September 26, 1999
FOREIGN AFFAIRS / By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Little Brother

Last summer I visited Chicago and stayed at a large chain hotel. In the
morning I went down to swim in the pool, and I put my room key in my
bathing
suit pocket. I then proceeded to lose the key in the pool. So I went back
to
the front desk and asked for a new key.

"Can you show me a picture I.D.?" asked the desk clerk.

"No," I said. "I'm in my bathing suit! I have no I.D."

"No problem," said the clerk. She typed a few things into her computer,
and
then looked up at me and asked, "What are the ages of your two daughters?"

My daughters weren't with me. But I had stayed in this hotel a year
earlier
with them. I correctly answered the clerk's question about their ages and
she
handed me a new key. But I couldn't help wondering: What else do they have
on
me and my family in that little computer, and whom are they selling that
info
to?

Last week, I got a letter from an old friend, Richard Day, whom I met in
Beirut in 1982 but had lost contact with. Richard, a consultant, now lives
in
Dubai and his letter said the following: "I found your address on a People
Search site on the Internet. I was amazed that for a mere $59 I could
order a
complete background search on you that included, among other things, a
complete listing of your assets. I kept my $59, but it made me wonder what
all of this is really coming to. Your daughters and my sons can check each
other out in ways that you and I never dreamed were possible."

And it's just the beginning. Rule No. 1 of the Internet is this: We are
all
connected, but nobody's in charge. That is, the Internet is Orwellian in
its
reach, but there's no Big Brother. Instead of Big Brother, there are a lot
of
Little Brothers. Beware of the Little Brothers. They are going to be the
problem. The Internet super-empowers individuals, Web sites, corporations
and
even hotels -- the Little Brothers -- so they can amass huge amounts of
information outside of any government supervision. Some of these Little
Brothers will use that personal data responsibly; others won't.

A study by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that less than 10
percent of all Web sites respected the O.E.C.D.'s privacy guidelines,
which
stipulate that people have the right to expect that any personal data they
submit over the Internet will not be used without their consent, that they
have a right to correct any errors and to assume the data will be
protected
from abuse.

How we deal with the Little Brothers should be a campaign issue. There are
lots of ideas. One of the most thoughtful comes from Harvard Law professor
Lawrence Lessig, in his upcoming book, "Code, and Other Laws of
Cyberspace."
Mr. Lessig argues that people suffer from the illusion that however
cyberspace is right now is how it must always be. It can't be changed.
It's a
place to be discovered, not shaped. But cyberspace was not handed down by
God. Its architecture is shaped by people with certain interests, who are,
as
we speak, "designing the hardware of cyberspace in ways that are
determining
the freedom and privacy that you and I will have there," says Mr. Lessig.

The architecture of cyberspace is highly influenced by commerce and
government, "both of which have an interest in knowing as much as they can
about what people are doing and where," says Mr. Lessig. "So it's not an
accident that the emerging Internet architecture makes it easier to track
people and collect private data, because tracking people is what
governments
like and collecting private data is what commerce likes."

Government, argues Mr. Lessig, can't legislate privacy on the Internet,
but
it can create incentives for people to build privacy filters and other
safeguards into the Internet. "Let's say the government says that data
about
you is your property and the only way that someone can take it away is by
negotiating with you," he said. "That would create an incentive for Web
designers to make it easier for each of us to negotiate about our personal
data -- what we want to give up for free, what we want to be paid for and
what we don't want to give up at all."

I don't know that Mr. Lessig has the right answer, but I am certain he's
asking the right question: How do we get better governance in cyberspace,
when there is no government in control there?

Issues such as the right to privacy are core values from our Constitution
and
Founding Fathers. Are we moving into an age when such values will only be
respected on land, but not in cyberspace? If the Constitution ends where
the
Web begins, well, beware of Little Brother.


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