Historically, we conceived of privacy, which existed because:
- There was no persistent surveillance without assigning at least one human to the task.
- The reporting of human surveillance effectively was limited to oral accounts.
- Limited scope and effectiveness of record keeping and retrieval.
- People usually had private living quarters and/or wide open spaces.
In addition to the emotional sense of security provided by this isolation from government and social threats, these phenomena imposed social and economic constraints on the exercise of control:
- To achieve a mass surveillance effect, the population had to live in dense cities, with a pervasive culture of informing and general terror.
- The government only could afford to assign a limited number of individuals to the job of neutralizing dissent, therefore a top-down approach could not succeed in a mass effect without general terror.
- Social networks could be subverted by sympathizers, providing refuge to resistance cells.
- The general space for resistance action still was large even in mass surveillance, because the number of observations was low, while private living quarters and farms/grazing areas/mountains/forests provided plenty of cover for unobserved activity.
- Punishment to words and actions in the past relied on creating, maintaining, and reviewing paper records at significant expense and delays.
Therefore in the design of government, you could rely on these realities to:
- Consider that the police and military were the only major internal threats to liberty, as long as the society was relatively free. (Not really true in all social contexts e.g. blasphemy lynchings)
- Ban or limit heavy/efficient weapons at lower cost, because you could assume that the police and military would be so heavily outnumbered that a military coup could not succeed against the will of the general population.
- Consider that the amassing of evidence against an individual only could occur in an environment where that individual was the target of focused scrutiny, with an economic trail and a number of people involved, so that framing or evidence only could occur via specific conspiracy, which is prone to exposure and not easy to scale up without raising other flags.
- Act as a check on the infringement of the freedom of speech, and on totalitarian controls such as the banning of homosexuality and government-enforced family formation, because the space for action remained significant even under those constraints.
- Likewise, because the creation, maintenance of, and search/access to records was much more difficult, use of such physically cumbersome data to enforce ostracism or criminal punishment could more effectively be bounded by legal constraints.
However, we’re never going back from the era of videophones. Even if the cellular networks were dismantled, the sheer number of devices, their small size, and airplane modes, make a project of confiscation even more daunting than that of gun control. Never mind the rest of the Internet of Things, vehicle telematics, satellites, public and private mounted camera surveillance, tag readers…and now stack economically correct work from home, and the necessary terminals, on top of that.
Moreover, all records now persist at extremely low cost, and poor choices in software and hardware design have meant that individuals’ data stored in any commodity system connected to a wide area network likely already have been stolen by some government or criminal organization (those two things could be, and often are, the same). Although we as law enforcement recognize that provenance now is a major concern because of low-cost deepfakes and similar constructions, if either the population, companies, social organizations, or the government have arbitrary power such as hire and fire without cause, the threat to every person in the society persists.
Therefore we no longer can rely on these economic limiters in our pursuit of minimizing total harms across multiple competing threats and interests; we must consider that every piece of information ever collected on an individual is available and that every significant movement is tracked. As such:
- The fully-documented and well-tracked measures of effectiveness and performance that already should be implemented for economic decisions like hire and fire, become essential to the operation of a free society, as the means to identify any anti-establishment thought are instantaneous.
- You have to give every free person (and maybe even mandate, depending on the uptake) access at least to assault rifles with armor-piercing rounds, because you cannot rely on people having the freedom of movement to ambush or launder supplies during revolt; therefore you must be able to initiate lethal force without prior warning. More may be needed (e.g. RPGs), but you get the point. Additionally, you can expect that every citizen’s address and location always will be available, so the only way you’re going to mitigate the abusive lovers, business grudges, etc. is to have armed citizens who can respond on the spot. Your witness protection programs and refuges mean very little.
- You have to become very aggressive in punishing infringement on rights, particularly the freedom of speech and association, because the locations and views of every citizen are available to the government and big business, enabling a rapid and highly specific purge.
In other words, you have to have a fully lawful society, and have to accept popular actions like assassination without warning as the enforcement mechanism, because your enemies can identify and track you in near-real-time.
At the same time, because there is no meaningful privacy, there are economic policies that now are correct, because there’s no obvious means to provide the privacy that otherwise would be an offsetting benefit:
- Full release of all medical records for research.
- Release and public viewing of most business records (obvious exemptions: current R&D, recent bidding information) for economic planning, and the expanded use of patent law to protect IP, since trade secrets and copyrights now are a joke.
- Centralization of personal records, the creation of national ID cards and folios, etc.
- The end of private credit reporting and private court records, private government deliberations except in the military and certain police cells, etc.
In other words, you have to consider that everything is in the open, you are going to have well-established processes to handle matters, and you are going to have to leave people alone. We can’t get back the sense of security that privacy provided (although for sure, there was offsetting risk), but we can preserve most of the liberal society if we are committed to enforcing the just law for everyone’s benefit.