Thinking about privacy

I have been reading The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America by Jeffrey Rosen, and I got to thinking about privacy. The right to privacy, if you think about it, is really a right to restrict the amount of information others obtain and thus the knowledge that they gain.

As I mentioned in a previous posting, Rosen makes the point that protection of one's privacy is especially important in preventing others from deriving false impressions from biased and partial knowledge of one, which seems a valid point. As this blog has pointed out, not all that we regard as knowledge is true, and that thus it is important to retain a willingness to reexamine our knowledge and to replace knowledge with better knowledge when that becomes available.

Returning to privacy, sometimes it is personal, and sometimes communal. Thus we feel that spousal communication is privileged, and a spouse can not be forced to testify about information obtained within a marriage. We also recognize the confidentiality of lawyer-client, and priest-penitent communication. I would also feel that religious rituals can legitimately be private, such as those of some of the native American nations which believe they would be polluted by the observation of non-initiates.

It seems to me that the rights to privacy are culturally defined, not only in the sense that they vary from culture to culture, but in that they are often communicated tacitly and are unexamined. They are deeply held attitudes that are not derived from rational analysis, but rather from custom and example. As such they are especially difficult to accept when exposed to another culture, or even to understand.

Indigenous peoples living in tropical climates, who wear few clothes, probably have as much difficulty understanding American perceptions of minimal acceptable clothing as Americans have in understanding the more stringent restrictions on women's clothing in conservative Jewish or Muslim cultures. Alternatively, we find it quite strange when people flaunt what we believe to be minimal standards of decency (in the protection of their own privacy or in the invasion of the privacy of others).

It is important that we understand the nature of privacy taboos because:

• technological advances pose threats to traditional standards for the rights of privacy;
• globalization results in people from different cultures, with different perceived rights to privacy, coming into more and closer contact, and thus changing each others cultural norms and standards;
• changing circumstances result in differing costs and benefits from privacy norms, and may drive changes in privacy.

I remember some years ago having a discussion about the cameras that are increasingly being used to monitor the speed of vehicles and which are combined with computer processes to issue tickets to the owners of cars that are found to be speeding. Some people feel that the systems invade their privacy, while I feel that there is no inherent right to break speed limits, and in fact cars are required to have license plates so that their owners can be readily identified if the car is involved in an illegal act.

Increasingly cameras and other sensing devices are embedded in our surroundings, and thus information is gathered about us in ways that were not possible in the past. Perhaps the issue is not so much to limit the gathering of the information, but to limit the ways in which that information can be used to inform the knowledge of different actors for different purposes. Thus I see no problem with surveillance cameras being used to deter theft, but some problems with them being used to inform marketers of consumer behavior where that knowledge would be used to encourage impulse buying, and significant problems where they would be used to provide the basis for blackmail.

I suppose that in a society in which norms are increasingly explicit, defined in laws and regulations, we will elaborate an increasingly complex set of rules for the protection of the rights of privacy, such as the requirement of warrants for governmental surveillance. The rule making will balance human rights with the public good, and indeed we are facing some of those controversies now. To what degree and in what circumstances can coercion be used to obtain information that might prevent terrorist acts? How and how much do we limit data mining of electronic data to balance the protection of privacy and the public safety?

Our foreign policy with respect to surveillance should be made with the understanding that our domestic attitudes toward privacy may be quite different than those of people in another culture -- people who we are now able to observe in ways that they do not expect nor understand, and may not approve. Equally, American entertainment programming, which is increasingly available worldwide, may thrust information on other people that they find objectionable.

Someone once said that they have more faith in courtesy than morality. If we can not depend on the respect for the rights of privacy as a moral imperative, let us be sure that all understand how profoundly discourteous it is to invade someone else's privacy observing that which they feel it improper to observe, or displaying that which they feel it improper for them to observe.

Iraq, Texas Holdem, and Decision Making

My last posting used chess as a metaphor for foreign policy decision making. Let me use another game to extend the metaphorical comment.

Texas Holdem is a poker game with tournaments that are getting a lot of attention via television. The game is very simple, and you can click here if you need the rules. For a given hand in Texas Holdem, there are four rounds of betting. In most games, most players fold their hands on the first round. The tactics used by a player on a given hand depend on the cards he has drawn, the size of his chip stack and of he players he faces, the size of the pot, the bets of his opponents, and his reading of those opponents. Compared to chess, games are short and simple, but depend less on skill on reading the board and much more on skills of reading the opponent. Note that the best hand does not always win the hand, and the best hand at a specific time is often bluffed out by a weaker hand played with strong tactics.

