“Surveillance technology. The Universal Panopticon” è il titolo del saggio in cui David Friedman si occupa della privacy del futuro.
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Tutto cominciò in Inghilterra…
…trend began in Britain a decade ago, in the city of King's Lynn, where sixty remote controlled video cameras were installed to scan known "trouble spots," reporting directly to police headquarters. The resulting reduction in street crime exceeded all predictions…
Le telecamere furono un successone: calo drastico nel crimine e collasso nei costi della sorveglianza. Ormai il futuro era tracciato.
L’idea di fondo era quella di Bentham: sorvegliare tutto da un unico punto d’osservazione…
…In the early nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, one of the oddest and most original of English thinkers, designed a prison where every prisoner could be watched at all times. He called it the Panopticon…
Le telecamere nei posti pubblici o aperti al pubblico sono già da tempo una realtà…
… In the United States, cameras have long been used in department stores to discourage shoplifting. More recently they have begun to be used to apprehend drivers who run red lights…
Ma si possono immaginare molti altri usi possibili, facciamo il caso delle emissioni inquinanti delle automobili…
…Consider the problem of controlling auto emissions… One could build a much better system using modern technology. Set up unmanned detectors that measure emissions by shining a beam of light through the exhaust plume of a passing automobile; identify the automobile by a snapshot of the license plate…
Altro esempio: cellulari e traffico…
… Another application of large-scale surveillance already being experimented with takes advantage of the fact that cell phones continually emit positioning cues… By monitoring the signals from drivers' phones, it is possible to observe traffic flows. That is very useful information if you want to advise drivers to route around a traffic jam, or locate an accident by the resulting cluster of phones. Currently it is anonymous information, locating a phone but not identifying its owner. As technology evolves that may change…
All’apparenza nessun problema, solo comodità e una quantità di problemi risolti…
… Few would consider it objectionable to have a police officer wandering around a park or standing on a street corner, keeping an eye out for purse snatchers and the like. Video cameras on poles are merely a more convenient way…
L’uso spot della sorveglianza sembra innocuo, ma l’uso pervasivo consentirà di ricostruire l’intera tua vita…
… A cop on the street corner may see you, he may even remember you, but he has no way of combining everything he sees with everything that every other cop sees and so reconstructing your daily life… large fractions of your doings are an open book to anyone with access to the appropriate records…
Si tratta di una potenziale perdita completa della privacy.
Oltretutto, un conto è l’uso limitato e legale della tecnologia di sorveglianza, un altro l’uso pervasivo e illegale, magari da parte di privati.
… Lots of people own video cameras and those cameras are getting steadily smaller… The owner of a few dozen of them could collect a lot of information about his neighbors…
Sarà possibile conoscere tutto del vicino… Il caso della marijuana…
… We have already had court cases over whether it is or is not a search to deduce marijuana growing inside a house by using an infrared detector to measure its temperature from the outside…
Il caso delle conversazioni private…
… We already have technologies that make it possible to listen to a conversation by bouncing a laser beam off a window…
La tesi di David Brin: la privacy è destinata a sparire, prendiamo le giuste contromisure…
… Assume, for the moment, that the offense wins out over the defense - that preventing other people from spying on you becomes impractical. What options remain? Brin argues that privacy will no longer be one of them…
Soluzione: imporre (o comunque auspicare) la trasparenza totale…
… He proposes as an alternative to privacy universal lack of privacy: the transparent society. The police can watch you - but someone is watching them. The entire system of video cameras, including cameras in every police station, is publicly accessible…. Parents can keep an eye on their children, children on their parents, spouses on each other, employers on employees and vice versa, reporters on cops and politicians…
Il ragionamento: il governo e i soggetti più potenti prima o poi si avvarranno della nuova tecnologia (quel che è possibile diverrà realtà), meglio allora rendere libero l’accesso alle info in modo che la “guerra” non sia asimmetrica.
Vediamo cosa c’è di buono nella società della trasparenza ipotizzata da Brin.
Il problema del “chi controlla i controllori” è in parte risolto: il caso Rodney King…
… Qui custodes ipsos custodiet? "Who shall guard the guardians?" … The transparent society offers a possible solution. Consider the Rodney King case. A group of policemen captured a suspect and beat him up… Unfortunately for the police, a witness got the beating on videotape, with the result that several of the officers ended up in prison… In Brin's world, every law enforcement agent knows that he is on candid camera…
Ma c’è un problema: la trasparenza selettiva. Difficile pensare che qualcuno non resti in una posizione di controllo…
… Brin's version does not seem likely. All of the information will be flowing through machinery controlled by some level of government…
L’esempio della polizia…
…If police are setting up cameras in police stations, they can arrange for a few areas to be accidentally left uncovered…
Ma ammettiamo che la tecnologia sia talmente invasiva da impedire di fatto ogni controllo asimmetrico…
… The situation gets more interesting in a world where technological progress enables private surveillance on a wide scale, so that every location where interesting things might happen, including every police station, has flies on the wall watching what happens and reporting back to their owners…
Nascerebbe un mercato privato delle info riservate: una società trasparente non voluta dalla politica ma dalla società…
… information is valuable to others, it can be shared. Governments might try to restrict such sharing. But in a world of strong privacy that will be hard to do, since in such a world information transactions will be invisible to outside parties…one can imagine a future where Brin's transparent society is produced not by government but by private surveillance… The information will be produced privately only if the producer can both use it himself and sell it to others. So a key requirement for a privately generated transparent society is a well-organized market for information."…
Ma la trasparenza totale è anche pericolosa.
