Choose Privacy Week 2012: Why We Should Care About Privacy
Doug Archer, chair of the Privacy Subcommittee of ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee (ALA-IFC), closes our Choose Privacy Week observance with a thoughtful reflection on why individuals should care about privacy:
Why We Should Care About Privacy by J. Douglas Archer, Reference and Peace Studies Librarian, University of Notre Dame, and chair of the ALA-IFC Privacy Subcommittee
It never ceases to amaze me when people ask “Why do you care about privacy if you don’t have anything to hide?“ The implication, of course, is that you do have some deep, dark, dirty little (or big) secret and, if found out, you’d be ostracized by friends and neighbors if not sent to the big house for 10 to 20. Of course in the real world everyone has things to hide, things they would prefer that the world not know. Usually these are simply private normal matters of everyday life that would be merely embarrassing if viewed by the general public. In other cases, however, they are private concerns that once made public could have a devastating impact on the persons in question or their families - but are in no way criminal.
Let’s start with trivia. I can’t imagine many people (other than a few hard core exhibitionists) who would want a camera in their bath or bed rooms 24/7. And what about your pay stub, bank statement, or tax returns? A need for some space and things in your life that are yours and yours alone if only for part of the day seems to be a basic human trait. Its expression may be culturally determined but it’s there. You can have my bank statement (after I remove account numbers) but just stay out of my bedroom! In other words, some things are just no one’s business but yours and you have a perfect right to say so.
In addition, there seems to be a basic human need to have private space to explore, test and examine feelings and thoughts alone or with extremely close friends, family or colleagues without public examination. Such privacy encourages creative expression and free ranging analysis of sensitive questions - think politics and religion. It provides an opportunity to think the unthinkable. After all, the previously unthinkable, upon private reflection, may turn out to be rubbish or a positive, life changing insight. Once it becomes public, it may be seen as an affront to decent folks everywhere or the start the next cultural revolution. You never know! And, without the privacy to think and explore, you never will.
So far we’ve looked at purely personal and often embarrassing behavior and at the private entertainment of political or religious heresy. Now it’s time to address the truly life altering if not life threatening dangers of the loss of privacy.
A hypothetical: a young woman (teen ager) walks into her local small town or neighborhood library looking for information on teenage pregnancy. What could happen if word of her interest got out in her community? Maybe nothing. But maybe rumors fly. People are great at jumping to conclusions. Reputations can be ruined. Perhaps she is looking for information for a friend. Perhaps she has been sexually assaulted by a relative. Perhaps, perhaps.
Libraries protect library user privacy and defend the confidentiality of library records so that people may seek information for their needs without external pressure or adverse public reactions. Those users are then responsible for the use to which they put the information they discover. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. So, the next time someone asks you “Why do you care about privacy? Do you have anything to hide?“ just say “Sure and so do you.“ Then ask them to be sure and bring along their bank statement the next time they have that question. Or, better yet, ask them if they’d like you to spend the next 48 hours in their bathroom!
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New Choose Privacy Week Documentary: “Vanishing Liberties”
The Office for Intellectual Freedom is excited to debut a new short documentary, “Vanishing Liberties: The Rise of State Surveillance in the Digital Age,“ in observance of Choose Privacy Week 2012. The documentary examines the government’s growing use of surveillance tools to track and spy on immigrant communities and the proposals to adopt these same tools to monitor and track the activities of all Americans.
The featured speakers ask important questions about the impact of the growing surveillance state on national security, civil liberties and privacy rights. They include Michael German, American Civil Liberties Union senior policy counsel for national security and privacy; Margaret Huang, executive director of the Rights Working Group; Paromita Shah, associate director of the National Immigration Project; Julia Shearson, Executive Director at Council on American Islamic Relations - Cleveland; and Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The producer and director of the film is Laura Zinger of 20KFilms.
The documentary is available for viewing as a streaming download at the Choose Privacy Week website, www.privacyrevolution.org, or via these links to Vimeo or YouTube. It’s our hope that libraries, schools, and community groups will watch the film and use it as a springboard for a discussion about privacy and surveillance in a digital age.
