A more serious concern than individual overindulgence is the vulnerability that could result from society’s heavy reliance on the highway.
This network, and the computer-based machines connected to it, will form society’s new playground, new workplace, and new classroom. It will replace physical tender. It will subsume most existing forms of communication. It will be our photo album, our diary, our boom box. This versatility will be the strength of the network, but it will also mean we will become reliant on it.
Reliance can be dangerous. During the New York City blackouts in 1965 and 1977, millions of people were in trouble—at least for a few hours—because of their dependence on electricity. They counted on electric power for light, heat, transport, and security. When electricity failed, people were trapped in elevators, traffic lights stopped working, and electric water pumps quit. Anything really useful is missed when you lose it.
A complete failure of the information highway is worth worrying about. Because the system will be thoroughly decentralized, any single outage is unlikely to have a widespread effect. If an individual server fails, it will be replaced and its data restored. But the system could be susceptible to assault. As the system becomes more important, we will have to design in more redundancy. One area of vulnerability is the system’s reliance on cryptography—the mathematical locks that keep information safe.
None of the protection systems that exist today, whether steering-wheel locks or steel vaults, are completely fail-safe. The best we can do is make it as difficult as possible for somebody to break in. Despite popular opinions to the contrary, computer security has a very good record. Computers are capable of protecting information in such a way that even the smartest hackers can’t get at it readily unless someone entrusted with information makes a mistake. Sloppiness is the main reason computer security gets breached. On the information highway there will be mistakes, and too much information will get passed along. Someone will issue digital concert tickets that prove to be forgeable, and too many people will show up. Whenever this sort of thing happens, the system will have to be reworked and laws may have to be revised.
Because both the system’s privacy and the security of digital money depend on encryption, a breakthrough in mathematics or computer science that defeats the cryptographic system could be a disaster. The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. Any person or organization possessing this power could counterfeit money, penetrate any personal, corporate,
or governmental file, and possibly even undermine the security of nations, which is why we have to be so careful in designing the system. We have to ensure that if any particular encryption technique proves fallible, there is a way to make an immediate transition to an alternate technique. There’s a little bit of inventing still to be done before we have that perfected. It is particularly hard to guarantee security for information you want kept private for a decade or more.
Loss of privacy is another major concern about the highway. A great deal of information is already being gathered about each of us, by private companies as well as by government agencies, and we often have no idea how it is used or whether it is accurate. Census Bureau statistics contain great amounts of detail. Medical records, driving records, library records, school records, court records, credit histories, tax records, financial records, employment reviews, and charge-card bills all profile you. The fact that you call a lot of motorcycle shops, and might be susceptible to motorcycle advertising, is commercial information that a telephone company theoretically could sell. Information about us is routinely compiled into direct-marketing mailing lists and credit reports. Errors and abuses have already fostered legislation regulating the use of these databases. In the United States, you are entitled to see certain kinds of information stored about you, and you may have the right to be notified when someone looks at it. The scattered nature of information protects your privacy in an informal way, but when the repositories are all connected together on the highway, it will be possible to use computers to correlate it. Credit data could be linked with employment records and sales transaction records to construct an intrusively accurate picture of your personal activities.
As more business is transacted using the highway and the amount of information stored there accrues, governments will consciously set policies regarding privacy and access to information. The network itself will then administer those policies, ensuring that a doctor does not get access to a patient’s tax records, a government auditor is not able to look at a taxpayer’s scholastic record, and a teacher is not permitted to browse a student’s medical record. The potential problem is abuse, not the mere existence of information.
We now allow a life insurance company to examine our medical records before determining whether it chooses to insure our mortality. These companies may also want to know if we indulge in any dangerous pastimes, such as hang gliding, smoking, or stock car racing. Should an insurer’s computer be allowed to examine the information highway for records of our purchases to see if there are any that might indicate risky behavior on our part? Should a prospective employer’s computer be allowed to examine our communications or entertainment records to develop a psychological profile? How much information should a federal, state, or city agency be allowed to see? What should a potential landlord be able to learn about you? What information should a potential spouse have access to? We will need to define both the legal and practical limits of privacy.
These privacy fears revolve around the possibility that someone else is keeping track of information about you. But the highway will also make it possible for an individual to keep track of his or her own whereabouts—to lead what we might call “a documented life”
Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. It will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as body temperature, blood pressure, barometric pressure, and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings. It will be able to track your interactions with the highway—all of the commands you issue, the messages you send, and the people you call or who call you. The resulting record will be the ultimate diary and autobiography, if you want one. If nothing else, you would know exactly when and where you took a photograph when you organize your family’s digital photo album.
The technology required is not difficult. It should soon be possible to compress the human voice down to a few thousand bits of digital information per second, which means that an hour of conversation will be converted into about 1 megabyte of digital data. Small tapes used for backing up computer hard disks already store 10 gigabytes or more of data—enough to record about 10,000 hours of compressed audio. Tapes for new generations of digital VCRs will hold more than 100 gigabytes, which means that a single tape costing a few dollars could hold recordings of all the conversations an individual has over the course of a decade or possibly even a lifetime—depending on how talkative he is. These numbers are based only on today’s capacities—in the future storage will be much cheaper. Audio is easy, but within a couple of years a full video recording will be possible as well.