http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/ This is just between us, right? [ 2 1 S T__B O O K S ] NEITHER A NEW "GUIDE" TO ONLINE RIGHTS NOR A REPORT FROM THE NET BATTLEFIELD ARE CLEAR ON JUST WHAT PRIVACY IS. "PROTECTING YOURSELF ONLINE: THE DEFINITIVE RESOURCE ON SAFETY, FREEDOM & PRIVACY IN CYBERSPACE" | BY ROBERT B. GELMAN WITH STANTON MCCANDLISH AND MEMBERS OF EFF | HARPEREDGE | 190 PAGES "NET.WARS" | BY WENDY M. GROSSMAN | NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS | 236 PAGES - - - - - - BY MATTHEW DEBORD | These two very different yet somehow eerily similar books take as their primary drums to thump the "Three Ps" currently dominating discussions of cyberspace's rapidly evolving future: privacy, protection and pornography. Both are dispiritingly tainted by a troubling series of misconceptions about what privacy really means. "Protecting Yourself Online," apart from arrogantly labeling itself the "definitive resource" on anything other than its own agenda, carries an additional designation as an Electronic Frontier Foundation "guide" (there will, presumably, be more). "Primer" might be a more accurate way of assessing what its committee of authors has cooked up under the guise of practical tips. A real troublemaker would go a step further and call it "agitprop." Peppered with boxed comments gleaned from the EFF digerati ("We're not left-wing or right-wing, we're up-wing," exults EFF co-founder John Gilmore in a sunny piece of ideological frippery) and sentences that conclude with exclamation points or hum with italics, Gelman & co.'s effort operates on two levels. Writing of the relationship between individuals and innovation, the authors point out that if "consumers" want to fully enjoy the good stuff just around the technological bend, they'll "want to be sure that the 'keys' that give access to sensitive personal data belong to us alone and are in our control." That sounds dandy, but -- like almost everything else about this insipid little meta-manifesto -- its innocuousness and seeming self-evidence forges the support that the book's superstructure requires: a re-engineering of the public's understanding of privacy and the protection of information. Cyberpunditry has perhaps done more to promulgate hooey about the meaning of privacy than any other enterprise ever. The most common error, undergirding much of "Protecting Yourself Online's" apparently benign recommendations, is that privacy is a natural right, closely allied with freedom and personal liberty, and solidified, at least in the United States, by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The worst thing about this narrative isn't that it's flat wrong, but that it will seem accurate to many of the people who will achieve their false grasp of privacy from the EFF book. The truth is that privacy was "discovered" by the Supreme Court and given its fullest articulation through Justice William O. Douglas' famous majority opinion in 1965's Griswold vs. Connecticut. Douglas argued that while the sacred documents of the Republic were silent on the matter of privacy, they emanated certain legal "penumbras" that permitted the establishment of zones of privacy. Many critics have jeered this ruling since, but the activist thinking that spurred it remains: Though privacy isn't recognized in the basic texts, it must be there because it needs to be, in order for modern life to function. This doesn't change the fact, however, that privacy is a legal afterthought, divined not naturally but established through representative government -- a cumbersome bureaucracy the EFF would like to expel from the debate. The EFF's general distaste for all vestiges of centralized control -- "Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a Peeping Tom to install your window blinds," quips cowboy cyberguru John Perry Barlow, EFF's resident libertarian -- leads the organization conveniently to forget that American democracy is not, as the authors would have it, "true" but representative, and therefore diluted. It was not the people themselves who plucked privacy from the ether, but a court assembled by elected presidents; privacy is not, therefore, the natural state of information, but an established right, an artifice requiring government maintenance. This confusion leads the authors to promote some bogus affinities, such as one between anonymity -- another absolute right, in their view, dictated by privacy -- and the writers of the Federalist Papers, who were of course American history's first great boosters of central government, as well as men who published anonymously, but who were hardly unknowns themselves. "We do want rules," EFF chairwoman Esther Dyson argues in her introduction, "we just don't want rules imposed by centralized powers that tend to flout their own values, at times in secret." Anonymous individuals are OK, but anonymous institutions are inherently harmful. The only value the EFF wishes to flout is the sanctity of child rearing. Where questions of unregulated content intersect with the increasing availability of pornography, "Protecting Yourself Online" effectively ditches the "Yourself" part of its title and adopts "Your Children" as an emblem of its authors' responsible intentions. They offer this as a counterweight to their frequently restated loathing for the 1973 Supreme Court case Miller vs. California, a decision that established the current U.S. obscenity standard. They would like to see the court take the radical step of updating its obscenity test, but they would also like to decide for themselves, within their own online communities, what their children can and can't view. It's a typical piece of narcissistic EFF logic: Overturn the "community standards" segment of Miller, but do so according to the priorities of our community, one that -- as Barlow has maintained -- is not beholden to the law of the land, anyway. In "Net.wars," Wendy Grossman, a freelance journalist who has worked the technological waterfront since 1992, manages to avoid, for the most part, the EFF's restyled definitions of privacy rights -- but that's only because her mind seems to be too incoherent to latch onto a political chimera in the same way that Dyson would. "I hate being edited," she claims in her acknowledgments, and it shows. Most journalists have been trained to rig their investigations around a narrative spine, but not Grossman, whose ramblings lope from Barlow hagiography to deconstructions of Barlow's free-range notion (expressed in his "Cyberspace Independence Declaration") of cyberspace as a transnational frontier that cannot be compelled to submit to earthbound law. Grossman made her reputation with a 1996 piece in Wired about the Church of Scientology's efforts to harass people who had infringed its copyright online, and a version of that saga has been included here. Drowned in arcane detail, however, it's impossible to imagine how a reader unfamiliar with the debate, with Scientology's litigious appetites and bizarre philosophy, or with the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup on Usenet will be able to make sense of this important instance of the Net outpacing conventional copyright law's ability to keep up. Grossman fares somewhat better with her discussions of pornography, bringing a needed dose of skeptical realism into the controversy, and her accounts of the federal government's botched efforts to control exports of encryption software and to sustain the ill-fated Communications Decency Act of 1996 are chock-full of information. Unfortunately, none of it is distinguished by much of an angle, beyond her feeling that government regulation in cyberspace is hamstrung by ignorance among the regulators. It is perhaps a lot to ask of a reporter, but "Net.wars" could have used at least a smidgen of theory to characterize the stakes of the combat that Grossman believes will only intensify in the next century, as the Net expands and fewer people have the luxury of blissful ignorance. On balance, Grossman's undisciplined dispatch from what she perceives as the frontier is altogether less galling than the EFF's attempt to colonize that frontier and enlist its new inhabitants in a state-slaying entrepreneurial army. Information may want to be free, but the vast majority of the world's citizens may not want to let it out of its cage. SALON | April 21, 1998
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