Brother?
WOMAN: The, the show Big Brother?
BOB GARFIELD: No, sweetheart; not the show Big Brother. But you have accidentally detected the paradox --we like to hide, but we also like to peek, and that's something else that's changed. Not technology alone but the powerful convergence of technology and the suddenly ready-for-prime-time surrender to our basest instincts. Jerry Springer, MTV's Real World, NBC's Spy TV. And need I mention, for viewing a young woman's every waking moment on the Worldwide Web -- JenniCam. In the past decade the hitherto social taboo called voyeurism has come out of the closet. It's no longer a secret shame. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] It's a genre!
ANNOUNCER: Twelve strangers have been locked in this house. There are no newspapers, no TV, no privacy. Previously on Big Brother....
BOB GARFIELD: Cameras, cameras everywhere. It's horrifying all right, but let he who is without titillation -- or just plain suspicion -- cast the first stone. The other day I myself got spammed with an offer to secretly monitor my computer to see what my wife and kids are up to -- every e-mail - every chat room - every web site - the ad for spyware promised. [LAUGHS] I deleted it, of course, but-- not before giving it some thought! Likewise the pop-under Internet ad that slips surreptitiously under my browser window every time I navigate the web. It's for a tiny wireless camera I can plant undetected anywhere, which reminds me -- there's a private detective in Pennsylvania I need to talk to. The name's Martin, Michael Martin, a real life shamus, gumshoe, private dick, [PHONE RINGING] and a man of few words.
MICHAEL MARTIN: Hello?
BOB GARFIELD: Say-- can you get me my permanent record?
MICHAEL MARTIN: We can do that!
BOB GARFIELD: That'd be swell. E-mail me when you get it. You know how to e-mail, don't you? Just lift up your finger and click. [PHONE HANGS UP]
BOB GARFIELD: Ohhh, right! In my haste to whip you into a panic, I neglected to present that other side of the story -- the side that says when you want information, you can go on line or call a private eye to get it -- that the ready access democratizes information, taking it out of the exclusive hands of government and into the hands of the people; that while we wish to be free and secure from surveillance, we demand surveillance to make us feel-- free and secure; and that all of this data floating around while potentially threatening also fuels and lubricates the consumer society.
MARTY ABRAMS: It means we have more immediacy in our lives.
BOB GARFIELD: Marty Abrams, director of the Information Policy Center for the Hunton and Williams law firm was the chief privacy officer for the data-aggregating giant Experian, a company that keeps profiles on 215 million Americans.
MAN: We can go into an appliance store on a Sunday afternoon at 6 o'clock; we can walk out of that appliance store with a 400 dollar television with instant credit, and we can do that because of the immediacy of the information flows and the fact that we understand the information better. It means that large manufacturer of automobiles will better be able to predict the types of cars that we will want 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the road. It's really about an economy that is richer and more vibrant and creates more wealth for all of us.
BOB GARFIELD:See? What's good for General Motors is good for America! Or-- not. Man, at least in 4th grade I knew exactly what I had to fear. Now it's hard to know if the accumulation of my personal data liberates -- as Marty Abrams believes, or enslaves. Are we really being watched? Or just seen? Should I accept some level of risk of living in the information age like I risk driving in my car, or should I become some sort of e-survivalist, hunkered down in an unwired fortress, waiting for the final struggle? Well, you know what? I can answer those questions too. The answer is: I don't know! If I did know I'd write a book! I'd call it Frog Soup [SOUND OF BOILING LIQUID] for the Soul. [RIBIT, RIBIT] Sure, some of this stuff is extremely spooky and maybe even a very bad deal with the devil. But if you were a tradesman 140 years ago, so was the industrial revolution. Privacy hawks like Beth Givens and Richard Smith say that we must act now or dystopia is around the corner. Fair enough. Isn't that the way society has always dealt with change? With laws, vigilance and by the way, information-- simply to adjust. Meantime though, I've been dying to know whether the snowball incident was indeed immortalized in my dossier. Well, now I know.
BOB GARFIELD: So you got the dirt huh, Sherlock? Tell me about the snowball incident. How bad is it?
MICHAEL MARTIN: Your permanent record has been shredded.
BOB GARFIELD: Shredded?!
MICHAEL MARTIN: It is the policy that files that old are shredded.
BOB GARFIELD: It's gone?!
MICHAEL MARTIN: It's no more. [THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER] 58:00
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Melissa Sanford and Katya Rogers; engineered by Irene Trudel and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Sean Landis, Kathleen Horan and Giselle Foss.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large; Arun Rath our senior producer, and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. [THEME MUSIC TAG UP AND UNDER] This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
July 28, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Privacy concerns are not unique to Abiomed. Time Magazine just ran a cover story about Internet intrusion. Super Bowl attendees last winter had their faces photographed and compared to fugitives' mug shots, and every time we get caught with our pants down, in the back of our minds we have to wonder if we're on that newest network phenom-- Spy TV. No wonder a Lou Harris poll last year revealed that 92 percent of Americans are suddenly worried about their privacy. Is it possible that for the first time in the life of the American citizen we have ceased to be flesh and blood but merely the accumulation of our personal data?
