A is A

Renaissance and revolutions, omnipotent governments and George Orwell used to give us a healthy aversion to being brutally honest. Of course the law of identity holds, and whether or not people know you do something doesn't change the fact whether or not you did it.

People being people will either go the whole anarchistic hog and refuse any abridgement of their privacy, or merrily write down all the information needed to steal their identity on the profile page of each and every social network they come across. Now the vast power of the internet to connect, communicate, find and be found also means that it's exceedingly hard to do something online and maintain plausible deniability. Of course you can be a darknet rebel but in practice you only raise the barrier to being found out, you don't prevent it entirely. In fact, nothing short of a complete disconnect will really avoid the pitfalls of being cached, logged, and data-mined.

As I've said in the post "Don't be evil", the power of internet giants to aggregate data on human behavior equates to a vast store of invaluable knowledge for the fuzzy sciences. This is a very good thing as long as we are able to find out more about ourselves in order to better deal with the complexities of our existence. However, and it takes a nasty repressive regime to fully appreciate this, it places a lot of power in somebody else's hands. The power to describe human behavior in general comes from tools that allow tracking an individual's behavior during every second they are wired, and that includes carrying a cellphone. It's the price we pay for being online at all.

We all know the stories of people being fired over facebook pictures, twitter posts and foursquare location data. As big Z pointed out, people's perception of the value of privacy is changing, and changing rapidly. The Stasi held sway over millions a mere two decades ago, and yet we are happy to share information with the world that is fully as revealing as the files of the Schild und Schwert der Partei.

The danger in this time of nice governments is mainly identity theft and the odd affair or creative sick leave leading to undesirable consequences. However, there will be rain after sunshine and the ground is well prepared for totalitarian control the like of which we have not seen before. This is not only because we so blithely share anything and everything, but because our nice governments mandate service provides to store all that we do for automated perusal.

The great firewall of China is reportedly circumvented with clever proxy tricks and the like. However, this doesn't change the fact that most people in China most of the time cannot be sure that what they do online doesn't lead to being branded as a criminal. Every state has the duty to draw lines in the sand about the admissibility of certain behavior. Under a nice and liberal state these are so drawn that we easily loose all sense of caution, whereas in a totalitarian state the lines are restrictive and very dangerous to cross. In either situation it is barely possible to cross them unnoticed. The promise of the internet as a brave new world has become the spectre of the telescreen.

In dealing with this phenomenon we cannot ignore that A is A, that doing something means accepting responsibility for doing it. This is the only mature way to live, online as well as offline. What we are obliged to ourselves and others is to make sure that the internet is used to enable rather than to stifle, to create rather than to control. Our governments and the giants of the internet must be led with scruple. Ensuring this is much more important and an activity on a much higher pane than arguing if the internet should veil the truth about how we use it. The real problem is not the records, but the consequences of their perusal, and that is what should give us pause when we do anything at all online, let alone publish the contents of our hearts and minds as I am doing here for the sake of the discourse. I will forever be the guy who blogged about the absence of privacy on the internet. So be it. A is A. And we've been warned.

UPDATE: The SSL encryption scheme is apparently compromised by a combination of man-in-the-middle attack hardware and (governmental) Certificate Authorities willing to fork over bogus certificates. Nice. http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/03/govts-certificate-authorities-conspire-to-spy-on-ssl-users.ars