There is a long history in the United States of distinguishing between
routine governmental surveillance activities and those that require
either a court order or “probable cause.” General public
acceptance of certain practices as routine rests, at least in part,
on the assumption that the gathered information is put to very specific
and limited use. The nearly universal acceptance of relatively invasive
airport screening procedures is due primarily to the great danger
from hijackings. However, I believe that acceptance also rests on
the belief that information about what specific passengers carry on
or pack is discarded once the material is deemed safe for travel.
Technology advances now make it much easier to combine arguably innocent
bits of information into an ominous whole. If I visit my local library,
a drug store across town, and then a park three towns away, I would
have no expectation of anonymity for any of those visits. However,
I would not expect anyone to know about all three. Yet, increasing
prevalence of high resolution cameras in public places (think Great
Britain), advances in face recognition software, and plummeting costs
of computer hardware may soon allow law enforcement to follow us automatically.
Combined with data sources like E-ZPass and some of the ubiquitous
privately collected databases, one could imagine governmental authorities
fishing for people judged likely to engage in troubling activities
like building bombs, dealing illegal drugs, using illegal drugs, gambling
on sports, cross dressing, eating too much junk food, attending church
X (stop me when I’ve crossed the line).
I propose two research questions:
1. How should we assess the risk from combining otherwise non invasive
bits of information with the potential to discover a multitude of
unanticipated relationships? I contrast this question with the more
common one that addresses disclosure risk of otherwise unidentified
data through record linkage methods. In this case, individuals might
already be identified, but the increased risk comes from the potential
to derive new data from the combination of existing fields.
2. How can technology facilitate legitimate uses of data bases while
limiting risks of either intentional or inadvertent discoveries that
breech publicly accepted boundaries? Government certainly needs to
be able to “connect the dots” to discover certain suspicious
patterns, but too much data in one place raises serious civil liberty
concerns (witness Adm. Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness
program).