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One response to stepped-up surveillance is stepped-up effort to hide from it — more laws regulating what people and governments are allowed to record, and more funds devoted to encryption and other privacy-protecting resources. But author and scientist David Brin says while this approach reflects the right instincts, it is insufficient. Especially as technology advances, there will be no hiding from surveillance. What we should instead fight for is transparency: the watchers must feel just as exposed as the watched.

Dr. Brin anticipated this debate with his 1998 book, “The Transparent Society,” which he joined me to discuss. We also talked about what privacy policy means when applied to the government versus the increasingly powerful tech titans, the future of AI, and lessons from science fiction. David Brin holds a PhD in astrophysics, and besides writing “The Transparent Society” is also the prize-winning author of several science fiction novels (one of which, “The Postman,” was made into a movie starring Kevin Costner). His blog can be found here, and essays and speeches touched upon in this episode here, here, and here.

What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode by clicking the link below, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

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Pethokoukis: You are probably best known as a science fiction writer, but you have also wrote a book about privacy sometime in the late 1990s called “The Transparent Society” that I thought seemed newly relevant. What were you thinking back then when you wrote that book and how have your initial conclusions changed?

Brin: I’ve been asked recently to do a 20th anniversary edition, and I flipped through the book and I found almost nothing that needs revising, unfortunately. I keep getting emails about page 206, which is where in 1997 I talk about what powers the federal authorities might ask for if, for example, terrorists ever brought down both World Trade Center towers. I said that specifically — people call that a Twilight Zone moment.

In fact there had been an effort that attempted to bring down the towers a couple of years earlier so it’s not so much psychic, but what was prescient was that I pretty much described in detail what would become the Patriot Act. Lately there’s been a lot more discussion about page 160 because that chapter discusses how cell phone cameras are equalizing the playing field to some degree for our racial minorities. And that was also predicted in my novel “Earth.”

So the topic keeps coming up and I try to raise things that people don’t notice because the news media is addicted to a particular type of narrative. It’s not that they’re Deep State. It’s not that they’re dishonest. But they have reflexes to follow certain pathways. It’s not wrong to be concerned that we’re heading toward Big Brother; this is the great contribution of science fiction, what’s called the self-preventing prophecy. The greatest of them all was George Orwell’s “1984.” And almost all Americans think that they are brave defenders of freedom against some nefarious group that is trying to become Big Brother.

We’re all heroes of our own stories.

Yes, and the difference primarily is that on the left you think that the danger is arising from conniving aristocrats and faceless corporations. On the right you think it’s from snooty academics and faceless government bureaucrats. And if you put it that way the answer is you’re both right. 6,000 years of human history shows us that cheaters will try to gather power to cheat from any direction that’s left unguarded. Under ideal circumstances a moderate person of the left says to a moderate person of the right, “I’m more concerned about these elites and we will guard each other’s backs.” But that comity, that willingness to accept the other side might possibly have a point, has been the principal thing that enemies of freedom have been targeting — the American genius at pragmatic negotiation, the lost art called politics. So sticking us at each other’s throats has been a major goal.

When you wrote the book in the 90s the concern was cameras everywhere — cameras on street corners, cameras on early drones, that we would have this video surveillance society.

Yeah, and I had just lived in London, so I saw it starting. I was constantly being invited to these gatherings where these so-called cypher-punks are declaring that freedom will be saved forever if we just use secret codes. And they’re still out there. They are still saying all we need is encryption and everything will be wonderful. And what I point out is that these guys know absolutely no human history. Going back to Hammurabi 4,000 years ago, there have been cat-and-mouse games between secret police and resistance heroes fighting for liberty. And of the dozen methods used by secret police for 4,000 years, secret codes might hamper the secret police in three of those dozen methods; so they aren’t even thinking about the big context.

Nor do they think about what it is that got us our freedom. How is it that we got the freedom that is enabling us to do all this shouting about freedom? It turns out that 99 percent of the methodologies that actually gave us freedom and some privacy is to look back at power. It is not hiding from power. Hiding never worked and it never will.

So making power as transparent as what they would make our lives?

Exactly. And that is exactly what we’ve increasingly done for the last 250 years, and we’re increasing that. 2013 was the best year for civil liberties in the United States in this century so far. And the news media barely covered it at all because it didn’t fit into the narrative of gloom.

What happened then?

Well, what happened then was that year the Obama administration and the courts both held that it is a universal right of citizens — if they aren’t interfering — to record their interactions in public spaces with police. And the Trump-wing of the GOP is trying hard to restrict this. The federal district court they most control in Missouri just tried to cancel this right, and it’s going to go to the Supreme Court. Now four other district courts have reinforced it. But there is no more important liberty than the power to exculpate yourself from an accusation of a crime.

The people who are supporting this right to record our interactions with police cite the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment — these are obvious. And now they’re citing the Second Amendment, which I think is very clever because when you’re thinking about bearing arms, there’s nothing that is more important than a camera. The camera doesn’t threaten legitimate state power but boy does it threaten illegitimate state power.