BOB GARFIELD:I can answer that question. The answer is: No! Not because we shouldn't be concerned about surveillance and the long arm of the data base in the year 2001, but because we've always had to worry about it! I speak from experience here. [KIDS PLAYING ON PLAYGROUND] The year was 1965. I was 10 when I-- tossed a snowball against the brick facade of Kingwood Elementary School-- [WHISTLE BLOWS] and got caught. My insane act of violence against masonry got me dragged into the principal's office to be read the riot act.
STERN PRINCIPAL: Bobby-- you better straighten up. This is going on your-- permanent record.
BOB GARFIELD: Permanent record?! [GLOOMY MUSIC UP AND UNDER] Next year's teacher. Colleges! Employers! The military!-- they'd all know. I was doomed to a life of rejection -- revulsion -- fear. ECHOING VOICE: Rejection -- revulsion -- fear.
BOB GARFIELD:[ECHOING VOICE CONTINUING UNDER] I would never make colonel or Phi Beta Kappa! My dream to be undersecretary of commerce would go out the window! The snowball incident would-- snowball into my own ever-lasting hell!!!!
BOB GARFIELD:So-- for the next 8 years, I was disgustingly well-behaved -- blackmailed, basically, with my permanent record. And with all due respect for Time Magazine and the opinion poll industry, there is nothing new about that. For all the hand-wringing about a brave new world of intrusion, public records have always been public! Marketers have always collected data to understand and sell to us. Wiretaps and intimidation by dossier -- J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. Furthermore Spy TV? -- Hah! CANDID CAMERA TV SHOW SONG: WHEN IT'S LEAST EXPECTED, YOU'RE ELECTED, YOU'RE THE STAR TODAY-- SMILE! YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA. IN THE HOCUS POCUS....
BOB GARFIELD:Richard Smith, chief technology officer of a research group called The Privacy Foundation makes a living by sounding alarms, but he understands what has never changed.
RICHARD SMITH: Human beings naturally like to snoop. [LAUGHS] It's part of our makeup.
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah. 225 years into the life of the Republic, we're all worried about our privacy. Why?! What all of a sudden is so different?! Actually -- I can answer that question too. [MUSIC] Technology. It's not just that the intelligence community purportedly has a system called Echelon that scans every e-mail and satellite transmission foraging for security threats. It's that I myself went on the Internet the other day to a people-search site and within 5 seconds located my address and phone number. With that I went to a site called Acudata.com. For 30 dollars, giving that information, I was supplied my social security number. Then I went to a site called U. S. Search where for 69 colleague I obtained the names, addresses and phone numbers of everyone I'd been in a real estate transaction with in the past 10 years. If I'd had any bankruptcies, a criminal record, tax liens, civil judgments or a merchant registered with the Coast Guard, they'd have found that too. Then years ago they'd have had to root around a fusty courthouse file room for two days. Big Brother, Big Smuther. Now any clown can sit naked in his den and for a hundred bucks terrorize me, steal my identity or God knows what.
BETH GIVENS: Government, corporations, nosy neighbors, criminals who are committing identity theft. What we have today are lots and lots of Little Brothers.
BOB GARFIELD:Beth Givens, founder and director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse isn't Chicken Little exactly. Just put her down for guardedly apocalyptic.
BETH GIVENS: A tremendous amount of information is being collected on us, and in the end it's being used in the same kind of way that George Orwell described in his book!
BOB GARFIELD: The book, by the way, is 1984. [MUSIC]
TV ANCHOR PETER JENNINGS: Police now have the ability to discover evidence of crimes inside a home without ever walking through the door.
WOMAN: The technology allows the FBI to sift through thousands of private e-mails, selecting out--
MAN: ...the rental car company Acme uses global positioning systems.... [AMBIENT SOUNDS OUTDOORS, VEHICLES PASSING]
BILL BROWN:Good morning. My name is Bill Brown. In this area there are approximately 139 different surveillance cameras of all different sorts, and we can be seen simultaneously by three different surveilling authorities.
BOB GARFIELD:Bill Brown, a currently out of work proofreader and self-described anarchist, leads a unique tour of New York's Time Square, pointing out for appalled visitors just how much they are being watched. Some of the camera emplacements are innocuous, like the ones ABC uses for sidewalk shots on Good Morning America. But in the aggregate, Brown believes, this is ground zero for citizen repression.
BILL BROWN: The first and most important is directly above us -- is a globe-shaped camera operated by the New York City Police Department. This is circular and hidden behind a translucent globe, and that spares us from the trauma of seeing a unit swerving around and staring right at us while we point back at it. Up to our right, about a hundred feet....
BOB GARFIELD:The truly chilling thing he says is that video images are increasingly digital and storable in perpetuity, there to cross-reference against any other data in any other file. And it's all happening so gently, so incrementally Brown says, we scarcely notice -- until one day we wake up as slaves. The analogy he likes is frog soup.
BILL BROWN: The way you make frog soup is you don't boil a frog all at once; you raise the temperature very gradually so the frog never realizes that it's being boiled. You could find yourself swimming in totalitarianism and think that you were having a nice bath!