Winning tournaments is not just about winning hands, and indeed the winning strategy must be based on knowledge that chance plays a role in each hand, and that even the winner must lose a lot of bets during the course of a tournament. Winning strategy depends on accumulating chips during the course of the tournament, accumulating knowledge of the opponents at the table (their tactics and tells), and not taking imprudent risks. Early in the tournament, winning players protect their limited resources; later in the game, when they have accumulated large amounts of chips, they can use that financial power to take risks and bully opponents.

Texas Holdem winning players know that the tournament is not won in the opening hands, but in a process which leaves the player in better position hour after hour, day after day of the tournament. Moreover, a winning tournament player knows how to adapt his tactics as the tournament progresses, reflecting his competitive position and the changes in the tactics of his opponents and the growing knowledge of those opponents.

In Iraq, the professional soldiers recommended invading with a larger force than the politicians actually used. A winning Texas Holdem player would see that as wise, since doing so would reduce the early risk and provide more "bullying power". The winning poker player might also have avoided high risk plays early in the process, such as putting tactical control of the Transition Authority in the hands of ideologically driven neophytes, and radical departures from the status quo ante such as radical deBathification, disbanding the forces of order (military and police), and big-bang economic reforms, or a radically new constitution and legislature.

As an aside, I heard General Ricardo Sanchez on the Charlie Rose show say that the Bush decision to stop the invasion of Fallujah during the 2004 election season in order to improve his election prospects cost the lives of American soldiers. That was a profoundly immoral act by those in the White House, and should have occasioned the resignation of the civilian authorities who were tasked with carrying out the order. (The military, in our system, are charged with carrying out the directives of their civilian chiefs, whether or not they agree with them.)

Iraq exemplifies a key element of decision making

The initial decision to invade Iraq was followed by a series of decisions. A relatively small force quickly destroyed the Iraqi military capacity and took Baghdad, but failed to stop the looting and destruction of government building, as well as the dissemination of Iraqi weapons to the public. There followed decisions to disband the military and effect a deep de-Bathification which have been linked to the initiation and/or strengthening of the insurgency. The decision to have a brutal liberalization of the economy resulted in lots of consumer goods, but also a lack of productive jobs. The decisions on the management of the occupation lead to the abuses of Abu Ghraib and a great deal of antipathy among Iraqis toward the occupying forces. Other decisions, such as the development of a new constitution, the timing of elections, the attacks on Fallujah and their conduct have been challenged as leading to a worsening of the situation. Of course, these decisions were also subsequent to decisions about the coordination of Iraq policy in the U.S. Government and Coalition, and decisions about the people to put in charge of the occupation who made or influenced many of the subsequent decisions that proved unfortunate.

I would say that the opening decision may have looked better after half a decade had the subsequent decisions been different, and thus the course of the occupation and "nation building" been different and perhaps more positive. (Indeed, once U.S. foreign policy institutions contained thousands of people who had thought long and deep about nation building, and who had decades of experience, but they had all gone due to the decisions to weaken those institutions.)

The point I would make is that the decision to go to war almost guarantees that many subsequent decisions on the conduct of the war and the subsequent search for nation building and peace will be badly made. Sometimes people ask about "the plan B" -- what will you do when things go wrong.

Chess players in the opening focus on building a strong position in the opening game, avoiding high risk initial gambits that offer the chance of a quick win but the threat of an eventual loss if mistakes are made and capitalized by a clever opponent. Perhaps in foreign policy, too, the best approach is to build a strong position in whih the country can respond to the unexpected, as well as to tactical moves that go wrong.

An Argument for the Right of Privacy

In The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America, Jeffrey Rosen argues that disclosing one salacious fact about a person may result in that person getting an inaccurate, and thus unfair reputation. He further argues that disclosing full information about a person, say all the websites that they have visited, results in people overloading with input and thus selecting (perhaps at random) a very limited set of that information on which to form an opinion of the subject of the disclosure, and again an unfair opinion. He then says that the protection of privacy is the best and perhaps the only protection that individuals have against such unfair judgments by others.

Unfairly extrapolating from his comments, humans have evolved to form interpersonal bonds relatively slowly, in part through the exchange of confidences. Culturally, we have modes of communication within the family or within groups of friends which are quite different than in a public setting. Putting communications from the circle of friends and/or family into the public setting can also result in very unfair judgments of the person so revealed, and thus should be protected by privacy.

So, in terms of the theme of this blog -- Knowledge for Development -- where does one draw the line between information in the public domain to inform our knowledge and information that should be protected by privacy? In a time in which surveillance cameras are found in our cities in the tens of thousands, in which electronic communication can be monitored and data mining computers can extract the most damning information from the most fleeting comment, in which remote sensing can track a person's every movement without his recognizing that fact, in which the U.S. Government officials can feel empowered to extract information by torture or to authorize surveillance without due process of law, the issue of rights to privacy versus rights to information has become urgent and complex.

