Able Danger, Databases, and the Right to Privacy.

While I was reading up on the Able Danger controversy this morning, I ran across some side information on a recurring theme of mine. I want to bring this to the attention of my readers:



From the CNN interview of Colenel Shaffer

What I did was I married the land information warfare activity, LIMA, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, an Army unit, Army capability, to the special operations command for the purposes of this exercise, this targeting exercise of al Qaeda. What the LIWA did — and it was their ability to go through massive amounts of open-source data, 2.5 terabytes, and look for patterns that related to previously-known terrorists. It was that information then which popped up...



S. O'BRIEN: So, by trolling the Internet and LexusNexus, things like that, I think that's what you mean by open source data? Am I right about that?



SHAFFER: Open source — anything that's not a classified database. We're talking about commercial databases, financial databases. Anything that's out there that relates to the real world.



And let me be specific on this. S. O'BRIEN: And his name pops up?



SHAFFER: Well, yes, because terrorists live in the real world. As we recognize from the London bombings, there's a picture of the terrorist in a whitewater rafting trip. They live in the real world just like we do. They plan in the real world.



S. O'BRIEN: What were those documents that — give me a sense of what kinds of documents targeted Mohamed Atta a year before 9/11 as a potential terrorist.

Look at this. This man is telling you that you have no privacy. Just the illusion. If someone wants to find out about you, they can. So don't do anything that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of every paper in the world.



Now, this illusion of privacy allows for a lot of evil things to go on. Identity theft. Cons and scams. Evil men and women going from place to place to place to catch new victims. It allows the powerful to protect their privacy legally while invading yours in fact. They can prevent us from looking at them; it is much easier for them to look at us.



It also allows for the perpetuation of more hypocrisy than most people think about. If it were legal and trivial for me to find out if Mr. Rich or Ms. Powerful violated any number of vice statutes (drugs, prostitution, gambling, blue laws, etcetera), how long would the police be able to hassle ordinary citizens on these points? How long would vices of personal choice like this remain illegal? What would this do to the economic underpinnings of organized crime and gangs? Why should anyone pay Mr. Criminal Drug Dealer whatever the street price of illegal drugs is when they can go buy it at the pharmacy? How much would we save on all the enforcement activities and incarceration? How much would we lower theft, burlary, and mugging when the stuff is no more expensive than aspirin?



On the economic front, imagine if every Good Faith Estimate for every loan that every loan officer ever did was freely available to prospective clients, along with the subsequent HUD-1 when the loan funded. Prospective clients could see if a loan officer did or did not have a track record of delivering what they said they would. Imagine if every real estate transaction had a subsequent issues attachment in a public file, and you could search the database for past performance by an agent, by an owner, or by a property. Imagine if every piece of investment advice could be tracked on a database by who gave it, who followed it (and whether the person giving the advice was among them), and what the results were. The deadwood and parasites would vanish from all three of these professions. Con games and fraud would shrink to a fraction of their current size. Real Estate and loan transactions would have large portions of their costs demolished.



This is not a complete list, by any means. But I've long since decided that this illusion of privacy is far too expensive. It allow the powerful the ability to restrict our liberty while maintaining theirs. It allows the criminal to steal our property. It allows the incompetent to remain anonymous, and the con man to prevent their victims from being warned. It forces us to spend our tax money places it doesn't need to be spent. It allows too much of the way we spend our tax money, and the process by which it is allocated, to remain unscrutinized. It allows the very process by which our tax money is collected to remain unscrutinized, and if potential IRS abuse of the tax code doesn't bother you, or abuse of the tax code by those who can afford "protection money" (i.e. lawyers, accountants, etcetera), then something is wrong.



Bottom line: This illusion of privacy allows those who would do us harm to walk among us undiscovered. It allows those with power the ability to harrass those who aren't hurting anyone. It allows those who have harmed us to escape what should be the consequences of their actions.



This is one book with a very worthwhile explanation of the issues. I've been hitting this subject since before it came out, but Mr. Brin does a more comprehensive job here with these issues than I have seen elsewhere. It also discusses what some limits to transparency should be.



Take your time and decide which is more important to you: Being able to pretend in public, or not having to pretend because no one else can, either. Lies, Hypocrisy, and Demogoguery to distract us, or public disclosure and scrutiny of real issues. Criminals and incompetents and rip off artists being able to pretend in public that they are fine upstanding citizens with our interests at heart, or being carted off to jail, losing their licenses, and just plain being put out of business? Being able to escape accountability for your actions, or being able to ensure that everybody is accountable.



I know which side I'm on.



(If you'll check this article, you'll see that this is a theme I keep returning to, and a Hat Tip to Captain's Quarters for the original link.)