There are many forces that are coming together at this moment in time that point to the need for a constitutionally enshrined right to privacy. These different issues come from a variety of directions, domestic spying, attacks on the right to control your own body, increasingly easy access to your life through technology (see
AmericaBlog's cell phone record sales), but all are centered around a shared perception that we have the right to private lives, private thoughts, private spaces, free from the prying eyes of others, and that these privacies are increasingly threatened. The threats are coming from our own government and the rapidly changing nature of technology. Trends seem to point to this problem only getting worse. We need to act.
Many people are aware, or becoming aware, of the threats of identity theft and privacy issues around reproductive rights. We're becoming aware of gaps in our assumptions around domestic spying and privacy of our conversations. The Patriot Act brought up the issue of sneak and peak searches without a warrant and the loss of privacy of our library records. (Granted, not a lot of people were even aware of that right)
What I think most people are not aware of is the role that technology has played, and will increasingly play, in our loss of individual privacy. Huge databases exist that store massive amounts of information about you. As you shop in your local grocery store, your purchasing information and patterns are being tracked. If you use anything but cash, and if you use one of those ubiquitous discount cards, that tracking can be linked to you personally. I know that now when I shop, even if I don't buy any baby items I get coupons printed out for me that include coupons for infant formula.
The recent kurfuffles around total information awareness efforts merely skirt the surface of what is quite possible for private companies, and what will become more possible for government organizations as laws against warrantless searches become ignored. If NSA can listen in our electronic communication without a warrant, what's to stop them from including electronic transactions being counted as "communication"?
Data storage and data mining are two of the biggest growth areas of business applications. Everyone is trying to find patterns and nuggets of information in these massive dumps of raw data they already own. Insurance companies are realizing that they have very valuable mountains of information in their claims systems. Health insurers can use millions of claims to find patterns of who gets what and correlations between one disease and another. This information could be increadibly useful for medical research, it could also be used to refine actuarial tables to deny, or add charges to certain classes of patients. (reducing the rates of some patients? nah!!)
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Technological change appears to happen in a linear fashion from the perspective of the short term. We seem to be humming along with new gadgets and faster computers at a fairly regular pace. This is illusion. Moore's law, and others, show that technological change is logrithmic, not linear. About every 1.5 years computer chips double in processing power. Chips get smaller, cheaper and more powerful by orders of magnitude regular as clockwork. As computer power increases, the rate of progress increases. At the current rate of increase, according to Ray Kurzweil, if you use the rate of technological change from the year 2000, in this century we will see not 100 years of change (linear), but 20,000 years (logrithmic progression).
The impact of this will soon become appearant. As RFID chips become imbeded in products to track their inventory status on a wider basis, as people begin wearing computers, or even embedding computers on them, as we work and play and read and think more and more "online" what happens to the boundaries between ourselves and our environment? What happens to our ability to lead a private life?
Already, that ability is vastly undermined. Just imagine trying to live without leaving an electronic record. You can't. First off, you need a social security number. You would have a hard time finding a decent job without one. You also would have a hard time finding housing. All apartment complexes now run credit checks. Most employers now run background checks. You'd have to pay cash for absolutely everything. You also could not fly on an airplane or drive a car.
Now imagine our electronic, interconnected world when we begin to augment our biological intelligence with electronic intelligence. Far fetched you say? I do it every day. I have a PDA and a cell phone that remember numbers and appointments for me. I use email to communicate with others, and the web to look up stuff so I don't have to remember it. This augmentation will only increase. Futurists differ in their optimism or pessimism of the coming revolution, but few differ in the conclusions that it is coming, and coming in many of our lifetimes. This revolution is what Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity.
This revolution will mark the moment when machine intelligence becomes more sophisticated and powerful than human intelligence and we increasingly merge our bioloical intelligence with machines to become something more. This is not some wild-eyed, sci-fi future for the 22nd century, people are already starting to do this. The horizon for this is conservatively more like 40 years, not 100.
The biggest impact on our privacy comes when the boundary between biological and mechanical is breached, when we need to access mechanical memory or mechanical processing power seamlessly. This breaks down the barrier between our "selves", our most personal space inside our head, and external objects. Once this happens, the reprocussions can be extreme. What happens when a future "total information awareness" initiative can include your personal thoughts, opinions, private beliefs?
We have to enshrine an absolute right to privacy of thought, and a conditional right to privacy of deed (subject to impartial judicial review) in our Constitution. It may not really make a difference, but without such a barrier, the invasion of our innermost privacy is inevitable. We need to act now, not wait for the revolution to begin, because it's already underway.
Update: In just minutes after posting this I ran across an article about using MRI's for lie detection. It's impracticle now, but then so were hand-held calculators and mobile phones the size of a candy-bar not so long ago.