Speech - 8^th Feb. 2006

Your Privacy and Freedom: The Facts May Seem Like Fiction

You are at a senior at UMKC, and can escape your required public speaking course no longer. So you head over to the public library in search of a topic. You stumble upon “The Communist Manifesto”, pick it up, and turn it over to read the summary. You figure that this will make for quite a controversial speech, so you pickup four more books on the topic. Well you have neglected grooming for the past weeks, and so, as you check out the books, the clerk wearily eyes your scruffy beard, and tags the books; to show that they have been checked out you presume. A few hours later, you are home searching the Internet for supporting materials, falling asleep at the keyboard an hour later. You don't know how much time gone by, but you wake up in a dark room, with a light shining directly at you, and several voices asking you questions about your recent “interests”. Was it the books? Was it the fact that you went over to South America last summer? Or could it be all the downloaded music on your computer?

Sure, this sounds like science fiction. And sure, you live in a country home to democracy and freedom of speech. But how free are you really? Technologies exist today that can unearth most of what you do everyday. You may not be a terrorist yourself, but what of your privacy? Can you really say whatever you want without fear of punishment? And does this lack of privacy adversely affect your freedom? We will answer this, and also see that a trend has developed where by corporations sell away our privacy for their own economic gain, along with the many new ways to spy on individuals.

So firstly, we need to establish why we should even care about our privacy. on the 9^th of February 2006i, Reporters Without Borders, ran an article reporting that a popular Internet company, Yahoo, had handed over personal information on one of their users to the Chinese authorities. An Internet journalist, a Mr. Li Zhi, had in 2003 been given an eight year prison sentence based mainly on those electronic records. This breach of Mr. Li Zhi's privacy led directly to the loss of his freedom.

Most of you identify freedom as ones ability to do what they want, within the law, whenever they so desire. Of course, this a rather attractive concept, but has a fundamental flaw: what happens when the laws change? Furthermore, what if these new, more restrictive laws only affect five percent of the population, and you are within that five percent? It is then that you may see that the level of your privacy very much affects your freedom. If tomorrow your every private act which led from poor judgment were to come to light, you may very well be taken into custody.

Keeping this in mind, let's consider the seemingly unrelated issue of the trend of cooperations using private information for economic gain. The Electronic Privacy Information Centerii goes to great lengths to detail the efforts of companies which actively seek, gather, manipulate and sell the data of every day people like you and I. Profiling, as it is called, is a big business: consumers, patients and students are their regular targets. Companies such as American Student Listiii start with a base price of $65 per million individuals: this rate quickly rises with additional information on the individuals. A June 2000 article of CNET News.comiv reports on several failed companies which have turned to the selling of customer information in an attempt to pay of creditors. I am sure many of you are familiar with the discount cards given by the likes of CVS, and Oscos to their customers. But did you think that those cards were given to for your benefit only? Stores give them out so that they can track your purchases. I shall leave you to ponder why they would do that. Remember, to them, you are just a number from which cash flows.

However, the biggest, yet probably the most discrete, threat to your privacy comes from new technologies that make it easier to spy on individuals. In a February article of 2004 , the American Civil Liberties Unionv reported on the MATRIX program: a federally funded program which uses computer systems to find and collect information on people by pulling data from commercial and government databases. The 6^th of February 2006 issue of the Christian Science Monitorvi reported that “The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, link far-flung information from blogs and e-mail, to government records and intelligence reports, and search for patterns of terrorist activity.” An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Lee Tien, was quoted saying “We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere. We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots.”

on the 6^th of February, the EE Timesvii reported on the development of wireless identification which is ten times, or more, thinner than paper. Four days later, SecuirtyFocus.comviii reported that a Cincinnati based surveillance company began requiring implants of microchips into their employees which utilized similar wireless identification technology. This technology is called RFID, or radio frequency identification. You may not have heard of it before, because mainstream news agencies such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox News do not run these stories. Yet, according to an article at CNET News.com, as early as January of 2003, one of the largest supermarket chains, Wal-Mart, began testing of RFID to track their products. RFID technology is as capable of tracking clothing as it is of tracking unaware individuals. I assure you, we will be encountering a lot more on RFID in time, whether we realize it or not.

In conclusion, we have seen that there is in fact a direct relationship between our privacy and our freedom. And while we may go along unaware, executives happily line their pockets with the sales of our personal information; and the technology only progresses further. So, lest we fall victim, and trade pieces of our soul for false security, we must keep informed. And so, I leave you with a thought from Benjamin Franklin: “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”