Reading it, one wonders if they are the words of a reactive radical, a contemporary civil libertarian, or someone who simply loves the freedom that American style liberty represents. Before disclosing its author though, let's examine the state of privacy today in light of those attacks.

 

Before attack. Even before the attacks, eroding freedom of privacy has evolved over the last half century as a result of enabling technology. The capacity to gather, store, and analyze all types of data about people, individuals and groups, has been a boon to both commercial and government users of that data. This ability has come to affect us on and off the Web, in the most insidious ways. The invasions of the privacy, that citizens of the United States are assured of, has been the ideological issue in the debate of red light cameras, cameras in high crime neighborhoods, the federal government's eavesdropping initiative on email and domestic wireless communication (known as Carnivore), and even the debate of the invasion of the bedroom. Nonetheless, not only has it made marketers more adept at niche mass marketing, but it has also made us more adept in identifying and preventing many forms of criminal activity.

 

During this time and before September 11, the daily impact of the publicly available knowledge about any individual has progressed at a terrifying rate. The best example of what that means is something a single friend told me. She explained that when well-meaning friends present prospective blind dates to her, she uses the Internet to perform information reconnaissance. Using a number of free websites, she learns quite a bit of truth about these young men. (You now how well-meaning friends can insolate the truth in dating.)

 

After attack. Since September 11, we have come to realize that despite losing control over our information, we are still not feeling safe. Thus, many of us believe that if we cede even more of our privacy to the government, we will feel and be safer. While businesses and private citizens may have a moral albeit not necessarily legal responsibility to enforce assurances of privacy, these privacy protections are clearly imposed upon government by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

 

Nonetheless, of late, our citizens are supportive of stripped protections. I've just pulled some examples from recent surveys and articles.

Lack of privacy is the Orwell warning of 1984 that many would say is an impossible extreme for society. Indeed, aside from the provocative thought it encourages, his model of a repressive and oppressive society is inconceivable to us. Nevertheless, world history and experience of governmental interference in personal and business life is precisely what led our country's early leaders to promise the citizenry of the new country that we shall not repeat the abuses of another time.

 

To be clear, I am not suggesting that loss of our privacy will be abused by most of our law enforcement officers or employees of other regulatory agencies. But even in the freedom of this country, abuses are possible by renegade employees who subvert new powers to their own ends. There are a myriad of examples of substantive abuses by government employees of powers defined. Let's not forget the Congressional Hearings about an IRS that was out of control, or the claims about big city Police Departments that were out of control over the last two decades. Again, even with new diminished privacy, police state is not likely, but overzealousness is. Who could forget the poor guard in Atlanta who was persecuted wrongly for a bomb in Olympic Park.

 

Our society has established significant measures to balance individual and group rights and our reaction to serious risks to those balances should not be permitted to erode what little remains of out privacies in technologically sophisticated times. What to do?

By the way, in case you were curious, the author at the beginning of this column was Benjamin Franklin. Yes, the same Mr. Franklin famous as statesman, author, and inventor. I am sure he would say, as did Dennis Burke in USA Today, "Now we must choose between safety and freedom, we must not flinch if freedom means anything."