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Charlotte Twight is a professor of economics at Boise State
University.
The Independent Review, v.IV, n.2, Fall 1999, ISSN 1086-1653,
Copyright © 1999, pp. 165–200
CHARLOTTE TWIGHT
Imagine for a moment a nation whose central
government mandated ongoing collection of detailed personal
information—individually identified—recording each citizen’s employment, income,
childhood and subsequent educational ex-periences, medical history (including
doctors’ subjective impressions), financial trans-actions (including copies of
personal checks written), ancestry, living conditions
(including bathroom,
kitchen, and bedroom facilities), rent or mortgage payment, household expenses,
roommates and their characteristics, in-home telephone service, automobile
ownership, household heating and sewage systems, number of stillbirths, language
capability—and periodically even demanded to know what time each person in the
household usually left home to go to work during the previous week.
Imagine further that such a government assigned every citizen a central
government identification
number at birth and mandated its use in reporting
the information just listed.
Suppose the same government were actively considering mandatory nationwide use of a “biometric identifier” (such as fingerprints or retinal scans) along with a new counterfeit-proof permanent government identification card incorporating the individual’s government-issued number and other personal information, through magnetic strips and embedded computer chips capable of holding up to sixteen hundred pages of information about the individual.
If a contemporary novelist were to portray the emergence of such a government in America, his novel undoubtedly would be regarded as futuristic fiction in the same vein as George Orwell’s 1984.
Yet this national portrait is no longer fiction. The model for the foregoing description is a government that now wields exactly those awesome powers over the citizenry— America’s federal government in 1999.
In this article I substantiate each of the preceding statements and provide citations to the laws, regulations, and working papers establishing and designing such intelligence systems. The logical outgrowth of such all-encompassing federal collection of personal information has increased government power and concomitant individual dependence on government.
Governments have long recognized the capacity of information collection to
erode individual autonomy by fostering deep personal uncertainty about the uses
to which the information might be put. Paul Schwartz (1992) has described the
linkage clearly:
Personal information can be shared to develop a basis for trust, but the mandatory disclosure of personal information can have a destructive effect on human independence. . . . Totalitarian regimes have already demon-strated the fragility of the human capacity for autonomy. The effectiveness of these regimes in rendering adults as helpless as children is in large part a product of the uncertainty that they instill regarding their use of personal information. (1363–64)With respect to U.S. government data collection in the 1990s, he added:
Americans no longer know how their personal information will be applied, who will gain access to it, and what decisions will be made with it. The resulting uncertainty increases pressure for conformity. Individuals whose personal data are shared, processed and stored by a mysterious, incalculable bureaucracy will be more likely to act as the government wishes them to behave. (1374)With extensive federal data collection creating ever greater incentives to behave as government wishes us to behave, the societal result is metastasizing government control. Indeed, Schwartz views the computer’s ability to digitize personal information as offering “the state and society a powerful way to control the behavior of individuals”
The result—and often the purpose—is a profound erosion of individual au-tonomy.
In this article, I focus on central government data-collection programs that share one defining characteristic: they compel production, retention, and dissemination of personal information about every American citizen.1
Their target is ordinary Ameri-can citizens carrying out ordinary day-to-day
activities. Although these programs by no means constitute the whole universe of
federal data collection, they are today the
government’s most critical
informational levers for institutionalizing government control, individual
dependence, and unprecedented threats to American liberties.
Even within this circumscribed sphere, the immense volume of federal data collection defies brief summary. Accordingly, I confine the present inquiry to government devel-opment and recent expansion of
Largely linked through an individual’s Social Security number, these databases now empower the federal government to obtain an astonishingly detailed portrait of any person: the checks he writes, the types of causes he supports, what he says “privately” to his doctor.Databases keyed to Social Security numbers—examining unchecked use of those numbers as a fulcrum for government data collection about individuals, and probing current legislative efforts to establish a national identification card; Labor databases—revealing new statutory provisions aimed at building a federal database of all American workers and requiring employers to obtain the central government’s approval before hiring employees; Medical databases—assessing creation of the “unique health identifier” and implementation of the national electronic database of personal medical information mandated by the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; Education databases—revealing federal databases mandated by the 1994 Goals 2000 Act, Improving America’s Schools Act, and related legislation that establish detailed national records of children’s educational experiences and socioeconomic status; Financial databases—describing provisions of federal statutory law requiring banks and other financial institutions to create permanent, readily retrievable records of each individual’s checks, deposits, and other financial activities.