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CPW 2012: The Perils of Social Reading
By Neil Richards
Professor of Law
Washington University School of Law
Sharing, we are told, is cool. At the urging of Facebook and Netflix, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill to “update” an obscure 1988 law known as the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”). Facebook and Netflix wanted to modernize this law from the VHS era, because its protection of video store records stood in the way of sharing movie recommendations among friends online. The law would have allowed companies to obtain a single consent to automatically share all movies viewed on Facebook and other social networks forever. The bill stalled in the Senate after a feisty hearing before Senator Franken, though some modernization of our video privacy law is inevitable.
But the VPPA debate is just the start; merely one part of a much larger trend towards “social reading.“ The Internet and social media have opened up new vistas for us to share our preferences in films, books, and music. Services like Spotify and the Washington Post Social Reader already integrate our reading and listening into social networks, providing what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing.“ Under a regime of frictionless sharing, we don’t need to choose to share our activities online. Instead, everything we read or watch automatically gets uploaded to our social media feeds. As Zuckerberg puts it, “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends? You want to go with your friends.“ Music, reading, web-surfing, and Google searches, in this view, would all seem to benefit from being made social.
Not so fast. The sharing of book, film, and music recommendations is important, and social networking has certainly made this easier. But a world of automatic, always-on disclosure should give us pause. What we read, watch, and listen to matter, because they are how we make up our minds about important social issues - in a very real sense, they’re how we make sense of the world.
What’s at stake is something I call “intellectual privacy” - the idea that records of our reading and movie watching deserve special protection compared to other kinds of personal information. The films we watch, the books we read, and the web sites we visit are essential to the ways we try to understand the world we live in. Intellectual privacy protects our ability to think for ourselves, without worrying that other people might judge us based on what we read. It allows us to explore ideas that other people might not approve of, and to figure out our politics, sexuality, and personal values, among other things. It lets us watch or read whatever we want without fear of embarrassment or being outed. This is the case whether we’re reading communist, gay teen, or anti-globalization books; or visiting web sites about abortion, gun control, or cancer; or watching videos of pornography, or documentaries by Michael Moore, or even “The Hangover 2.“
I’m not saying we should never share our intellectual preferences. On the contrary, sharing and commenting on books, films, and ideas is the essence of free speech. We need access to the ideas of others so that we can make up our minds for ourselves. Individual liberty has a social component. But when we share - when we speak - we should do so consciously and deliberately, not automatically and unconsciously. Because of the constitutional magnitude of these values, our social, technological, professional, and legal norms should support rather than undermine our intellectual privacy.
“Frictionless sharing” isn’t really frictionless - it forces on us the new frictions of worrying who knows what we’re reading and what our privacy settings are wherever and however we read electronically. It’s also not really sharing - real sharing is conscious sharing, a recommendation to read or not to read something rather than a data exhaust pipe of mental activity. At a practical level, then, always-on social sharing of our reader records provides less valuable recommendations than conscious sharing, and it can deter us from exploring ideas that our friends might find distasteful. Rather than “over-sharing,“ we should share better, which means consciously, and we should expand the limited legal protections for intellectual privacy rather than dismantling them.
There is a paradox to reader privacy: we need intellectual privacy to make up our minds, but we often need the assistance and recommendations of others as part of this process, be they friends, librarians, or search engines. The work of the ALA and its Office of Intellectual Freedom offers an attractive solution to the problem of reader records. The OIF has argued passionately (and correctly) for the importance of solitary reading as well as the ethical need for those who enable reading - librarians, but also Internet companies - to protect the privacy and confidentiality of reading records. The norms of librarians suggest one successful and proven solution to this paradox. Most relevant here, this means that professionals and companies holding reader records must only disclose them with the express conscious consent of the reader.
The stakes in this debate are immense. We are quite literally rewiring the public and private spheres for a new century. Choices we make now about the boundaries between our individual and social selves, between consumers and companies, between citizens and the state, will have massive consequences for the societies our children and grandchildren inherit.
Social networking technologies have matured to the point where many new things are possible. But we face a moment of decision for reader records. The choice between sharing and privacy is not foreordained; there are many decisions we must make as a society about how our reader records can flow, and under what terms. We’ve heard from the advocates of “sharing” and “social,“ but we must also secure a place for the thoughtful, the private, and the eccentric. When it comes to the question of how to regulate our reading records, a world of automatic, constant disclosure is not the answer.