BOB GARFIELD:He may have something there! I saw some Chicago high school girls clotted outside of the MTV studios on 44th and Broadway. They were making arrangements to be in the studio audience for the next day's broadcast of Total Request Live. I told them they were already on Times Square TV.
WOMAN: It's exciting! We love TV!
BOB GARFIELD: Does it bother you that Big Brother's watching you?
WOMAN: No!
BOB GARFIELD: You have any idea what I'm talking about when I say Big Brother?
WOMAN: The, the show Big Brother?
BOB GARFIELD: No, sweetheart; not the show Big Brother. But you have accidentally detected the paradox --we like to hide, but we also like to peek, and that's something else that's changed. Not technology alone but the powerful convergence of technology and the suddenly ready-for-prime-time surrender to our basest instincts. Jerry Springer, MTV's Real World, NBC's Spy TV. And need I mention, for viewing a young woman's every waking moment on the Worldwide Web -- JenniCam. In the past decade the hitherto social taboo called voyeurism has come out of the closet. It's no longer a secret shame. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] It's a genre!
ANNOUNCER: Twelve strangers have been locked in this house. There are no newspapers, no TV, no privacy. Previously on Big Brother....
BOB GARFIELD: Cameras, cameras everywhere. It's horrifying all right, but let he who is without titillation -- or just plain suspicion -- cast the first stone. The other day I myself got spammed with an offer to secretly monitor my computer to see what my wife and kids are up to -- every e-mail - every chat room - every web site - the ad for spyware promised. [LAUGHS] I deleted it, of course, but-- not before giving it some thought! Likewise the pop-under Internet ad that slips surreptitiously under my browser window every time I navigate the web. It's for a tiny wireless camera I can plant undetected anywhere, which reminds me -- there's a private detective in Pennsylvania I need to talk to. The name's Martin, Michael Martin, a real life shamus, gumshoe, private dick, [PHONE RINGING] and a man of few words.
MICHAEL MARTIN: Hello?
BOB GARFIELD: Say-- can you get me my permanent record?
MICHAEL MARTIN: We can do that!
BOB GARFIELD: That'd be swell. E-mail me when you get it. You know how to e-mail, don't you? Just lift up your finger and click. [PHONE HANGS UP]
BOB GARFIELD: Ohhh, right! In my haste to whip you into a panic, I neglected to present that other side of the story -- the side that says when you want information, you can go on line or call a private eye to get it -- that the ready access democratizes information, taking it out of the exclusive hands of government and into the hands of the people; that while we wish to be free and secure from surveillance, we demand surveillance to make us feel-- free and secure; and that all of this data floating around while potentially threatening also fuels and lubricates the consumer society.
MARTY ABRAMS: It means we have more immediacy in our lives.
BOB GARFIELD: Marty Abrams, director of the Information Policy Center for the Hunton and Williams law firm was the chief privacy officer for the data-aggregating giant Experian, a company that keeps profiles on 215 million Americans.
MAN: We can go into an appliance store on a Sunday afternoon at 6 o'clock; we can walk out of that appliance store with a 400 dollar television with instant credit, and we can do that because of the immediacy of the information flows and the fact that we understand the information better. It means that large manufacturer of automobiles will better be able to predict the types of cars that we will want 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the road. It's really about an economy that is richer and more vibrant and creates more wealth for all of us.
BOB GARFIELD:See? What's good for General Motors is good for America! Or-- not. Man, at least in 4th grade I knew exactly what I had to fear. Now it's hard to know if the accumulation of my personal data liberates -- as Marty Abrams believes, or enslaves. Are we really being watched? Or just seen? Should I accept some level of risk of living in the information age like I risk driving in my car, or should I become some sort of e-survivalist, hunkered down in an unwired fortress, waiting for the final struggle? Well, you know what? I can answer those questions too. The answer is: I don't know! If I did know I'd write a book! I'd call it Frog Soup [SOUND OF BOILING LIQUID] for the Soul. [RIBIT, RIBIT] Sure, some of this stuff is extremely spooky and maybe even a very bad deal with the devil. But if you were a tradesman 140 years ago, so was the industrial revolution. Privacy hawks like Beth Givens and Richard Smith say that we must act now or dystopia is around the corner. Fair enough. Isn't that the way society has always dealt with change? With laws, vigilance and by the way, information-- simply to adjust. Meantime though, I've been dying to know whether the snowball incident was indeed immortalized in my dossier. Well, now I know.
BOB GARFIELD: So you got the dirt huh, Sherlock? Tell me about the snowball incident. How bad is it?
MICHAEL MARTIN: Your permanent record has been shredded.
BOB GARFIELD: Shredded?!
MICHAEL MARTIN: It is the policy that files that old are shredded.
BOB GARFIELD: It's gone?!
MICHAEL MARTIN: It's no more. [THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER] 58:00
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Melissa Sanford and Katya Rogers; engineered by Irene Trudel and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Sean Landis, Kathleen Horan and Giselle Foss.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large; Arun Rath our senior producer, and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. [THEME MUSIC TAG UP AND UNDER] This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
Produced by WNYC Studios