Of course, federal officials always provide an appealing reason for such governmental intrusion into our private lives, however inadequate the reason or unconstitutional the intrusion. In this case, as in others, backers of these measures, in their effort to minimize resistance, predictably use political transaction-cost manipulation to that end, increasing the transaction costs to private individuals of perceiving—and taking collective action to resist—governmental encroachments (Twight 1988, 1994).
There is always an asserted benefit to be obtained, a plausible cover story.
The ostensible reasons have been diverse. With the spread of government-mandated use of Social Security numbers for database after electronic database, we have been told that it will reduce fraud—tax fraud, welfare fraud, the usual litany.
With government assertion of the power to require businesses to contact the government for approval before hiring anyone, we have been told that it will help in cracking down on illegal immigration.
With regard to government mandates for private physicians to record what we say to them in confidence, we have been told that it will reduce health-care fraud, promote efficiency, allow better emergency treatment, make it easier for the patient to keep track of his medical records, and the like.
To rationalize government assertion of power to track what public school teachers record concerning our children, we have been told that it will assist in students’ selection of a “career major,” enhance assessment of school courses, and facilitate identification of students needing help.
With government assertion of power to require banks to keep micro-film of all the checks we write, we have been told that it is to “reduce white-collar crime” and “inhibit money laundering.”
Who could oppose such worthy goals unless he had something to hide?
The immense powers now exercised by the federal government have made these
rationales inevitable. Having empowered the federal government to exert
centralized control over far-flung human endeavors, most Americans want
government officials to administer the programs effectively and responsibly. But
administering them effectively and responsibly necessitates functions such as
“reducing fraud” and “promoting efficiency” in the programs, legitimate
objectives that often become chameleonic rationales
that ultimately are
invoked in the service of illegitimate ends.
The pattern is unmistakable.
With vast federal power comes vast federal surveillance, providing plausible cover for those seeking to extend the central government’s purview even further.
Political transaction-cost manipulation has framed the issue in other ways besides these appealing rationales. In some cases discussed later, the database maneuvers were deliberately obscured from public view by means of what Claire Wolfe (1997) calls “land-mine legislation” that people don’t notice until they step on it. In other cases Americans were encouraged to view new proposals piecemeal, a strategy that fore-stalled public perception of the confluent streams of nationwide government-mandated data centralization and their likely eventual result.
Incrementalism again served activist policy making.
Information-law scholar Simon Davies (1994) judged the public’s “greater acceptance of privacy-invasive schemes” to be in part a result of “proposals . . . being brought forward in a more careful and piecemeal fashion” that may be “lulling the public into a false sense of security.” Given that piecemeal progression, legislators and members of the popular press today seldom discuss the likely cost of government data centralization in terms of lost liberty.
Perhaps “liberty” does not resonate so strongly or create so powerful an image for most people as “cracking down on illegal immigration” or “reducing health-care fraud.”
Liberty, after all, is an abstraction whose concrete reality often is not appreciated until its opposite is experienced firsthand. Yet we ignore at our peril the long-cited “use of personal information systems by Nazi Germany to enable the identification and location of a target race” (Davies 1994).
Less than sixty years ago, race-based government roundups of law-abiding citizens also occurred in America, similarly facilitated by government data collection. As Solveig Singleton (1998a) and others have reported, “In the U.S., census data were used to find Japanese-Americans and force them into camps,” a historical reality that gives fresh meaning to a 1990 U.S. Census instruction stating that “it is as important to get information about people and their houses as it is to count them.”2 By 1998, however, the events of the 1940s have become only a “vague memory”—and, except for the elderly, not a living memory at all (Davies 1994).
So today Congress proceeds apace. Having exposed most areas of our lives to ongoing government scrutiny and recording, Congress is now working to expand and universalize federal tracking of law-abiding citizens’ private lives. Concurrently, new developments in biometry are producing technologies that most observers concede “imperil individual autonomy” and pose “real threats to the fabric of contemporary society” (Davies 1994). The next generation awaits the full flowering of those tech-nologies and their availability to governments.
Our privacy, our personal identity, our independence, and our freedom hang in the balance.
Rest of article available in pdf at http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/TIR42Twight.html
Victims of our own apathy? Who or what is fostering and reinforcing our feelings of helplessness?
Are we even capable of refusing?
How many of us still suffer the illusion that we are a free people?
1 Posted on 03/22/2001 18:49:28 PST by Prism
The sheeple go along to get along; the enlightened ones have only God, their family and hope - plus a whole lot of fancy-dancing to stay somewhat free from the Federal Mafia, to which the sheeple and other trusting types look to as their God.
2 Posted on 03/22/2001 18:58:46 PST by CommunistsSuck!
How many of us still suffer the illusion that we are a free people?
It takes a lot of work to be free.
No credit cards.
