On Privacy

Privacy seems to be a big deal in today’s society and rightly so. If for example we let the government spy on everything we do and assuming they can process all the information then we would have a society where it would be easy to find dissenters and silence them either legally or otherwise. This would be a police state where every move you make would be judged by the ever seeing eye of big brother. On the other hand if all the corporate and government secrets were public then our “enemies” would be able to use all our information against us. This position seems very reasonable in our society today, but wait isn’t our society based on the informed consent of the population? How can the population be informed when information is kept from them.

So maybe privacy isn’t the ultimate goal at all, maybe it’s just a crutch that we limp on because we are afraid to walk. Well if that is the truth then it is reasonable to ask what is a better solution. I think that we have a solution staring us in the face, the open source movement. In the open source movement we recognize that things which are open are actually more secure and stable. This is because everyone is allowed to see and provide input on the program and in the end problems are spotted and fixed rather then hidden and ignored.

Before going into exactly how the open source movement’s ideas would benefit our society I would like to cover a bit more about how open source works for people who are not familiar with the process. The first step in the process is that someone gets an idea for a program, usually this program is something that they themselves need. They then create a working version of the program although usually just barely working and finally they release the source code (the human readable instructions for the program) to the community to use. Now this fledging program is often bugging and lacking in features so the creator of the program will keep working on the program and releasing new versions to fix those bugs or add more features. As they do that more and more people will start using the program, and here is where the magic happens. Some of the users will be programmers and because everyone has the source code to the program those programmers can edit that source code themselves to add features they need or to fix bugs.

Now we have a bunch of programmers with a bunch of additions to the program. These programmers give their additions to the creator of the program and s/he picks the best ones and adds them to the program. This effectively increases the value of the program without the creator having to do much work; in fact some of the work might even be impossible for him to have done do to different life experiences. The result if the program becomes popular is that you can have hundreds or even thousands of programmers working on one project with little overhead.

This is all well and good for programs but how does this relate to the real world? Well imagine I’m making a new long range missile. I’m not going to show anyone outside the development team how the thing works because then they might know how to sabotage it or worse build there own. Well lets look at those two situations separately. The reason we don’t want people to see the plans to prevent sabotage is so that they might find a weakness that we missed. That seems valid as nothing is perfect after all, but I would like to point out that even if it is secret the flaws still exist and so people may exploit them. If we were to make it open to the public, ask them to find flaws in it and most importantly keep adjusting our plans to fix those flaws then the missile will be very hard to exploit. It won’t be impossible but it is much harder for our enemies to find a flaw in a highly tuned design created by thousands of people then it is to fine one in a design made only a handful of people even if said people are specialists. It is also worthy to note that if a power wants some information on something I don’t think it’s possible to prevent them from getting it.

The second problem of course is what if someone uses the highly tuned plans to build missiles of their own. This is a little trickier because there is no real benefit to having our enemies having our weapons, but we can mitigate the results when we realize two things. First the major barrier to other powers having our weapons is money because if they really wanted out plans they would steal them, and secondly we could open a concurrent dialog on how to create defenses against the weapons. If we have good defenses against our weapons and our enemies are using similar weapons then we have the advantage, if they are using the defenses as well then we have a stalemate and have to resolve our problems with diplomacy which is a better solution anyway.

This is but one example of how having fewer secrets and more involvement would help us improve out lives and security rather then harm them. I will revisit this topic later with more examples but this entry has run a little long. I encourage you to comment and rework my ideas and like the creator of an open source program I will try to incorporate them into my next entry on the subject.