L’azzeramento della privacy è di fatto un ritorno al passato, quando si viveva tutti insieme…
… One might instead view it as a step into the past. The privacy that most of us take for granted is to a considerable degree a novelty, a product of rising incomes in recent centuries. In a world where many people shared a single residence, where a bed at the inn was likely to be shared by two or three strangers…
L’esempio delle isole Samoa…
… consider a primitive society such as Samoa. Multiple families share a single house -without walls… the community is small enough to make gossip… Infants are trained early on not to make noise. Adults rarely express hostility.'…
In una piccola comunità il pettegolezzo è potente quanto internet.
Si parlerebbe molto meno, il politically correct impererebbe, i caratteri meno conflittuali avrebbero più opportunità ma soprattutto si svilupperebbero lingue e codici esoterici, un po’ come fanno i genitori quando in presenza dei figli parlano una lingua straniera…
… to communicate in code, to use words or expressions that your intimates will correctly interpret and others will not. For a milder version of the same approach, consider parents who talk to each other in a foreign language when they do not want their children to understand…
La società della trasparenza sarebbe la società dell’ipocrisia all’ennesima potenza…
… In Brin's future transparent society, many of us will become less willing to express our opinions of our boss, employees, ex-wife, or present husband in any public place. People will become less expressive and more self-contained, conversation bland or cryptic…
Ma perché molti di noi considerano la privacy un bene prezioso?
La privacy perfetta la ottengo pensando tra me e me, ma anche in quel caso è possibile immaginare violazioni…
… Think of "privacy" as shorthand for an individual's ability to control other people's access to information about him… I have almost complete privacy with regard to my own thoughts… If someone invented an easy and accurate way of reading minds, privacy would be radically reduced even if there were no change in my legal rights.'…
Aumentare la privacy è un bene o un male?
La privacy ha dei chiari vantaggi…
… The reason I value my privacy is straightforward: Information about me in the hands of other people sometimes permits them to gain at my expense. They may do so by stealing my property - if, for example, they know when I will not be home… my privacy protects me from burglary - in which privacy produced a net benefit, since the gain to a burglar is normally less than the loss to his victim
Se il ladro sa che mi assento, andrà a colpo sicuro. Certo, io potrei essere il ladro ma il vantaggio netto della privacy resta.
D’altronde se io voglio cedere info che mi riguardano, posso farlo come voglio, la privacy non me lo impedisce…
… Information about me in other people's hands may also benefit me - for example, the information that I am honest and competent. But privacy does not prevent that information from being available to them…
C’è un caso in cui però la privacy è un costo…
… One of the risks of bargaining is bargaining breakdown when a seller overestimates the price a buyer is willing to pay or a buyer makes the corresponding mistake the other way and the deal falls through, making both parties worse off than if they had each more accurately read the other…
La privacy avvantaggia chi bluffa, e questo potrebbe rappresentare un costo, per esempio, a causa dei sospetti infondati che ingenera, potrebbe non far chiudere contratti convenienti ad entrambe le parti.
… Privacy makes it harder to know things about other people… It looks as though privacy produces, on average, a net loss in situations where parties are seeking information about each other in order to improve the terms of a voluntary transaction, since it increases the risk of bargaining breakdown.`…
Conclusione: la privacy ci avvantaggia negli scambi involontari (furti) e ci svantaggia in quelli volontari (commercio)…
… In situations involving involuntary transactions, privacy produces a net gain if it is being used to protect other rights (assuming that those rights have been defined in a way that makes their protection desirable) and a net loss if it is being used to violate other rights (with the same assumption)…
E la politica? Il rapporto tra governo e cittadini è quasi sempre di natura “involontaria”…
… Governments engage in involuntary transactions on an enormously larger scale…
La privacy, in altri termini, consente al cittadino di proteggersi dal governo, è questa la sua funzione fondamentale…
… While I can protect myself from my fellow citizens with locks and burglar alarms, I can protect myself from government actors only by keeping information about me out of their hands….
La privacy è come la libera circolazione delle armi: un modo per difendersi dagli abusi governativi.
Come giudicare questo scudo? Semplice: è buona se il governo è cattivo, è cattiva se il governo è buono…
… If government is the modern equivalent of Plato's philosopher-king, individual privacy simply makes it harder for government to do good. If, on the other hand, a government is merely a particularly large and well-organized criminal gang, stealing as much as it can from the rest of us, individual privacy against government as an unambiguously good thing…
Chi ama la privacy implicitamente giudica l’azione di governo…
… Most Americans appear, judging by expressed views on privacy, to be close enough to the latter position…
La privacy, per esempio, favorisce l’evasione fiscale.