A Thought About the Perils of Post Hoc Explanations

Toward the end of his book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, Adam Hochschild describes books by Thomas Clarkson and by the two sons of William Wilberforce that give different views of the history of the campaign against the slave trade. Hochschild has written his book with still a different version of that history, and the movie Amazing Grace presents still a different version. Since Hochschild's book is primarily a story of the people who energized the movement, his comment would seem comparable to the demonstrations in fiction of different stories by different people such as The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, or Akira Kurosawa's film Roshomon.

Why did Britain end slavery. It is certainly appropriate to credit the efforts of Clarkson and Wilberforce who not only worked very hard for a very long time to achieve that end, but also were very clever in the way in which they worked. Their credit should not detract from the credit of their inner circle who also worked very hard on the campaign, nor indeed the millions of people who joined the campaign and added their support.

There are two questions, however, that seem important. Would they have been able to succeed no matter how long, hard and smart they worked had the social and economic conditions not been propitious for their effort's success. Were those conditions so propitious that had Wilberforce and Clarkson not stepped forward, would others have done so in their place?

It is hard to imaging the abolition of the slave trade and of the slavery itself had there not been earlier The Enlightenment. So too, it seems as Hockschild has suggested, that the campaign would not have succeeded had it not been the age of revolution; indeed, the slave revolts which were themselves so important in the process must have been influenced by the revolutions in the United States and France. The Industrial Revolution and with it the exploitation of labor and the growth of industrial cities such as Manchester (a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment) must have had its influence. Hockschild points out that the movement was lead by Quakers and that the Baptist and Methodist missions to the slaves were very influential. He also reports that the reform of Parliament that reduced the power of the landed classes and opened suffrage in Great Britain made it possible to pass the anti-slavery law at last.

I would suggest that there may have been physical reasons for the success. European troops died by the thousands when sent to put down slave revolts in the Caribbean, while the residents of the area who were in revolt had survived in that environment that had killed so many, and may have been more fit to continue surviving there. It is also not clear how much the improvement of transportation technology and the spread of sugar growing to other regions had diminished the economic importance of the British and French sugar and rum sources in the Caribbean.

Retrospectively trying to understand the web of causality involved in such a historical change that resulted from a historical process that lasted for decades is basically impossible, and it is not surprising that different historians offer different explanations stressing different factors to different degrees. Reading such histories can help to expand one's understanding of the possibilities, but is unlikely to reveal factual truth about the processes. You may find out who did what, but not how important the acts or actors really were, or the counterfactual alternatives, the "what if's".

Incidentally, slavery is one institutional system by which some people exploit the involuntary servitude of other people. Today we have a major problem of sexual trafficking, with an estimated 50,000 people trafficked into the United States each year in this process. Debt servitude still "enslaves" hundreds of millions of people in Asia and elsewhere. We still have to fight for human rights!

Why Don't People Care Enough to Vote?

There was an election in my county yesterday to elect a member of the County Council. The county of a million people has an annual budget of 3 and 3/4 million dollars. This is a challenging year for the county government, with a falling economy that would appear to call for budget cuts, especially a crisis in the construction business which will cut an important source of revenues, changing neighborhood composition, problems of gang related crimes, government employees forming an important lobby demanding raises over already high salaries, citizens demanding very high levels of services, and lobbies representing the private sector which also demand high levels of services.

The County Council, increasingly fractious, is currently split four-four on a number of divisive issues. The election was to replace the ninth member after the death of the Chairperson, who often cast the deciding votes on matters before the Council.

I would have thought that this would have been an election that people would vote in. The elected person will cast key votes for the next two and a half years. The country electorate is highly educated, and indeed contains a large portion of citizens who work in federal, state or local government, who therefore should be concerned with and interested in government. Yet the turnout was 10.64% of the registered voters, or 8,896 voters. They elected the 75 year old widower of the deceased Council member who basically ran as a neophyte committed to protecting the legislative agenda of his wife.

I would hope for more of my neighbors!

Political Endorsements

I was chatting with someone who used to be a reporter on a local newspaper and is now a senior staffer for an elected official of local government. She mentioned that she once believed that papers should endorse candidates, since they have fairly detailed knowledge of the performance of elected officials and government, but now believes that they should not make endorsements. As she explained, the local papers are so dependent on real estate developers and other local interest groups that their endorsements are not credible.

It is an interesting point. Were we confident of the information literacy of voters, then we could be confident that they would combine information from the endorsement with information on the credibility of the source to make better judgments that they would without the endorsement.

Since in fact the voters in local elections do not fully understand the pressures on local papers as they make their endorsements, we can not be confident of their information literacy. Indeed, they may be so ignorant of the issues and the candidates positions, that even not understanding the biases of the papers, the voters may be better advised to accept the endorsements.

