Melancholy elephants

...was the title of a story by Spider Robinson.  Its premise was that we needed to decline to extend copyrights on works indefinitely, because sooner or later, everything worth producing would be produced, and it would be impossible to be creative without infringing on someone's copyright. (How many different possible one-measure pieces of music are there?)

Bruce Schneier looks at another reason why we need to be able to forget -- at least officially -- casual "ephemeral" conversations.

We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations -- with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet -- are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails.

We know this intellectually, but we haven't truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later.

....

Cardinal Richelieu famously said, :If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a Blackberry, are not official pronouncements. Discussions in a meeting, whether held in a boardroom or a chat room, are not the same as answers at a press conference. And privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our basic humanity.

We can't turn back technology; electronic communications are here to stay and even our voice conversations are threatened. But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation. We need a comprehensive data privacy law, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed. Laws requiring ISPs to store e-mails and other personal communications are exactly what we don't need.

Rules pertaining to government need to be different, because of the power differential. Subjecting the president's communications to eventual public review increases liberty because it reduces the government's power with respect to the people. Subjecting our communications to government review decreases liberty because it reduces our power with respect to the government. The president, as well as other members of government, need some ability to converse ephemerally -- just as they're allowed to have unrecorded meetings and phone calls -- but more of their actions need to be subject to public scrutiny.

But laws can only go so far. Law or no law, when something is made public it's too late. And many of us like having complete records of all our e-mail at our fingertips; it's like our offline brains.

In the end, this is cultural.

Indeed, this calls up another short story, this one by Isaac Asimov: "The Dead Past".  In this story, someone (re)invents a viewer that will display past events, going back a few centuries at most.  The sting in the tail, and the reason why the government has been monopolizing the technology so vigorously, is that the past also includes what has just now finished being the present.  If you can view events one second in the past, that's tantamount to spying on someone right now. Anywhere in the world.  Whether you've gotten permission or not.

This invention was placed in the public domain before the inventors had these facts pointed out to them.  The result was the absolute death of privacy.  Celebrities would be living in literal fish bowls.  Your only hope for privacy was obscurity, and everyone had at least one person who was interested in "looking in" on his private affairs.

Eventually, I suppose, the culture would adapt to this degree of transparancy, and whatever was observed through this viewer would be weighed against what would be seen if the viewer were turned upon anyone else -- the story ends before this period of adjustment had even started.

But with more and more of our lives winding up in databases or on the Web, we may find ourselves in the Dead Past -- make that the Transparent Present.  Anyone with access to the right databases and servers may be able to construct a detailed picture of our activities -- better, perhaps, than we're capable of remembering even in theory.  Surveillance systems can already potentially follow us every moment we spend outside our homes, and given behavioral modeling, may even be able to infer details about our private lives.

 

Cardinal Richelieu famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply.

If our casual conversations can be dragged into court to impeach our testimony in some legal action, how long before we see the casual conversations of judges and prosecutors dragged into those same cases to argue for recusal?  If six lines are enough to hang an honest man, maybe six lines will be enough to disqualify an honest judge.

 

The future will be here before you know it.