Just Finished Reading: The Transparent Society – Will Technology Force us to Choose between Privacy and freedom? By David Brin

It’s pretty much always a strange feeling reading books about technology – particularly IT. Even though this book was written in 1998 and is intended as forward looking it still manages to seem rather quaint and dated. Living amongst our technically charged society the speed of progress can seem very impressive. But it’s really when you read books about the subject that you can see just how fast things are moving.

Brin, who I previous knew purely as an author of hard SF, puts forward the interesting idea that the best way to handle the growing danger of computer advancement impinging upon and finally defeating any idea of privacy is the exact opposite of what many people seem to be advocating. Many, it seems, put their faith in stronger and stronger encryption and such devices as anonymous re-mailers. This faith, Brin suggests, is deeply flawed because those in power – and not just the government – have the resources to break encryption without anyone being aware of it. If this came to pass – if it hasn’t already done so – we would have a society where ‘they’ can spy on us but we (in blissful ignorance) are still incapable of spying on them. Brin’s idea is rather than increase secrecy we instead increase openness. We turn the (metaphorical and the real) CCTV camera’s on everyone – no matter who they are. Rather naively Brin thinks that we’d get pretty tired pretty quickly of snooping on our neighbours – especially knowing that they could be snooping at us snooping at them. Of course this was written before the world wide television phenomena known, rather ironically in this context, as Big Brother.

Whilst presently an interesting idea in a readable, though sometimes plodding, fashion I thought that Brin singularly failed to make his case. If the Authorities, and other parties equally capable, could theoretically crack even the best encryption codes I’m pretty sure that they could dupe most of the people most of the time into believing that their society was far more transparent that it actually was. Brin, I thought, was either simply naïve or strangely unaware that those in power will never give it up without a very long and very hard fight. Recent events on both sides of the Atlantic show that those in power simply cannot be trusted. Brin’s naïve suggestion that they can be controlled by well-meaning whistle blowers and hackers comes I think very much from a pre-9/11 mindset. These days control is everything and control is never easily relinquished. Several things did irritate me in a general sense about this book – the fact that it was almost universally American focused and that it definitely had the whiff of right wing bias or maybe that’s just me reading between the lines too much. This is a worthwhile background read on the subject and presents a different point of view from the mainstream but if you’re interested in the subject I’d pick up something a bit more up to date.