During October, a month filled with urgent headlines about a proposed law governing the wiretapping powers of the executive branch, a senior intelligence official spoke at a conference with a goal in mind.“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, told attendees of the Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s symposium in Dallas.The invitation would seem harmless enough, another attempt to stir the intellectual pot on an important issue. And stir the pot Mr. Kerr did, with his own take on what privacy means, which emerged over the weekend in an Associated Press article.“Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity,” he said, according to a transcript ][pdf]. “But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.” The future, Mr. Kerr says, is seen in MySpace and other online troves of volunteered information, and also in the the millions of commercial transactions made on the web or on the phone every day. If online merchants can be trusted, he asks, then why not federal employees, who face five years in jail and a $100,000 fine for misusing data from surveillance?To illustrate the point, Mr. Kerr described what he called an “anomalous situation”: the same people who are worried about government surveillance of e-mail are nonetheless “perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an I.S.P. who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data.” Jim Harper, a blogger at Tech Liberation, said the comparison revealed a “major flaw” in his thinking:“If you’ve identified yourself to your I.S.P.,” he appears to think, “you’ve identified yourself to me.” The folks in his world may think that way, but that’s not the way the rest of us look at it, and it’s not consistent with a sound interpretation of the Fourth Amendment or life in a free society.We routinely identify ourselves to certain parties - give up privacy in our identifiers to them - without giving up this information to the world. We may be identified to some, but we are anonymous as to all others. Thus, we have privacy.And there were many more objections from privacy-focused observers, including a declaration that Mr. Kerr “has decided to kill privacy,” an invocation of Benjamin Franklin about those who “deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” and a compact summation of Mr. Kerr’s remarks by an expert talking to The A.P.: ‘’It’s just another ‘trust us, we’re the government,’ ” said Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A writer at Ars Technica added,“It’s hard to have too much confidence when the F.B.I. is busy losing laptops and the nature of such programs appears to be one involving little oversight from independent branches of government.”But Mr. Kerr responded to concerns about oversight in the speech — not that his view won’t prompt even more references to Orwell:Privacy, I would offer, is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/an-intelligence-officials-privacy-proposal/?hp