The choices we make today will be sticky. They’ll have lasting consequences for the kind of networked society we will build, and whether there’s a place in that society for intellectual privacy and for confidential, contemplative, and idiosyncratic reading. Sharing might be cool, but some things, like intellectual privacy and our centuries-old culture of solitary reading, are more important. We need to preserve them; we need to choose intellectual privacy.
[This essay is adapted from a longer article forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal. The paper can be read online for free (and anonymously!) here.]
Neil M. Richards is a Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, where he writes and teaches about the relationships between civil liberties and technology. Born in England, he holds degrees in law and legal history from the University of Virginia, and was a law clerk for William H. Rehnquist, the late Chief Justice of the United States. His book, Intellectual Privacy, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.
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CPW2012: “Libraries may be our society’s best bet in resisting gov’t intrusions into privacy.“
by George Christian
Guest Blogger
Six years ago, three of my board members and I had the relief of having a perpetual gag order lifted in Federal Court. Our organization, a consortium of 27 libraries, had been served with a National Security Letter seeking library records.
National Security Letters are subpoena-like instruments modified in 2001 by the USA PATRIOT Act to allow the FBI to issue them without judicial review (no need to establish probable cause). They are accompanied by perpetual gag orders that forbid recipients from acknowledging they were even visited by the FBI, let alone that they were asked for information or provided that information.
My board members and I sued the Attorney General to have our gag order lifted and the request for information without judicial review declared unconstitutional. Our legal struggle took ten long months, an effort we could only sustain because of free representation by the American Civil Liberties Union with support from the American Library Association.
While we were gagged, Congress renewed the Orwellian named PATRIOT Act without our being able to contest the Attorney General’s repeated reassurances that the law had not been and never would be used against libraries.
After a Federal Appellate Court found our gag order unconstitutional, the FBI dropped its request for our records. We believe they did so to avoid having the constitutionality of National Security Letters tested in court.
Although we proved our point, we hardly changed the government’s attitude. By the time we had won the freedom to speak about the government’s illegal attempt to obtain library records, more than 300,000 national security letters had been issued, each accompanied by a perpetual gag order. I am sure hundreds of thousands more have been issued in the past six years.
Since our encounter with the PATRIOT ACT, it has been twice renewed and strengthened. When Congress isn’t compliant enough in passing new legislation, the executive branch uses administrative procedures to advance its powers. Recently revised guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center grant the director of National Intelligence the authority to profile and track American citizens for up to five years, whether or not they are suspected of any criminal activity.
If anyone can be profiled and tracked, privacy is lost, and conformity becomes valued over curiosity. How many people would be deterred from informing themselves about al-Qaida if they felt the government might be monitoring such inquiries? What about opposing military intervention in an Arab country? What about opposing the government’s erosion of privacy?
Libraries may turn out to be our society’s best bet in resisting government intrusions into privacy. American libraries have a proud heritage of promoting intellectual freedom by providing the broadest possible range of knowledge and ideas and opposing those who would limit what is available on library shelves.
Forty-eight of our states have laws protecting the confidentiality of patron information and library records and charging librarians with the responsibility of insuring this confidentiality is maintained. The other two states have State Library administrative regulations that amount to the same protection.
In recent years, an ever larger portion of the information to which libraries provide access has come in electronic formats, from data bases to electronic journals, downloadable e-books and audio books to digitized historical content. These trends will only continue, probably at an accelerating pace.
Which leads us to the delicious irony that libraries may be the only safe place the public has to access these types of information. Libraries may be the only place most people can get to where the monitoring of access to online information is guarded against.
All this is nicely reflected in the theme “Choose Privacy Week”. Privacy is a choice on both the individual and policy level. Librarians are mandated both by state law and professional ethics to protect patron privacy. Patrons need the shield of privacy to be able to use public libraries to explore personal and private issues or reading genres without fear of intrusion or censorship.
