Suspected terrorist: multimillionaire John Gilmore is suing the government to remain anonymous. Is this the last stand for privacy?

Reason, August, 2003 by Brian Doherty

Still, despite lacking explicit congressional authorization, TSA made a deal with Delta airlines to start test runs of CAPPS II at selected airports this spring, which led to a ferocious Web-based boycott campaign against the airline, one that generated lots of anger and e-mail even if it hasn't brought Delta to its knees. "Do you really want to trust Delta with your bank account, SSN, mother's maiden name, or credit rating?" asks Boycott Delta majordomo Bill Stennett at boycottdelta.org. "By their own admission, Delta's computer servers are attacked over 500 times a day."

While others have had complaints about airline ID requirements, Gilmore is unique in making them a federal case. Most Americans, it seems, don't really care very much about their privacy. There are plenty of Americans "who would give away their life story for a Big Mac," observes Sonia Arrison, who studies privacy issues for the Pacific Research Institute and who prefers market solutions over regulatory ones for consumer privacy concerns.

If government in our representative democracy is supposed to respond to people's stated concerns, then government punctiliousness about privacy might actually be exceeding the public's demands. Consider for example:

* Americans' near-universal willingness to embrace the convenience of credit cards and ATM cards even though they create permanent records of what you buy and when and where you buy it, and when you obtain cash and in what amount.

* The widespread use of car transponders that create permanent records of each time your car passes a toll booth, just so you can avoid stopping and rifling through your pockets for change. (Where available, these devices tend to win the patronage of over half of motorists, according to Peter Samuel, editor of Toll Roads Newsletter.)

* The popularity of supermarket club cards that collate permanent records of your grocery spending just so you can get 12-packs of Diet 7-Up on the cheap.

* A recent poll showing that three-fourths of a polled group of frequent business fliers would be "very" or "extremely" willing to undergo fingerprint scans and 61 percent equally thrilled to have a national ID card with thumbprint if only they could move faster through those goddamn airport security lines.

In practice, the overwhelming majority of us are more than happy to accept the conveniences that make tracking and database building possible. We thus have a lot of databases for a TIA to choose from--more than anyone (or any database) has even tallied.

Only the Guilty Have Reason to Fear

Still, we don't have a fully functioning database nation yet. Private investigators and database management spokesmen point out that we do not yet live in a world where someone can pop your name into a computer and have a fat dossier come shooting out of the LaserJet with your name, address, income, bad checks, and old girlfriends in a convenient list, even though private--and government--databases do continue to multiply.

D.C.-area private investigator Ken Cummins sounds like David Bin when he points out that databases are of enormous help in totally legitimate tasks--making people pay their debts, finding fleeing miscreants. Obscurity is indeed the friend of much of the world's evil, as Bin insists when he rails that "financial privacy" concerns are just camouflage for drug dealers and tax evaders. But even in this high-tech world, private eyes often have to find things out through phone calls, physical tracking, and digging through garbage, just like in the old days.