To some degree I’m surprised Garret didn’t link this William Safire essay covering Robert O’Harrow Jr.’s No Place to Hide and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, the subject matter’s right up his discomfort zone, but this being the weekend and all he probably deserves some slack. Safire, recently retired from his OpEd column, is clearly uneasy at the increasing destruction of any remaining personal privacy by the converging interests of government and business and so uses this piece, nominally a book review, to have his say.
You may remember that Safire has generally been a member of the small government/poweful military faction of the American conservatives, not a Neocon or evangelical. He always seemed to favor engagement with any and all, as long as Americans interests were served, but not in the arrogant, dismissive manner of the current Administration. Safire certainly has not been a proponent of the Big Brother invasiveness coming to light in recent days.
So when he sees the problem as sufficient to return to political punditry, I have to sit up and take notice. Since becoming aware of such government programs as Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness and CAPPS 2 and corporate chicanery at ChoicePoint and LexisNexus, I’ve done a bit of thinking on the topic and decided there’s little to be done (besides voting and writing against Republicans, which I already do) other than to accept it as another distasteful yet semi-necessary aspect of modern life.
As someone pointed out to me in a discussion a few days ago, other than the hassle factor, what real consequences result from being an identity theft victim? The banks or their insurers will generally make you whole and pay for credit monitoring services to make sure the damage has stopped. There is a cost at the aggregate level, admittedly, of insurance and systems to manage the problem, spread among all of us. Then one also wonders about the psychic and emotional costs and whether the easy availability through technology of the means to commit these crimes is the last straw between temptation and crime for some people.
I wonder too if we will soon reach a place where individuals will need to prove their are, well, themselves and have trouble at times succeeding. If their are no real secret identifiers such as social security number or mother’s maiden name because those facts are in hundreds or thousands of computer files, what will we do? Biometrics may suffice when we’re in the same room as the person testing our identity but not necessarily over the phone or the Internet. Current schemes for securing communication, SSL and the like, are too easily defeated.
Already I see trouble brewing by Googling my name, with another Mountain View resident and several others around the country showing up with it as well. ChoicePoint and their ilk may claim to have some new digital fingerprint that uniquely idientifies everyone but excuse me if I doubt their ability to prove that. And of course these companies are no more willing to allow outside experts to examine the validity of the systems, no more than the voting machine manufacturers or proprietary operating system vendors.
In the end, this is another element which will only contribute to a time of troubles that I see coming soon.
BillSaysThis 