Patrons also need to know what the issues are. Choose Privacy Week is an excellent opportunity to help patrons explore these issues. My experience in being served a national security letter and its accompanying perpetual gag taught me that our liberties are guaranteed not by the Constitution, but by our willingness to insist that our Constitutional liberties be honored. An enlightened and informed public is our best hope. We all are fortunate that we have libraries and that our libraries have such a proud tradition of preserving intellectual liberties.
George Christian is the executive director of the Library Connection, Inc., a non-profit cooperative of 27 public and academic libraries that share an automated library system and other technology services. In 2005, he joined three other librarians in a lawsuit challenging portions of the USA Patriot Act after he received a National Security Letter seeking sensitive about a library patron.
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Choose Privacy Week 2012: The Privacy Expert You Need to Meet - Your Local Librarian
I am honored to be the first blogger in a series of posts celebrating ALA’s Choose Privacy Week. Thanks to funding from the Open Society Foundations, this is our third year and we are so pleased to share with you our campaign’s growth. Get to know www.privacyrevolution.org! There you can view the very latest news on how YOU can get involved as a library privacy expert. Soon you can view our newest video on immigrants and privacy rights. Your community needs you!
April 23’s Chicago Tribune featured a front-page story: “Health data protection vulnerable: theft, privacy breaches abound in decade since patient law began.“ The article tells the story of Elizabeth Page, whose mammography records were hacked. Before that she had no idea that North Carolina had a statewide mammography registry—and that this information had been forwarded to a national database. And there is no way for the health consumer (you!) to know that this information is being used illegally and how it might have affected your being turned down for insurance or a job.
So what is the problem? Aren’t health registries helpful? After all, think of the life-saving value of organ transplant databases. To me, the problem is that the public does not know what information is being collected and how it is being used—not to mention whether it is being secured.
That’s why ALA celebrates Choose Privacy Week. All surveys show that the general public does care about their personal privacy. But they feel powerless and unable to keep up with all the potential invasions of their personal data. Librarians, let’s step into that void! We already deal with privacy issues daily when we protect the confidentiality of user circulation records. We require OPAC vendors to include privacy considerations in the RFP’s. We support the Campaign for Reader Privacy because the USA PATRIOT Act threatens our constitutional rights to read without the government looking over our shoulder. We did this long before privacy was in the headlines. Librarians were there from the beginning. Let’s build on that professional expertise and ethical concern—and the public’s trust in us.
We now need to take this experience and use it strategically in our communities. When our libraries sponsor small business workshops, we need to include a session on privacy. When I attended March’s SXSW I was inspired by the enthusiasm of all those young tech entrepreneurs, but shocked at their lack of information about privacy laws that could make or break their bottom line.
We need to have Privacy Pizza Parties for young people, like our recent event at a Lexington, KY public library branch. Teens need to understand that they can make smart choices when it comes to their school, health, Facebook, and other personal records—so that they aren’t blocked from getting scholarships, health care, or a job because of a misplaced or mismarked Facebook photo or unfounded gossip.
This week the Privacy Revolution website will be filled with information and energy, but our campaign is forever. Just like Banned Books Week, libraries can sponsor programs year round. We need to hear from you about what works and what doesn’t. Let’s take the public concern over privacy and bring it into our libraries in the form of our collections, content, community forums, workshops—all our programming. And in this election year, this is a perfect topic to bring both Republicans and Democrats into the same room to address a topic of mutual concern.
~~ Barbara M. Jones, Director, Office for Intellectual Freedom
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CPW 2012: Amie Stepanovich on Biometrics and Government Surveillance
This is the third in a series of three video presentations in advance of Choose Privacy Week that explore the growing impact of government surveillance on our civil liberties. In this video, Amie Stepanovich, counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), provides an overview of the government’s growing use of biometrics as a tool for government surveillance.
Amie Stepanovich is legal counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, where she works on issues of national security, government surveillance, digital security, and open government.
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CPW 2012: George Christian on Taking a Stand for Privacy
This is the second in a series of three video presentations that explore the growing impact of government surveillance on our civil liberties. In this video,George Christian, executive director of the Library Connection, Inc., discusses challenging government surveillance in the library, with advice on how all librarians can take a stand for privacy.
