September 11, Ground Zero, a huge hole into the heart of the most powerful nation on the planet, a hole in which several certainties have been lost, among them also the right to privacy, “the right to be left alone, the most comprehensive of right and the most valued by a free people” seems to be disappeared.

As matter of the fact it was maybe a process already ongoing which has been speeded up by contingent historical events. Actually a society in which information is power leaves no room to the possibility that governmental bodies relinquish the control of the information.
It is an historical commonplace that individual rights be infringed on behalf of alleged superior collective interests. Once again the privacy right, although legally well founded all over the occidental world, has to surrender in front of the value of public security.

Thus, in the last years, we witnessed continuous attacks to our privacy, which have been made more efficient by the extraordinary technological development:  PATRIOT Act, Homeland Security Act, art. 15 of the Directive 58/02and data retention schemes enacted all over Europe, Cybercrime Convention, Echelon, Total Information Awareness (TIA) Project, now formally revoked by the US Congress, but undercover financed by the presidency, investigative tools like Carnivore or Magic Lantern, the Governmental Technical Assistance Centre in UK, the Chinese Golden Shield, the collection of data regarding the Internet user surfing habits and the sale of such data on the open market where governments, law firms, companies, etc. regularly purchase them, video surveillance systems all over the world, especially in Europe, technology as Traffic Master, face recognition software (such as Smart Face and Facelet) that can be found in shops, stadiums and public areas, the Snap Track technology, the UK Celldar Project, Loyalty Card that are able to register whatever we buy and all our tastes, RFID, the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II...

Having to face all this, we wonder if it is true that “u already have zero privacy, get over it”, as Scott McNeely, SumMicroSystem CEO, stated. We wonder if a privacy Code, as the Italian one, which makes everything personal data, a great quantity of data sensitive and substantially all the behaviours treatment, it is not an hypocrisy to give the false perception of the existence of something that is absent.

It is necessary to look for new solutions fitting with the society in which, willing or not, we have to live and in which “scientia potentia est”.

Maybe the solution is not to protect all information but only that information which can really harm people when diffused, such as medical or psychiatric records and genetic data. Maybe the solution is the openness of the system and not the secrecy.

Technology can help as well as can threat privacy. If a global network exists and everyone can be watched, the way to defend privacy is to use the global surveillance to keep under control the watchers. We could think about supervisory bodies and centres that are dedicated to control how the information collected be managed and used, informing the average person about the information management and the ways to defend the right to privacy.

In fact very often people tend to undervalue the importance to defend their rights not to be under surveillance or deprived of their personal data. The problem, which has been defined “privacy myopia” by M. Fromkin (the Death of Privacy), is that any one bit of information about ourselves does not seem that valuable to us and we do not consider useful to make efforts to protect that bit we are losing. Thus bits by bits we lose important portion of our right to be left alone without realising it.
It is compulsory to be the principal players of our right to be alone without expecting that someone will concede to us that right, on the contrary knowing that none will renounce to the attempt of controlling such a precious data flow.
It will be necessary not to trust the protection coming from the system, as the system is not trustworthy, but to be active protagonist in creating our spaces for being alone.

In his book “The Transparent Society” David Brin describes two communities of the future that look similar, each one clean, orderly, with surveillance cameras on every building and without crime, but in one all the surveillance devices connect to governmental authorities, in the other to a net which allows everyone to watch.

Copyright SCiNT - avv. Giancarlo Frosio

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