I find the prospect of documented lives a little chilling, but some people will warm to the idea. One reason for documenting a life will be defensive. We can think of the wallet PC as an alibi machine, because encrypted digital signatures will guarantee an unforgeable alibi against false accusations. If someone ever accused you of something, you could retort: “Hey, buddy, I have a documented life. These bits are stored away. I can play back anything I’ve ever said. So don’t play games with me” On the other hand, if you were guilty of something, there would be a record of it. There would also be a record of any tampering. Richard Nixon’s taping of conversations in the White House—and then the suspicions that he had attempted to alter those tapes—contributed to his undoing. He chose to have a documented political life and lived to regret it.
The Rodney King case showed the evidentiary power of videotape and its limits. Before long every police car, or individual policeman, may be equipped with a digital video camera, with nonforgeable time and location stamps. The public may insist that the police record themselves in the course of their work. And the police could be all for it, to guard against claims of brutality or abuse on one hand and as an aid in gathering better evidence on the other. Some police forces are already videorecording all arrests. This sort of record won’t affect just the police. Medical malpractice insurance might be cheaper, or only available, for doctors who record surgical procedures or even office visits. Bus, taxi, and trucking companies have an obvious interest in the performance of their drivers. Some transportation companies have already installed equipment to record mileage and average speed. I can imagine proposals that every automobile, including yours and mine, be outfitted not only with a recorder but also with a transmitter that identifies the car and its location—a future license plate. After all, airplanes have “black box” recorders today, and once the cost drops, there is no reason they shouldn’t also be in our cars. If a car was reported stolen, its location would be known immediately. After a hit-and-run accident or a drive-by shooting, a judge could authorize a query: “What vehicles were in the following two-block area during this thirty-minute period?” The black box could record your speed and location, which would allow for the perfect enforcement of speeding laws. I would vote against that.
In a world that is increasingly instrumented, we could reach the point where cameras record most of what goes on in public. Video cameras in public places are already relatively commonplace. They perch, often concealed, around banks, airports, automatic-teller machines, hospitals, freeways, stores, and hotel and office-building lobbies and elevators.
The prospect of so many cameras, always watching, might have distressed us fifty years ago, as it did George Orwell. But today they are unremarkable. There are neighborhoods in the United States and Europe where citizens are welcoming these cameras above streets and parking lots. In Monaco, street crime has been virtually eliminated because hundreds of video cameras have been placed around the tiny principality. Monaco, however, is small enough in area, 370 acres (150 hectares), that a few hundred cameras can pretty much cover it all. Many parents would welcome cameras around schoolyards to discourage or help apprehend drug dealers, child molesters, and even playground bullies. Every city streetlight represents a substantial investment by a community in public safety. In a few years it will require only a relatively modest additional sum to add and operate cameras with connections to the information highway. Within a decade, computers will be able to scan video records very inexpensively looking for a particular person or activity. I can easily imagine proposals that virtually every pole supporting a streetlight should also have one or more cameras. The images from these cameras might be accessed only in the event of a crime, and even then possibly only under court order. Some people might argue that every image from every camera should be available for viewing by everyone at any time. This raises serious privacy questions in my mind, but advocates might argue that it’s appropriate if the cameras are only in public places.
Almost everyone is willing to accept some restrictions in exchange for a sense of security. From a historical perspective, people living in Western democracies already enjoy a degree of privacy and personal freedom unprecedented in all of human history. If ubiquitous cameras tied into the information highway should prove to reduce serious crime dramatically in test communities, a real debate would begin over whether people fear surveillance more or less than they fear crime. It is difficult to imagine a government-sanctioned experiment along these lines in the United States because of the privacy issues it raises and the likelihood of constitutional challenges. However, opinion can change. It might take only a few more incidents like the bombing in Oklahoma City within the borders of the United States for attitudes toward strong privacy protection to shift. What today seems like digital Big Brother might one day become the norm if the alternative is being left to the mercy of terrorists and criminals. I am not advocating either position—technology will enable society to make a political decision.
At the same time technology is making it easier to create video records, it is also making it possible to keep all your personal documents and messages totally private. Encryption-technology software, which anyone can download from the Internet, can transform a PC into a virtually unbreakable code machine. As the highway is deployed, security services will be applied to all forms of digital information—phone calls, files, databases, you name it. As long as you protect the password, the information stored on your computer can be held under the strongest lock and key that has ever existed. This allows for the greatest degree of information privacy any individual has ever had.
Many in government are opposed to this encryption capability, because it reduces their ability to gather information. Unfortunately for them, the technology can’t be stopped. The National Security Agency is a part of the U.S. government defense and intelligence community that protects this country’s secret communications and decrypts foreign communications to gather intelligence data. The NSA does not want software containing advanced encryption capabilities to be sent outside the United States. However, this software is already available throughout the world, and any computer can run it. No policy decision will be able to restore the tapping capabilities governments had in the past.
Today’s legislation that prevents the export of software with good encryption capability could harm U.S. software and hardware companies. The restrictions give foreign companies an advantage over U.S. competitors. American companies almost unanimously agree that the current encryption export restrictions don’t work.
Each media advance has had a substantial effect on how people and governments interact. The printing press and, later, mass-circulation newspapers changed the nature of political debate. Radio and then television allowed government leaders to talk directly and intimately with the populace. Similarly, the information highway will have its own influence on politics. For the first time politicians will be able to see immediate representative surveys of public opinions. Voters will be able to cast their ballots from home or their wallet PCs with less risk of miscounts or fraud. The implications for government may be as great as they are for industry.
Even if the model of political decision making does not change explicitly, the highway will bestow power on groups of citizens who want to organize to promote causes or candidates. This could lead to an increased number of special-interest groups and even political parties. Today, organizing a political movement on an issue requires an immense amount of coordination. How do you find the people who share your view? How do you motivate and communicate with them? Telephones and fax machines are great for connecting people one-on-one but only if you know whom to call. Television lets one person reach millions, but it is expensive and wasteful if most viewers are not interested.