George Christian is the executive director of the Library Connection, Inc., a non-profit cooperative of 27 public and academic libraries that share an automated library system and other technology services. In 2005, he joined three other librarians in a lawsuit challenging portions of the USA Patriot Act after the Library Connection received a National Security Letter seeking sensitive information about a library patron.
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CPW 2012: Michael German on Data Mining, Government Surveillance, and Civil Liberties
This is the first in a series of three video presentations that explore the growing impact of government surveillance on our civil liberties. In this video, Michael German, policy counsel for the ACLU, discusses the government’s growing use of data mining for surveillance purposes.
Michael German is senior policy counsel for national security and privacy for the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. He previously served as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations. He is a Senior Fellow with GlobalSecurity.org.
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Choose Privacy Week 2012 Resources and Events
Choose Privacy Week begins next week (May 1 - 7, 2012), and the ALA is offering numerous resources to help libraries observe Choose Privacy Week.
From April 25 through April 27, the ALA will post three online presentations to www. privacyrevolution.org that explore the growing impact of surveillance on our civil liberties. These presentations can be used to guide library program planning or can be shared with the community during Choose Privacy Week.
On Wednesday, April 25, Michael German, senior policy counsel for national security and privacy for the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, will discuss “Data Mining, Government Surveillance and Civil Liberties.“ George Christian, executive director of the Library Connection, Inc., will discuss “Challenging Government Surveillance in the Library” on Thursday, April 26. On Friday, April 27, Amie Stepanovich, legal counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), will close the series with a discussion about “The Future of Biometrics and Government Surveillance.“
Beginning on April 30 and continuing throughout Choose Privacy Week, five guest bloggers will reflect on topics addressing the importance of defending privacy and assuring freedom from surveillance:
- Monday, April 30: Barbara Jones, director, ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom.
- Tuesday, May 1: George Christian, executive director of the Library Connection and one of the “Connecticut Four,“ a group of librarians who filed a lawsuit challenging the use of the USA PATRIOT Act in libraries.
- Wednesday, May 2: Neil Richards, professor of Law at Washington University, on privacy and the perils of social reading.
- Friday, May 4: Peter Chase, director, Plainfield Public Library, Plainfield, Connecticut, and one of the “Connecticut Four,“ a group of librarians who filed a lawsuit challenging the use of the USA PATRIOT Act in libraries.
- Monday, May 7: J. Douglas Archer, reference and peace studies librarian at the University of Notre Dame and chair of the ALA-IFC Privacy Subcommittee.
The keynote event of Choose Privacy Week 2012 will be the May 3 premiere of a new short form documentary on privacy, government surveillance and civil liberties that libraries can share with their communities and host events to discuss the issues it raises.
The documentary considers the surveillance techniques used by federal and local law enforcement to spy on immigrant communities in America and the decision by local, state and federal governments to adopt these techniques to monitor and track the activities of all Americans. It features commentary from experts and everyday citizens who ask important questions about the impact of the growing surveillance state on national security, civil liberties and privacy rights.
Featured speakers include Michael German, ACLU senior policy counsel for national security and privacy; Margaret Huang, executive director of the Rights Working Group; Paromita Shah, associate director of the National Immigration Project; Julia Shearson, Executive Director at Council on American Islamic Relations - Cleveland; and Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The documentary will be available for viewing as a streaming download at http://www.privacyrevolution.org
For more information on Choose Privacy Week, visit http://www.privacyrevolution.org or contact Deborah Caldwell-Stone at ..
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Barbara Jones discusses Choose Privacy Week 2012
Barbara Jones, executive director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), highlights the importance of privacy rights in today’s digital age with a new video podcast in honor of Choose Privacy Week, May 1 - 7, 2012
In the podcast, Jones discusses how new technologies have made it possible for organizations and government agencies to monitor our everyday activities through surveillance, and the choices we can make to protect our privacy.
Now in its third year, Choose Privacy Week (May 1-7) is a national public awareness campaign that aims to educate the public on how to protect their privacy and understand their rights. Through special programs, workshops and events, Choose Privacy week aims to deepen public awareness about the serious issue of government surveillance, and offers individuals the resources to think critically and make more informed choices about their privacy.
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