Published in the Laissez Faire City Times, July 16, 2001
The ideal of the transparent society is gaining ground everywhere. The prohibition of insider trading is justified by the theory that all material information must be simultaneously known to all investors. The hundreds of thousands of cameras in public places in the U.K. – a practice that is spreading in the U.S.[1] – help to deter crime and catch the undeterred criminals. Reporting and traceability of financial transactions are promoted in the name of “transparency.” And so forth.
Transparency means visibility to others. We all allow some transparency in our lives. A large part of one’s life is visible to one’s lover. Private contracts often allow for some form of inspection so that a party may obtain the information necessary to monitor the other’s performance. The more a child’s life is transparent to his parents, the better they can care for him. Problems appear when an adult’s actions are made transparent without his contractual consent.
Every individual has his own reasons to hide some of his actions. Prudishness, writ large, is one broad class of reasons: except for exhibitionists, people consider that certain functions or acts are private and should be shielded from other people’s view. Let’s not pass moral judgments on individual preferences.
The other broad class of reasons why individuals wish to hide what they do, write or think, is fear that somebody could use the information against them. In the case of criminals, it’s easy to understand why, but peaceful individuals will often have their own reasons too. If your letters were not sealed, the mailman may try to blackmail you, or your girlfriend’s husband may want to kill you, and so forth. The problem with transparency is not so much the inconvenience or shame of being seen, as the danger of being controlled by the viewer or somebody to whom he transfers the information.
Transparency is a means of getting the information necessary for control. From an economic (as opposed to a moral) point of view, the problem is weighing the costs and benefits of control.
Consider one illustration of beneficial control and, thus, beneficial transparency. In the Western tradition, institutions and laws have developed that impose transparency on state actions, from open, public proceedings, to freedom of information laws, through public accountability of state agents. Obviously, the reason is not simply for voyeur citizens to peek into bureaucrats’ and politicians’ workdays, but to control what they do. The transparency requirement is partly waived in certain cases (criminal inquires, foreign spies) where it is thought that the cost of immediate control would outweigh the longer-term benefits of covert action. Yet, when the trial comes, the prosecution is obliged to make its evidence transparent to the defense. At least, this is the theory.
Another instance where transparency has benefits is when it contributes to controlling criminal activity. The problem is that such transparency also carries costs – indeed high costs. Making criminal activity more visible is difficult without making ordinary people’s lives also more transparent. This, in turn, increases the possibility that the state might use the information it gathers against non-criminals, especially since it gets to define what is a crime. The fact that there are other means of controlling crime (viz., high penalties, or the right to self-defense by victims of aggressions) makes transparency an even less economic alternative.
Some peaceful individuals may be willing to make the trade-off in favor of more transparency, but others are not. In private activities, transparency is contracted for, and does not raise much of a problem. In the public sphere, we get one-size-fits-all, with the risk of the same tyranny for everyone.
The costs and benefits of transparency, then, are mainly related to the costs and benefits of controlling individuals whose lives are made visible. We have good theoretical and historical reasons to believe that the more control the state exerts on individuals, the more tyrannical it will become, and the more costs it will impose on everybody – or, what amounts to the same, the less benefits it will leave to the citizenry. The more tyrannical the state, the more benefits will accrue to a small number of rulers or accomplice. Hence, the transparent society is not an ideal. On the contrary, we should want to increase the cost for the state of gathering information.
This is even truer if technology makes information – and, thus, surveillance and control – cheaper for the state. There is little doubt that a large number of contemporary technologies have had the net effect of increasing state power, from weapon systems to road transportation, through (probably) the telegraph, the telephone, and satellite communications. The early mainframe computers, which cost millions of dollars, also served state power.
It is more difficult to determine the net effect of the new information technologies that developed over the past twenty years with the dramatic drop in computing costs. On the one hand, these technologies reduce the cost of information for the state. On the other hand, they also reduce the cost for individuals of hiding from, or resisting, the state. I think the jury is still out on the net outcome of these two conflicting factors.
An intriguing hypothesis proposed by David Brin[2] is that transparency is inevitable and that, in order to minimize its cost, we must make sure that everything is as transparent to individuals as to the state. When the state is able to monitor all behavior in public places through fixed cameras or tiny RPVs (remote-piloted vehicles), individuals should have access to the same technologies. Every individual could watch on his computer the images gathered in public places. Everybody would also be allowed to spy on state agents, including policemen.
There are many problems with this sort of multilateral transparency. It may well be more difficult to preserve citizens’ access to information once everything is transparent than to stop state-imposed transparency now. And why should transparency stop at the door of private quarters? Another problem is that information gathering would be most valuable to people seeking to control others (whether common law criminals or bureaucrats). In other words, a multilaterally transparent society of the kind envisioned by David Brin would increase control over individuals more than it would provide means to limit it. Transparency is not liberty.
We can now see why privacy is important. It is not necessarily a matter of prudishness or shame, although it can be a matter of dignity. It is a question of limiting control. Privacy makes information more costly to obtain by mischievous individuals, common criminals, or the state; therefore, it makes control more difficult to exert. The cost of information, surveillance and control needs to be increased, especially for the state, and especially for the kind of monstrous states that we have. As wrote a slave who had fled to the North, “Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.”[3]
[2] See the main arguments of his book, The Transparent Society, at http://www.orlingrabbe.com/money2.htm.
[3] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself [1845] (Toronto: New American Library, 1968), p. 106.