No bank accounts.
But it can be done.
Thanks for the post.
3 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:02:58 PST by nunya bidness
Scary FYI ping!
4 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:06:45 PST by MadameAxe
You forgot:
No drivers license.
No working for someone else.
No medical care.
I think this whole matter is an infringement on civil rights.
5 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:08:14 PST by Prism
This is the very reason why I do not use grocery cards or the NYS Thruway EZPass. I do not wish to have my purchases and travelings added to the database.
6 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:08:39 PST by copycat
I haven't used a SS number for years and I still work.
When the DMV asks for my number I tell them I don't have one.
It's just a matter of how much do you want to be free.
Freedom is never easy.
7 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:16:40 PST by nunya bidness
The most worrisome aspect of all this is, what type of people would want to create such a system and for what purpose. We are not under threat that would create the need for that type of information. Don't they have children, or sisters, or friends, or perhaps future grandchildren, that they would want to enjoy the blessings of a free society? Why would anyone want to destroy all of this?
8 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:23:32 PST by flotsam
I suffer no illusions at all.
We have built up an enormously powerful federal, state & local government structure. But it all rests on the voluntary cooperation of ordinary citizens.
All the bureaucrats, politicans, judges, corporate leaders, -- and all the way down to the soccer mom types that support this vast regime, - what they all fail to realize, - is that there is another equally adamant core of highly independent americans, who believe in the constitution, and will draw a line at some point.
It is hard to tell when & where that line of abuse will be crossed. I would suspect it will come over the 2nd amendment. But in any case, that line is being drawn,slowly yet surely, as we can see even here, in our so called 'flame wars' on FR.
9 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:28:57 PST by tpaine
Don't they have children, or sisters, or friends, or perhaps future grandchildren, that they would want to enjoy the blessings of a free society?
I think one avenue of attack or conciousness-raising would be for parents to refuse to give thier newborns names to the hospital birth certification system. I've talked to a couple of mothers who have 'hassled' the 'name-lady' at the hospital by pretending they havent decided on a name.
I suspect the hospital would be very reluctant to let you leave with an 'unregistered infant'.
10 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:36:28 PST by Prism
This should interest you.
11 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:44:13 PST by Nita Nupress
To the Fed watching me. Sorry I'm boring you to death. I'll try to get more interesting soon. By the way...the six rolls of tinfoil are only for baked potatoes.
12 Posted on 03/22/2001 19:49:11 PST by socal_parrot
Bump!
13 Posted on 03/22/2001 20:01:29 PST by ratcat
Besides being scary it's also decended into the absurb. The National Marine Fisheries requires detailed reports be sent in within seven days of a boats fishing trip. Many boats day fish so now these are a DAILY REPORT. Among other vital information that they MUST have is a requirement to tell them HOW MANY FISH HOOKS THAT YOU USE ON A LINE.
They also just announced that they will be asking for detailed financial information to be submitted as well.
14 Posted on 03/22/2001 21:27:13 PST by Captain7seas
Besides being scary it's also decended into the absurb. The National Marine Fisheries requires detailed reports be sent in within seven days of a boats fishing trip. Many boats day fish so now these are a DAILY REPORT. Among other vital information that they MUST have is a requirement to tell them HOW MANY FISH HOOKS THAT YOU USE ON A LINE.
They also just announced that they will be asking for detailed financial information to be submitted as well.
15 Posted on 03/22/2001 21:29:58 PST by Captain7seas
By the way, All commercial fishing regulations in America are regulated under the U.N. this was admitted by a govt official in a govt. publication "The South Atlantic Update" Oct. '97, pg 22. "The objectives conservation and enhancement of Essential Fish Habitat (this is what the current fishery mangt. parideigm is called today) ARE PARALLEL to objectives of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, A BINDING international agreement which ENTERED INTO FORCE in 1993" (emphisis mine)
The fact is that the U.S. Senate refused to ratify this treaty. That pesky fact has no effect on the NMFS though.
16 Posted on 03/22/2001 21:40:28 PST by Captain7seas
Besides being scary it's also decended into the absurb. The National Marine Fisheries requires detailed reports be sent in within seven days of a boats fishing trip. Many boats day fish so now these are a DAILY REPORT. Among other vital information that they MUST have is a requirement to tell them HOW MANY FISH HOOKS THAT YOU USE ON A LINE.
They also just announced that they will be asking for detailed financial information to be submitted as well.
17 Posted on 03/22/2001 21:44:25 PST by Captain7seas
Bump
18 Posted on 03/22/2001 21:57:10 PST by Captain7seas
BTTT
19 Posted on 03/29/2001 09:47:25 PST by MadameAxe
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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