Friday, February 1

"Civil liberties activists said they fear the system could be the beginnings of a surveillance infrastructure that will erode existing privacy protections. When told about the system, Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be "a massive complex system of surveillance."
"It really is a profound step for the government to be conducting background checks on a large percentage of Americans. We've never done that before," he said. "It's frightening."
Some critics also worry that law enforcement authorities will be tempted to use it for broader aims, such as snaring deadbeat parents or profiling for drug couriers.
"If you can profile for terrorists, you can profile for other things," said Richard M. Smith, an independent computer security and privacy specialist. "The computer technology is so cheap and getting so much cheaper, you just have to be careful: Turn up the volume a little bit, and we just use the air transportation system to catch everybody." "

Civil liberty concerns like this always fall through an odd loophole in the libertarian framework of my political beliefs -- namely, that I don't mind if the privacy of criminals is invaded. I understand the slippery slope problems with this idea: you don't want cops to use evidence obtained illegally, for example, even if the people it was obtained about really are criminals, because it encourages the police to violate everybody's privacy rights. But it seems to me that a large-scale database that can help pick out criminals actually helps protects everybody else's rights by cutting down on cruder forms of profiling.

The way it happens now, airlines pick on people who fit some vague definition of suspicious: i.e., I got yanked out of line when I was flying to Germany 'cause I was wearing a black leather coat, had a broken pair of nail clippers in my carry-on and looked nervous (which I was ... mainly due to the traffic jam that resulted in me getting to the airport just an hour before the flight took off.) To broaden the example, people of Middle Eastern descent are more likely to be "randomly" searched, because -- based on the relatively small amount of data available to the airlines -- such people have a greater statistical likelihood of causing problems. So, given more data, more precise forms of profiling can be done, meaning that those targeted for Mr. Rubber Glove are more likely to actually be criminals.

Fighting such databases out of concern over privacy rights seems to be misplaced. No one is complaining that the system would be used to arrest those who aren't criminals, just that criminals other than terrorists would be more likely to be caught in the web.

The problem isn't that innocents will be violated, it's that too many criminals will be arrested. We fear such systems because we don't really like all the laws; we don't actually want to catch all the deadbeat dads and drug couriers that might be flying the friendly skies. It's similar to our feelings about speed limits. Most people would be aghast if the gubmint set up a highway monitoring system that automatically ticketed anyone who sped. Such a thing wouldn't be any more of an invasion of privacy than the current system: It's just with the current system, we know we have a chance of not getting caught.

Society carries out a sort of cost/benefit analysis of breaking certain laws. We speed, and we don't mind some other people speeding -- but civilization would break down if everybody could go 80 mphs and not have to flinch every time they passed a white Crown Vic. We don't want drugs to flood the country, so the cops should stop some couriers, but they shouldn't get all draconian or anything: some drugs are OK. It's as though laws come with various comfortable enforcement rates: Murder - 100%; drugs - 80%; deadbeat dads - 60%; speeding - 30%. When enforcement rates climb too high, we complain about the methods.

That's going about it backwards. If we don't like the laws, we should get rid of them. If we're concerned that such systems will catch too many criminals, maybe we shouldn't have laws that create so many criminals.

If we don't want profiling to pick up drug couriers or deadbeat dads, then we're really saying that we're not too concerned about those activities after all.

Your thoughts?

posted at 6:33 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link