The Greens’ most vocal advocate for cyber-rights, Senator Scott Ludlam, has penned an argument over on New Matilda about six ways to fight surveillance by the State on Australian citizens.
The democratisation of communications is leading to information sharing, scientific and technical innovation and the formation of a global civil society and that is extraordinarily valuable. We won’t get these benefits unless we actively resist the medium being rapidly transformed into a giant surveillance tool at the hands of unaccountable security agencies. To paraphrase a meme going around the net at the moment, in America you don’t browse the internet – the internet browses you. It’s time we pushed back.
The six methods are listed cursorily. Senator Ludlam wants security agencies to be subject to the Freedom of Information Act and to be subject to the reporting requirements of the Telecommunications Interceptions and Access Act. He wants security agencies to require a warrant prior to accessing telecommunications information, and to be compelled to provide data breach notifications. Senator Ludlam also wants telecommunications providers to alert customers to agreements they’ve entered with governments that might breach their privacy. Finally, Senator Ludlam seeks a revision of the ‘Five Eyes’ agreement.
There is a certain appeal to Senator Ludlam’s proposals. Who can shake the thought of some Orwellian nightmare where we can’t even send e-mails to our friends without the State cataloging our every keystroke? Doesn’t it make you uneasy to know that some bureaucrat has access to your shoe porn, hat porn, tree porn, and all your most popular Tumblr posts? What if ASIO, ASIS, ASD, and the ARG were to bust into your house right now, confront you with all of the DMCA-infringing e-mails you’ve sent over the past thirteen years, and stuff you into a black body bag and ship you to some secret prison — wait, no: gulag — in the Middle East where they’d torture you just like what happened in Zero Dark Thirty? Wouldn’t that be awful? Wouldn’t that just be the worst?
Welcome to the world of Australia’s privacy debate. On the one hand, you have a bunch of — quite frankly — weird people who have fetishised the concept of ‘privacy’, forcing its apotheosis into a 21st Century deity. On the other hand, you have the people who dismiss all privacy concerns as the domain of the tinfoil hat wearers, who let their lethargy and intellectual inertia hinder robust inquiry.
Senator Ludlam’s article in New Matilda shows us quite clearly how the privacy-fetishists now use intuition pumps instead of arguments in hot button cyber-issues. If I use the word ‘private’, I mean that I don’t share this information with somebody else. When Senator Ludlam and other internet activists speak of the ‘private’, they in fact mean information that is already being shared.
If I have a private piece of information, I don’t write it on a giant poster and stick it to the side of a public building. In the world of Senator Ludlam and co, my information is still private and I should be able to decide who gets to see the poster that I’ve stuck up on the side of the public building.
So when Senator Ludlam writes:
Warrantless theft and storage of vast quantities of detailed and private information about citizens all over the world, their habits on email, at the bank, in the kitchen and in bed, is both illegal and immoral.
The natural response is positive. Of course taking that private information is terrible! If it’s not illegal, it should be!
But the ‘private information’ in the middle of that sentence isn’t ‘private’ in the common, ordinary sense of the word. It’s private in that special Internet-activist sense of the word. The ‘theft’ is merely observing the information that a person has put into the public space. It’s information that the person already shares with a host of companies, advertisers, data miners, &c., &c., &c.
In short, this ‘private’ information is — to use the common tongue — ‘public’ information.
It’s important to distinguish very carefully between what I am and what I am not arguing. I am arguing that the arguments advanced by Internet activists do not hold up under scrutiny. I am arguing that their use of the word ‘privacy’ relies on a very particular use of the word — one, I’d wager, that the rest of the world does not share — and that their arguments rely on intuitions that distract from the salient details of the problem.
I am not arguing that, simply because the information is already given to a wide range of shady characters, the State should feel welcome to help itself. My argument is entirely consistent with the point — with which I agree strongly — that we need stronger legislation to protect the privacy of Internet users from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Simply saying that we ‘choose’ to expose our private information to these companies is weak sauce, considering that the biggest breaches of our privacy are as a result of other people uploading information about us.
At the end of the day, chanting spooky mantras about Australia being ‘deeply complicit in a surveillance culture’ doesn’t get us particularly far. What we need is sensible, rational people to open up a discussion about what privacy really means to us and why our actions seem to be completely at odds with our language. We need a conversation to uncover why it’s so popular to hold libertarian intuitions about constraining the State to the weakest possible position when it comes to information about its citizens. And we need to develop a new way of conceptualising how private citizens who operate in a public space should feel about interactions with the State in light of new technological developments and new social expectations.
Senator Ludlam’s ‘six ways’ are more of the problem, not the solution.
Mark Fletcher is a Canberra-based blogger and policy wonk who writes about conservatism, atheism, and popular culture. He blogs at OnlyTheSangfroid. This article was originally published on AusOpinion.com.
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