If you have never read John Brunner‘s novel “The Shockwave Rider“, I strongly recommend you do so at your earliest opportunity. Published in 1975, the novel is a fictional story about a man in a future society dominated by computer networks, corrupt governments and social upheaval. Key to the book’s plot is the division between what information government authorities can access and the information citizens can see.
In many ways the book mirrors the situation we live in today. In fact, “The Shockwave Rider” is so keenly accurate in its predictions that it’s somewhat unnerving (Brunner even coined the term “worm” to refer to a computer program that moves through a network of computers and makes changes). Vast oceans of data exist across societies throughout the world. Databases compiled by corporations, non-profits and governments store meticulous details about all of us. And in our world today there is no data access balance between “regular joes” and those governmental and corporate entities. Because data about people is so especially valuable, that divide represents a power imbalance.
Conspiracy theorists think that all these libraries of sensitive information are available at touch of a mouse to Big Brother federal agencies. While the Feds would like to have that level and ease of data access, in reality there are too many disparate databases and systems to make it so. Instead, data must often be searched through an analog network of phone calls, e-mails, Faxes and other human-to-human communications. Not to mention that a government agent even needs to get legal permission to obtain certain data, at least sometimes.
Increasingly, large corporations are a focus of such data requests. An individual case may require law enforcement agents to request very specific data from a specific business (security camera footage from a robbed store, phone records from an insurance office under fraud investigation, etcetera). But its only in recent years the US Federal government has been trying to get broad, sweeping access to large databases of personal information about its citizens.
Let’s consider the US Justice Department’s recent request to Google for near-unilateral access to the searches performed by Google users over a one week period. Google refused the request and a judge agreed. But thanks to the recent search term breach at AOL, we can see real-life examples of just how much sensitive data can be revealed through logs of search terms (In the past I’ve warned friends to be careful about searching for their own social security or credit card numbers for this very reason). In the AOL case it was just a tiny fragment of a larger database. Imagine what the Department of Justice could do with access to all of Google’s search records.
Now consider that at least some employees at Google already have this unilateral access to the search term data. Presumably Google has controls in place so that not just any employee can go rummaging through the records. But how good are those controls? How can we, as people who do not work for Google, be sure that information isn’t being abused? Cases of employees abusing their access to sensitive data are well documented, and those are only the ones disclosed to the general populace.
Google is hardly the only corporate source of personal data. AT&T actually collaborated with the Federal government to spy on the calls of American
citizens without their knowledge. Most financial institutes, due to recent
laws, are monitoring your financial transactions in order to report “suspicious” transactions to the Department of Homeland Security.
So where does that leave us? You and me, US citizens who do not work as big-time corporate employees of Google, Wachovia, ChoicePoint? While we swim in the same ocean of data and information as everyone else, we are separated from most of it, unable to perceive not only others sensitive information but in many cases our own (Inexplicably, the very businesses we deal with every day have no mechanism for allowing us access to their automated systems, yet will perform no security checks with human-to-human interactions). Is it fair that US
governments can see your personal data so easily when you yourself can not?
The Chaos Ocean can not be calmed but I hope, with further writings, to help
teach some people how to keep their heads above water.
