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| A CONVERSATION WITH... | |
 June 26, 2000 
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Jeffery Rosen has been warning about current threats to privacy in a series of articles and in a new book, "The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America." Rosen is Associate Professor at the George Washington University Law School, and legal affairs editor of "The New Republic." Thanks for being with us. JEFFREY ROSEN: Thank you so much for having me. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is privacy more at risk now than in the past? JEFFREY ROSEN: As thinking and writing and reading and gossip and sex and health care increasingly take place in cyberspace, there's a growing danger that intimate bits of personal information, originally disclosed in one context, may be monitored and recorded and taken out of context in the future. So, for example, if I spend a decade gossiping in a chat group, I might find that a decade of my former postings may be misinterpreted years later, and I might be comfortable joking about intimate information with my virtual friends... ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Let me interrupt you right here. How would that happen? If you're in a chat room and it's on the Internet, you mean it's there forever and ever. JEFFREY ROSEN: So this is the story of James Rutt, the Internet executive who tried to erase his own past. He'd spent a decade gossiping in the well, and all of a sudden he's appointed head of Netscape Solutions, and he realizes that a decade of his dirty jokes and foolish musings about his weight problem may be used by his business competitors. Now, fortunately for Rutt, he uses technology called scribble that allowed him to go back and erase a decade of his own past. And one of my goals in the book is to try to think through technological and legal and political solutions that allow us to reconstruct in cyberspace the kind of privacy, anonymity, and pseudonymity and opacity that all of us take for granted in real space. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay, we'll get to solutions in a minute, but first, the nature of the problem. So... Chat rooms. What else on the Internet is a problem? JEFFREY ROSEN: Privacy protects us against the indignity of being judged out of context. So in a world where all of my reading habits, for example, can be monitored-- not only the magazines that I read, but the amount of time that I spend skimming them can be monitored by all-seeing advertising networks; where my email can be resurrected from employers even after it's deleted-- people are learning that the "delete" button doesn't make it go away, it just lurks there and can be retrieved years later; where my quickstream data can be resurrected: All of us can be misjudged on the basis of isolated bits of personal information, and I make a case that there's a difference between information and knowledge. If all you know about me is the latest book that I read or the latest music that I downloaded on the Internet, you might think I'm one kind of person, whereas in fact I assure you I'm much more complicated and interesting in all my wondrous dimensions, and, you know, my friends know this and my students know this and my family knows this. They all know me in different contexts. I present different parts of myself to each of these people. But we've just met, and you wouldn't be able to e me whole. Privacy protects us from the danger of confusing information with knowledge. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now there are other problems that you see, other threats to privacy right now. What are some of those other threats? JEFFREY ROSEN: I was struck by the fact, in writing this book, that the part of the Starr investigation that Monica Lewinsky was most upset about was the retrieval of her unsent love letters from her home computer. She said, "What a violation. I felt like I wasn't a citizen of this country." 200 years ago, if you asked the framers of the Bill of Rights what was the paradigm case of an unreasonable search or seizure forbidden by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, they would've pointed to the example of private diaries. Indeed, there was a famous case in the 18th century where John Wilkes, the great British rogue and Bob Packwood-like character who published an 18th-century "Drudge Report," had his diary seized by Lord Halifax, the Ken Starr figure, who broke into his desk drawers and seized his diaries, and he objected, "my most intimate thoughts have been exposed." He sued in trespass, and he won £1,000 in damages, a ruinous amount in its day, and his case was galvanizing to the colonists. So I tried to trace in my book the slow, sad, almost imperceptible eroding of these precious constitutional protections, so that private papers, which once had the highest degree of protection, are now vulnerable to involuntary exposure. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You know, I can tell here, and it was very clear in the book, this is really important to you. You... This is... Privacy is tremendously important to you, isn't it? JEFFREY ROSEN: I feel very passionate about this subject in a way that I haven't with other legal subjects, partly because it's so rich intellectually to understand this evolution, but also I know how important it is to me personally to express myself and even to write a book. In the process of writing the book, I was reminded about how important it is to have backstage areas, spaces where we can let down our hair, share rough drafts with friends, have half-baked arguments talked out of ourselves, and basically allow ourselves to refine the arguments that are necessary for more public presentation. Without these backstage areas in the workplace and at home, why, creativity, individuality, eccentricity, even love are impossible. If I can't disclose parts of myself to my most intimate friends that I withhold from the rest of the world, I won't disclose those confidences to begin with. There's nothing more important than privacy for leading fully self-actualized lives. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The title of the book is so interesting, and it's part of your concern here. What does the "Unwanted Gaze" come from? JEFFREY ROSEN: The "Unwanted Gaze": It comes from a beautiful doctrine in Jewish law called Hezzekh Reah, which means "the injury caused by seeing," and this arises in the law governing what happens when your neighbor puts up a window overlooking you in a common courtyard. According to medieval authorities, you not only have the right to order that the window be removed, but also that your neighbor not gaze upon you, because Jewish law recognizes that it's uncertainty about whether or not we're being observed that causes us to lead more constricted lives in private places. Even the smallest intrusion by the unwanted gaze causes damage, said Jewish authorities, because the injury caused by seeing cannot be measured. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you say about the argument that if I have nothing to hide, I don't mind that people know what I'm doing? JEFFREY ROSEN: I want to argue against this with every passion that I have in my being. Privacy is not primarily about secrecy; it's about opacity. It's about the ability to protect parts of ourselves in different contexts. I would be... even if I read the most innocent books imaginable, if all you know about me is that I've just listened to the music of Richard Strauss, for example, which I like, and it's a little weird, you'll think I'm that kind of person. I'm really not; there's much more going on to me than that; and that's why it's very wrong to say that the answer to misjudgment is just more information, because information is no substitute for the genuine knowledge that can only emerge slowly over time. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So what can be done about this? I know there are lots of... This could take some time, but technical solutions, for example, talking about the Internet. JEFFREY ROSEN: There are technological solutions. There's been a range of programs with "Austin Powers"-like names-- ziplip, zero knowledge, disappearing ink-- that can enable me to cover my electronic tracks, send anonymous email, and browse the Web anonymously. Even more importantly, they allow us to express ourselves pseudonymously, so I can reveal part of myself. I can tell one Web site that I'm over 18 or I have green eyes, and not tell them my actual identity. The problem with these technologies-- and they're very helpful, and they're exploding every day-- is that they have a kind of "spy versus spy"-like mentality. Right now it's not really socially acceptable to act like Maxwell Smart every time you take to the Web. So although it's important to inform ourselves, I think technology is only one of the many options. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What other options? Legal options? JEFFREY ROSEN: There are legal options. Congress could pass laws prohibiting information gathered for one purpose from being disclosed from another without the consent of the individual concerned. Double Click, the nation's largest advertising broker, got into tremendous trouble when it tried to link our actual identities with our online and offline browsing habits because people in America don't want to leave like citizens in East Germany, where we have, you know, dossiers of all of our most intimate activities. But my belief, in the end, is it's a range of options that necessary, is that one of the most important is politics. People have to be persuaded about why privacy is important and they have to care about it. It was politics that persuaded Double Click to stop compiling its dossiers. It was politics that persuaded Real Networks, the largest music purveyor and jukebox on the net, to stop collecting unique identification numbers that linked my actual identity with my music preferences or gave it that potential. It was politics that forced Intel to remove the unique chips from its word processors that made it possible to link every document that I type with my actual identity. As long as people care about privacy, we can stop the surveillors in their tracks. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Jeffery Rosen, thank you very much. JEFFREY ROSEN: Thank you so much for having me. |
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