Our safety doesn’t depend on secrecy

First: nothing will to halt the flood of vision in our world. Faster than Moore’s law, cameras get cheaper, better, more mobile, more numerous and smaller each year. Your Google Glass may provoke strong objections today. But when they vanish invisibly into contact lenses, how will you ban them? If laws forbid such things, only normal folk will be thwarted; elites will have the new omniscience anyway. Generally, when people call for technology prohibition, it means they are thinking only about today, never about ten years from now, or twenty.

Second: you won’t achieve safety, or even privacy, by reflexively hiding or trying to blind others. Information leaks! It copies itself with the ease and speed of electrons. If the NSA and FBI routinely crack open, should you depend upon an even more illusory fantasy of secrecy?

It’s not that western citizens have nothing to fear! Our core mythology – Suspicion of Authority – fills every movie and novel, for good reason. Across 6000 years, the lords who ruled all human societies used information to cement power, while keeping people ignorant. Our recent ancestors won for us some fragile freedom and privacy, and our instinct is to protect these treasures at all cost. But can you name for me one time in history when elites let themselves be blinded? As the author Robert Heinlein said: “A privacy law only makes the spy-bugs smaller.”

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Transparency is the trick to protect privacy

And yes, transparency is also the trick to protecting privacy, if we empower citizens to notice when neighbors infringe upon it. Isn’t that how you enforce your own privacy in restaurants, where people leave each other alone, because those who stare or listen risk getting caught?

Most of us want the same thing, to preserve our recent renaissance of freedom, science, tolerance and progress, of vast knowledge and some privacy. Sometimes these desiderata come into apparent conflict, but we must never accept the zero-sum notion of a tradeoff between freedom, safety and opportunity – a dismal, foolish notion. We can have all of those good things, but not by cowering in shadows or demanding that others be blinded.

Resist the dismal reflex to answer modern problems with secrecy. There is almost always a solution that works better by applying transparency and accountability to the mighty. We will remain more adaptable and fiercely sovereign citizens, if we are empowered with light.

http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/david-brin--2/7535-why-transparency-will-save-privacy