| May. 1st, 2005 @ 05:20 pm Privacy and the Patriot Act, pt. 3 -- Info 520 Week 5 -- Drexel U. |
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Notes on the subject of privacy and the USA PATRIOT act:
Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available...Ways may some day be developed by which Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be able to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.
Justice Louis Brandeis
Olmstead v. United States (1928)*
=> I like the Brandeis quote with above; I wonder if people know how prescient they are being when they are being, well, prescient. I keep one not-so-prophetic piece on my desktop: a 1940s or 50s-era picture of a well-dressed mother using some kind of video phone to note that her son is upstairs reading a book. “Junior,” she says to him through the device, “put down that book and turn on the electric dog washer.” Never mind that in the real future mom would be at work and junior would be playing video games, what I note is the glibness with which the author concluded that mom not only could be, but would and presumably should be spying on her child. No doubt her actions were considered reasonable because she was exercising her parental duty. I would argue that the USA Patriot Act puts the government in the position of a parent and citizens as children. Parental duty gives the government the right to spy on children, as the woman in the picture does, for their own good. (Pun warning) It puts the “loco” back in in loco parentis.
=> I note with some humor the array of cryptographic resources available on the Tools page of the Electronic Privacy Information Center website. Some years back I read Stephenson’s wonderful novel Cryptonomicon and went on something of a crypto trip. I downloaded a freeware encryption program and began encrypting my email. Well, some of my email. See, encrypted email requires that parties on both ends of the transaction share the same concerns and cooperate by agreeing on an encryption systems to work with, but no one else I knew at the time shared my concerns or even pretended to play along with me (as my wife can be counted on doing, occasionally), so there was only one person to whom I could send encrypted email: myself. And I already knew what I had to say and, all of it being eminently boring, there was no one I could depend on to try and hack into it. Sensing the futility, I gave up (eventually). More realistic precautions are shared on the EPIC site and also in the class notes: don’t give away important personal information to anyone you don’t completely trust, anonymize personal email addresses posted to listservs and other online fora, monitor cookies, avoid any contact with spam-meisters, etc.
=> Until reading Mary Minow’s article I had no idea that the USA PATRIOT part of the Patriot Act is in fact an acronym: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. My word, who thought of that? In any event, that I didn’t know the acronym is not as disappointing as the fact that many of the signatories to the law probably didn’t know it either; may still not be able to tell constituents what it stands for. The attack on US soil occurred in the first third of September, 2001 and Mr. Bush signed it before October was out. That’s some quick drafting and some quicker voting; much has been made of the fact that most of the legislators who voted for the act hadn’t the time to read it before having done so. In fact, I’d guess that Minow put more thought into her article on the subject (published a scant three months after the act was signed into law) than some legislators did in voting for it. That doesn’t strike me as being an informed way of going about one’s business. Employed librarians would no doubt want to be informed, and a good place to start would probably the Minow’s own (with Lipinski) The Library’s Legal Answer Book.
=> One conclusion I can make is that standing up for what I feel is the librarian’s duty to protect the privacy of patrons is not necessarily a good way for winning friends and influencing enemies. I’d never told an associate the story of how FBI agents whisked away computers from one of my labs shortly after 9/11, but after I shared it with our group the other day I thought it was time to tell him. A (pun alert) starch conservative, said my associate was not amused by my little anecdote, or by my suggestion that when the government starts taking away from us some rights all rights are at risk. The fight for liberty, I’m afraid, is going to be a long hard one, and it’s not being fought on the streets of Baghdad but in the aisles of our local libraries.
The Brandies quote is borrowed from Dr. Sandra Hughes class notes for week 5. All these notes are adapted from my weekly journal assignment for Information 520.
Robert, robert.a.harris@gmail.com |
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