Joseph Kennedy told his boys
John, Robert, and Edward not to write down anything they would not want to see
on the front page of The New York Times the next morning. Even if the Times may be going out of style, Joe
Kennedy’s advice is not.
David Petraeus—director of the
CIA and one of the most powerful men in the world—was recently undone by Gmail.
Threatening e-screeds led the FBI from a Florida socialite to General David
Petraeus’ biographer.
Its monitoring easily
connected the biographer to the CIA director. And if he was vulnerable, we
certainly are.
Our real concern is not with
the technology itself, but how its novel uses might make us more vulnerable.
Most people can’t resist using cheap, powerful computing devices that channel
nearly all the world’s information. Can we count on those people to use these
tools in the service of truth, justice, and freedom?
The Cloud
Life in The Cloud can be as
whimsical and convenient as it sounds. After a long day of work, I tapped out
ideas for this piece, including this sentence, on my phone to revise a Google
document I created soon after the Freeman's editor
accepted my pitch via Facebook. Later I confirmed the topic on Facebook via
SMS.
As more of our information and
interactions migrate online, we are recording things we never recorded before.
Minutiae previously confined to rolodexes, diaries, and midnight whispers are
as accessible as pocket lint. Only, what if we could just as easily grab
strangers’ pocket lint?
My legal, personal identity
resides online. Anyone who stole my laptop or smartphone would be able to
fiddle with my finances or savage my reputation in minutes. A decent hacker
with a free afternoon could do the same—without stealing either one. It’s
happened even to particularly tech-savvy people, like Wired senior writer Matt Honan, who described how
thoroughly—and quickly—his life was turned inside out in a
recent cover story.
The government has easy access
to anything we put online, often without need for a warrant. Law enforcement at
all levels can track GPS-enabled devices with a surprising lack of drama. The
NSA mainlines Internet and telecommunications traffic into colossal data
centers for analysis and storage archiving. Defense and intelligence
agencies use highly classified “tag and track” systems to keep unbelievably
close tabs on specific individuals to an incredible—almost supernatural—degree.
The same basic technologies that allow our smartphones to navigate unfamiliar
cities and make video phone calls allow governments, particularly our own, to
deploy drone aircraft that drop bombs on the other side of the world and patrol
domestic skies with little oversight and unclear consequences. That scares a
lot of people.
The Silver Lining
Still, diligent students of
economics and liberty must ask whether having our heads in The Cloud represents
a significant departure from the past. Are we more vulnerable? Arguably not, in
view of censorship and other civil liberty abuses during the Wilson, Lincoln,
and Adams presidencies. The Defense and State departments have suffered massive
leaks. Hosni Mubarak tried to kill the Arab Spring resistance by shutting down
Egypt’s Internet, but that brought the movement vital popular attention. North
Korea’s leaders are virtually powerless to stop the influx of mobile phones
linked to the outside world via satellite. Information asymmetries between
governments and citizens will only increast. The NSA already has a tough time
processing the oceans of data we all generate. This should give us hope.
My alma mater has two mottos.
One of them makes sense: Sapientia ipsa Libertas.
Knowledge itself is liberty! Digital technology is radically democratizing
information, making it more difficult to control. Abuses are easier to
document. (Some major media firms are using iPhones and small drones to cover
events.) The Internet does not even need an inch to throw a door wide open,
only a few bytes.
Once a concept—in a video, for
example—goes viral, virtually no one can control public exposure or reaction to
it. It takes on a life of its own. The case of Invisible Children’s Kony 2012
campaign demonstrates that critiques sometimes go viral more intensely than the
subject of those critiques. Buzzfeed contributor John Herrman called
Twitter a “truth machine” to describe how the service handled falsehoods as
Hurricane Sandy hit the United States. Good information tends to be shared
online. Bad information tends to be discredited and discarded. This should make
us optimistic about the viability and vitality of a truly free marketplace for
ideas.
Technology exposes people to
ideas (like libertarianism) that they might never have been exposed to
otherwise. I owe more of my intellectual and ideological growth in the last
five years to Facebook than any other means. If people encounter a new concept
or fact, they may not care, but information is now more likely to reach those
who find it compelling. This is crucial to the Hayekian theory of social change
advanced by FEE, among others.
When an admirer asked Hayek
whether he should enter politics, Hayek admonished, “Society’s course will be
changed only by a change in ideas. First you must reach the intellectuals, the
teachers and writers, with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on
society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow.” If an idea is
firmly held by a sufficient minority (pegged by researchers at the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute at around 10% in a widely-covered study), it will become part of a
group’s culture. Then their society will be transformed.
Technology gives ordinary
people unprecedented power. We should be optimistic that it will be a force for
liberty and good in the long term.
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