The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

• Author: Peterson, Christine

By David Brin, Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 378 pages, $25.00

New technologies are disrupting society's evolved checks and balances. Advances in computing lead to low-cost encryption - privacy for our online communications and finances. Advances in sensing lead to low-cost surveillance-tracking of our movements, actions, speech, and physical purchases. As technologist Mark S. Miller and legal scholar David Friedman both point out, our formerly unified world of partial privacy is splitting in two: an online world with much more privacy and a physical world with much less.

The knee-jerk reaction from most of us is that the first change is good and the second is bad: We want more privacy, everywhere. David Brin's goal is to convince us of the opposite. He succeeds only halfway - but that half is brilliant.

Brin's credentials for the task are appropriate and unusual. As a former practicing scientist, he can understand the basics of these new technologies. As a science fiction author, he has experience in projecting their effects into the future.

The book's message on surveillance is: "The cameras are coming; they will soon be everywhere. Complaining won't stop them, so we might as well turn them to our benefit." Once seen only in banks, then retail stores, cameras are now sprouting along the roads. Tiny cameras used to be so expensive that only spies used them. Soon they'll cost so little that each of us can afford to have many: "surveillance technology for the rest of us." Sensors, microphones, cameras everywhere.

This prospect makes practically everyone nervous. The political right wants economic privacy, to discourage redistribution. The political left wants "lifestyle" privacy, to discourage morality-based interference. Libertarians want both kinds of privacy. All understand that privacy is vital to protecting their preferred areas of freedom - what the other side doesn't know about, it can't prevent.

Brin advocates another path: protecting freedoms through openness and accountability instead of secrecy. Openness - letting the data flow where it may - promotes personal responsibility in both economic and social arenas. This in turn decreases the temptation to have the state intervene. By aligning individuals' incentives with the results of their actions, accountability gives us more robust freedom than privacy alone can ever guarantee.

As Brin emphasizes, this is not a new insight. Accountability has always been part of what makes societies work. He makes the case for openness in a relatively nonpolitical way, often emphasizing its usefulness in simply protecting our physical safety.

This usefulness is increasing, not decreasing. After decades where external threats of mass destruction seemed far away, and internal ones were nonexistent, the use of sarin gas by Aura Shinrikyo in Japan reminds us that chemical and biological weapons are smaller, cheaper, and easier to hide than old-style weapons. It used to be sufficient to fly planes over enemy countries to look for weapons facilities. Now we are going to have to pay different kinds of attention, in more places, to head off disaster. Arms control and personal privacy issues were once easy to separate. Now they're blurring together.

This is going to take some getting used to. We're all in favor of "personal...