1 post tagged “monitoring”
Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have published what they describe as "the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published."
From their site: (http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-545223)
"The most recent report published in 2006 is probably the most comprehensive single volume report published in the human rights field. The report runs to almost 1,200 pages and includes about 6,000 footnotes. More than 200 experts from around the world have provided materials and commentary. The participants range from law students studying privacy to high-level officials charged with safeguarding constitutional freedoms in their countries. Academics, human rights advocates, journalists and researchers provided reports, insight, documents and advice."
The report table is located here:
http://www.privacyinternational.org/survey/phr2005/phrtable.pdf
Looking at the results I see that we, the USA, only just beat out Thailand (which just experienced a military coup) and the Philippines. Out of 37 countries, we were ranked 30th for worst protection of privacy. My knee-jerk reaction is that, while not too surprising, I'm shocked at the company we keep as a nation on this topic. The erosion of our liberties as individuals has been a source of consternation for me for many years. But with the terrorist mania promulgated in today's political climate, I have to wonder: why is privacy important?
I believe that privacy is important for many reasons, but several reasons that spring to mind are:
- I believe that people will modify their behavior when they believe they're being surveilled. This is important because the freedom to act according to one's own will instead of complying with the implicit coercion instilled through surveillance is a defining characteristic of a free society.
- I believe that privacy leads to increased autonomy and a sense of personal responsibility and ownership of one's influence on one's environment. One simplified application of this theory: If I see a stranded motorist in the middle of no-where, I'm likely to assist them. If it's in a crowded city, I'm likely to think someone else will help them. (I forgot the term for this phenomenon, if you know, please alert me.) By extension, if we live in a pure surveillance society, why bother to help anyone if "the authorities" can handle it.
- Politically speaking, I distrust the imbalance of power caused by surveillance. I think the risks outweigh the potential benefits when massive surveillance becomes the norm (and we're closer to that than I wish). A huge risk is that the political machine that is at the top of the surveillance pyramid will have unchecked power and that imbalance is ripe for exploitation. I don't trust a benevolent dictator with surveillance and no-one to answer to to stay benevolent.
This is the tip of the iceberg, but these are a few things that lead me to believe that privacy is an important liberty to protect.
OK, privacy is important, so what?
I'm not an expert in general societal privacy issues, but I can point you to great resources for online privacy. One resource from an outstanding organization (support them!) you should visit is the Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy page: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/
For relatively anonymous web browsing, you can use a commercial service like Anonymizer or one of its cometitors (The Cloak or A4Proxy).
A free solution that EFF supports is TOR (originally The Onion Router network): http://tor.eff.org/ Using this in conjunction with Privoxy, http://www.privoxy.org/, and if you're using firefox get Torbutton, https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2275/, or FoxTor, http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/foxtor/, to quickly toggle between using and not using TOR. In my tests, TOR is significantly slower than regular browsing, but still useful. DON'T use TOR if you're using it for P2P. You'll waste a ton of bandwidth. Instead, use a commercial service (Anonymizer.com, The Cloak, or A4Proxy) or MUTE (http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/).
