Government & Our Privacy

Government & Our Privacy by David Beers   David Beers works with a software company in Houston. He is the former debate coach of the St. John's School in Houston and has a degree in economics from George Mason University.

For many reasons people have much more reason to be concerned about invasions of their privacy by the state than by private businesses and organizations. As argued elsewhere in this study guide, businesses use information they collect about us to make offers -offers which we as consumers can refuse or in many cases tune out completely without repercussion. Contrary to popular opinion, businesses also have strong profit incentives to keep information they collect confidential and to protect their reputation for confidentiality. Businesses also profit by designing and selling technologies that are in demand by people who crave additional protection from zealous marketers and thieves. Government, on the other hand, has a different modus operandi and a different set of incentives. As Solveig Singleton of the Cato Institute has pointed out, "Government databases pose a serious threat that private databases do not for one fundamental reason: government alone may control the police, the armed forces, and the courts." We can protect our privacy from private marketers by limiting our use of credit cards (or by choosing credit card firms that promise not to reveal information about us to marketers). We can hang up on telemarketers who call during dinner. But we dare not do that to the Internal Revenue Service.2 Government's possession of detailed information about its citizens has never increased the peoples' freedom; rather it has been a precursor to depredations of freedom. Some of these depredations have been dramatic, such as the personal information systems used to identify and locate Jews in Nazi Germany. Even relatively free countries have found their governments willing to trample that freedom when tempted by the power such information provides. Answers to questions about race and national origin in the 1940 U.S. census were used by our own government to force Japanese Americans into internment camps at about the same time as the Holocaust was occurring in Germany.3 More recently, our government's prying into the private choices of consenting adults' choices about what drugs they use, for example, has resulted in U.S. incarceration higher than any industrialized nation. As enforcement measures against victimless crimes are stepped up and the power of police and courts to invade homes and monitor activities increases, Anthony Giddens' reminder that "totalitarianism is, first of all, an extreme focusing of surveillance"4 should give us pause. Less dramatic, but perhaps more dangerous for its mundanity is the effect that systematic government surveillance has on individual autonomy. Even when databases are maintained for purposes the public considers benign, knowledge of their existence and ignorance of the use to which they are actually put creates an atmosphere of uncertainty, even intimidation, that is destructive to human independence.5 The government's use of force has an unique mantle of legitimacy which gives it unusual power. This power need rarely be invoked to control its subjects if there is sufficient mystery surrounding the nature and use of the information it collects. Paul Schwartz observes that the extent of government data collection and surveillance in America today already induces an attitude of passive compliance that enables government control to grow unchecked. Americans no longer know how their personal information will be applied, who will gain access to it, and what decisions will be made with it. The resulting uncertainty increases the pressure for conformity. Individuals whose personal data are shared, processed and stored by a mysterious, incalculable bureaucracy will be more likely to act as the government wishes them to behave.6 Back