Obviously, one wants both an informed, information literate electorate and multiple sources of information on the candidates. I suppose, as compared with a couple of hundred years ago, things are better now. But, progress toward some ideal of democracy seems slow.

What to do about U.S. Government Endorsed Torture

I saw an interview with Phillippe Sands, the author of Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law. (Read a review of the book from The Guardian.) Sands, a legal scholar, interviewed a number of the principals in the decisions on types of interrogation techniques to be used after 9/11 and concluded that torture actually had taken place. His key suggestions are that the situation should be fully investigated, and if indeed high level officials did decide to order procedures that were in contravention of international conventions and U.S. law, they should be brought to justice. He further suggested that the roles of the lawyers involved similarly be investigated, and if they were complicit in illegal activities that they also be brought to justice.

Sands' position seems reasonable to me. In a democracy, finding out whether laws have been broken by public officials is fundamental. This is perhaps as central an element of "knowledge for development" as one can imagine.

So too is a system of justice that subjects everyone to the rule of law. If lawyers advise corporate executives how to break the law, or indeed advise mafia bosses how to do so, then they are complicit in the law breaking that takes place and should be brought to justice. So too should high government officials who can be proven to have violated the law. The legal knowledge system is critical to the development of knowledge that serves the democratic processes.

It is important to protect basic human rights, and the right not to be tortured is indeed enthroned in international and U.S. law. A system for the legal protection of human rights, especially a system of protection from infringement by the government, is a crucial element in social development.

Electricity Shortages Are Driving Up Mineral Commodity Prices

Source: "Chilean Drought, Power Shortages Drive Up World Metal Prices," Saijel Kishan and Gavin Evans, Bloomberg News via The Washington Post, May 11, 2008.

Excerpts:

Chile's worst drought in five decades and power rationing from South Africa to China mean the price of aluminum, gold, copper and platinum will keep climbing as the lights go out in the world's biggest mines.....

Runaway growth in emerging markets is squeezing world oil supplies and has led to electricity shortages, cutting output of commodities needed to meet ever-rising demand. Platinum jumped to a record in January after mines in South Africa closed for five days because utilities were rationing power. Cobalt rose 58 percent in the 12 months ended May 2 as production growth in Congo was limited by electricity supply....

Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, the world's biggest publicly traded copper producer; Cia Vale do Rio Doce, the largest in iron ore; and gold producer Newmont Mining all say power shortages threaten to reduce production.

Rio Tinto Group, the second-biggest aluminum producer, cut output at its New Zealand smelter by 5 percent, or 1,400 metric tons a month, May 1 because of power constraints caused by drought. Anglo Platinum, the world's biggest producer of that metal, said April 29 that first-quarter output plunged 24 percent, to 428,600, ounces because of cuts in the supply of electricity to its South African mines.

Smelting aluminum uses about four times as much power as for copper and more than twice that of zinc, Barclays Capital said. About 80 percent of world aluminum smelting capacity is in nations at risk of electricity shortages, according to Citigroup.....

Chile, the world's biggest copper producer, faces the risk of energy rationing after the worst drought in 50 years lowered hydropower reserves during a shortage of natural gas for generators.

Comment: A perfect storm? Increased demand for raw materials from Asia, reduced supply from electricity poor nations responsible for primary production, and a weak dollar make mineral commodity prices rise especially fast for Americans.

The shortage of electrical power is in part due to a failure in investment in power generating capacity, which in turn may be due to failure of international donors to invest in the sector. Hydropower is often a good investment alternative, providing clean energy at an affordable cost. But it has often been a target of environmental NGOs that scare multinationals.

I underline the importance of engineers to provide the infrastructure needed for economic development. JAD

Natural Resources are Good!

Source: "ECONOMICS: Linking Natural Resources to Slow Growth and More Conflict," by C. N. Brunnschweiler and E. H. Bulte, Science, May 2, 1008.

This article challenges the frequently stated position 'that resource-rich economies suffer from weak leadership, rent seeking, and failing institutions." It is doubly interesting from the point of view of this blog, not only raising an important point about economic and social development, but challenging past analyses on the basis that they oftern use poor indicators. The authors use a World Bank indicator that measures resource availability by the present value of all primary product exports over a 25 year period. They compare economic growth over the period 1970 to 2000 with this indicator, finding a modest positive relationship between the resource endowment and economic growth. (I have noted before that resources are not merely things that exist, but things that exist that the society knows how to use.)

I thought it interesting that the authors suggest that poorly governed and poorly run countries appear to exploit primary production because they are unable to exploit manufacturing and service industries for growth.

The final conclusion is not surprising to any but economists. It is better to have good institutions and good policies, and if a country enjoys these advantages, it is also good to have natural resources to exploit.