Difficile che il progetto della società trasparente possa reggere con un Hitler al potere, ci sarà sempre asimmetria…
… technology could enable a tyranny that Hitler or Stalin might envy. Even if we accept Brin's optimistic assumption that the citizens are as well informed about the police as the police are about the citizens, it is the police who have the guns…
Ma ricordiamoci comunque che nell’ipotesi di Brin la privacy non è un’opzione: il governo – Renzi o Hitler – se potrà violare la privacy, prima o poi lo farà (vedi l’accesso nei c/c personali). Solo per ristabilire la simmetria si auspica l’avvento di una tecnologia altamente intrusiva disponibile per tutti…
… It does not follow that Brin's prescription is wrong. His argument, after all, is that privacy will simply not be an option, either because the visible benefits of surveillance are so large or because the technology will make it impossible to prevent it. If he is right, his transparent society may at least be better than the alternative…
Problema: le info saranno disponibili per tutti ma saranno anche falsificabili. Esempio della causa di divorzio per tradimento…
… My wife is suing me for divorce on grounds of adultery. In support of her claim, she presents videotapes, taken by hidden cameras, that show me making love to three different women, none of them her. My attorney asks for a postponement to investigate the new evidence. When the court reconvenes, he submits his own videotape. The jury observes my wife making love, consecutively, to Humphrey Bogart, Napoleon, her attorney, and the judge. When quiet is restored in the courtroom, my attorney presents the judge with the address of the video effects firm that produced the tape…
L’unica soluzione è affidarsi sempre alla tecnologia…
… There are possible technological fixes - ways of using encryption technology to build a camera that digitally signs its output, demonstrating that that sequence was taken by that camera at a particular time…
Altro argomento correlato: senza privacy sarà molto difficile delinquere. O comunque sarà molto più semplice fare indagini. Ma soprattutto: le indagini potranno essere privatizzate. L’agenzia investigativa si farà consegnare tutti i file e ricostruirà la vicenda risalendo ai colpevoli.
Domanda: il diritto andrebbe totalmente depenalizzato? Oggi abbiamo un codice civile e un codice penale, quest’ultimo, infatti, esiste poiché si ritiene che lo stato debba avere un ruolo…
… In the criminal system prosecution is controlled and funded by the state…Criminal law provides a somewhat different range of punishments…
Se nella società trasparente non ha più senso dare un ruolo nelle indagini allo stato, non ha più senso nemmeno la legge penale con il PM e il suo ufficio…
… One argument against such a pure tort system is that some offenses are hard to detect. A victim may conclude that catching and prosecuting the offender costs more than it is worth, especially if the offender turns out not to have enough assets to pay substantial damages. Hence some categories of offense may routinely go unpunished… In Brin's world that problem vanishes. Every mugging is on tape… The normal crime becomes very much like the normal tort - an auto accident, say, where (except in the case of hit and run, which is a crime) the identity of the party and many of the relevant facts are public information… If someone steals your car you check the video record to identify the thief, then sue for the car…
Se qualcuno ruba la tua auto, controlli i video e denunci il colpevole.
E’ un’idea radicale ma lo è solo per noi oggi: nella Gran Bretagna del ‘700, per esempio, le cose funzionavano esattamente così…
… Like many radical ideas, this one looks less radical if one is familiar with the relevant history… Even as late as the eighteenth century, while the English legal system distinguished between torts and crimes, both were in practice privately prosecuted, usually by the victim."…
Le cose cambiarono poiché la società si allargò diventando anonima, e potrebbero di nuovo cambiare in seguito ad una nuova trasparenza…
… One possible explanation for the shift to a modern, publicly prosecuted system of criminal law is that it was a response to the increasing anonymity that accompanied the shift to a more urban society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century."-" Technologies that reverse that shift may justify a reversal of the accompanying legal changes…
Ma l’ipotesi della società trasparente si scontra col fatto che noi non abbiamo mai avuto tanta privacy nella nostra vita telematica: la possibilità di criptare i messaggi li rende completamente inaccessibili. Sono due mondi che collidono: massima privacy nella comunicazione telematica, massima trasparenza nella vita reale…
… We could end up in a world where physical actions are entirely public, information transactions entirely private…
A prima vista la trasparenza della realtà sembrerebbe vincente…
… It does no good to use strong encryption for my email if a video mosquito is sitting on the wall watching me type… privacy in a transparent society requires some way of guarding the interface between my realspace body and cyberspace…
Ma si possono immaginare soluzioni a bassa tecnologia o ad alta tecnologia…
… A low-tech solution is to type under a hood. A high-tech solution is some link between mind and machine that does not go through the fingers…
La “tastiera mentale”…
Le conversazioni faccia a faccia potrebbero diventare wireless…
… If we are sufficiently worried about other people hearing what we say, one solution is to encrypt face-to-face conversation. With suitable wireless gadgets, I talk into a throat mike or type on a virtual keyboard…
Probabilmente potremo ancora assoldare un killer in modo sicuro ma probabilmente non lo troveremo mai poiché lui non potrà mai agire impunemente…
… Private citizens will still be able to take advantage of strong privacy to locate a hit man, but hiring him may cost more than they are willing to pay, since in a sufficiently transparent world all murders are detected….