But the amendment that truly is never used to support it, which is the most underrated amendment in the Bill of Rights, is the Sixth. It’s the one that says that if you are accused of a crime, you have a right to prove your innocence, and you have that right to prove your innocence by grabbing witnesses by the collar and demanding that they testify; that includes cameras. That includes the ability to say I didn’t do this and here’s why.

And there’s nothing more connected with that basic right, because as long as we have that then the state can’t throw you in prison on the basis of a lie, and that’s what they’ve done for 4,000 years. That’s what they’re doing now all over the world in the mafia states.

So you make a case for turning surveillance around as a way of enabling freedom, but it seems to me that the concerns a lot of people have are especially about private companies — that private companies will have their information, whether it’s our data from our cell phones or whether it’s facial recognition. An example: I’m someone who’s very excited about autonomous vehicles — they will save all these lives and hopefully they’re just around the corner — but what I hear from people is all that means is we’ll be banned from cars and a company is going to know where we are at all times. Then the government will know where I’m at and all of a sudden we’re in — you guessed it — “1984” and I’ll have no privacy. Hence we better not have autonomous cars.

This is where everybody has the right instinct. But the reflex to then say David Brin is against privacy and doesn’t worry about Big Brother and wants to trust Big Brother is insane. I am more paranoid about this than anybody. I approve of people sending money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU. People are right to be worried, but they always lead to the wrong impression of what to do about it. It is not important what the elites know about you because you’re not going to stop them from knowing about you. It’s just not going to happen. Ban facial recognition software when it can be embedded into anything? The fundamental is that you are not going to have your life ruined by what elites know about you and you’re not going to stop them from knowing about you. What could ruin your life is what elites can do to you, and there is only one way to prevent them from doing bad things to you — and that is by stripping them naked and putting the fear of God in them and saying, “If you harm me, I as a sovereign citizen will open you up and show you to the world.”

How can you equate the power of the mighty to the average citizen? How are you doing that to Google? How are you doing that to Facebook, and to companies where people are very worried about the information they have (even if at the moment it’s mostly being used just to target ads toward them)? People seem extraordinarily concerned.

I’m glad to live in a culture in which targeting ads is the worst thing they can do to you. Hollywood has portrayed all those power centers — rich people, faceless corporations, academics and innovators and secretive scientists gone rogue — Hollywood has got us all tuned with suspicion of authority. It’s the central US, Western mythology. And it’s fine. I was raised under it. I totally agree with it.

But we have to be able to parse, (a) where the real harm is going to be, and (b) how we can prevent it. Even in a movie like “The Circle,” which is blatant propaganda and basically targeted against me, the story rails against people like me who favor transparency and openness by doing huge exaggerations, but then at the end of the movie, what’s the solution? Shining transparency and openness on the mighty.

So does that just mean knowing what data Facebook or Google or any other big companies are taking from you and knowing exactly how they’re going to use it and giving you greater control over it? Is that the path?

It is to some degree. The question of reciprocity of evenness of power is one of the best ones that people raise. If everybody has the right to see and hold each other accountable, government agencies and the rich and corporations are going to be better at it than I am. And that’s completely right. And that is why we had the greatest invention of the West in the second half of the 20th century — the NGO, the non-governmental organization. I’m a member of three environmental organizations, for example, and they take my money every year and then pool it with several million others, and then the Sierra Club can hire the best scientists and lawyers on a par with the lawyers hired by Exxon. So you start by pooling your money. You join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you join the ACLU, and even though I disagree with some of their recommendations, they are in the good fight and they are there trying to equalize the battle over your rights.

How about pooling our data?

Tim Berners-Lee is working on something called Solid which would let people keep their data cached in more secure capsules. I don’t think that could possibly work but at least it’s an attempt.

I think Jaron Lanier had the best idea and that is that we do not own our information. Think about it. That is insane: You are saying I have the right to tell someone else you may not know something. Well that is exactly what the elites and the powerful want as the law because they could take advantage of that better than we can; they can restrict what we are allowed to know.

But what Jaron Lanier says is if the information about us can move around but we own a continuing interest in that information, we can know who owes us micro-royalties for the use of our information. Now we are starting to talk about something that could be enforceable. That type of policy doesn’t declare no one else may know something, but it does say I am real, I exist, and my information is something that I should benefit from before anyone else benefits from it. That’s enforceable. That’s something that could happen.

Still, when I talk to some people they tend to be worried by the very idea that their information is out there and that someone out there has their name and email address. To me it doesn’t seem like a particularly significant level of information, but they’re worried about that. And you’re saying, no, that’s fine that that’s out there. You just need know how it is being used and perhaps be able to profit from it.

Yes, in the long run, but there’s something more important than that. The major distinction is: It’s less important what others know about you than what they can do to you. Now, how can we prevent them from doing bad things to you? You know, there’s a cliché that’s out there that the paladins of secrecy and privacy say: “Why are you trying to hide your information? Do you have something to hide? The only reason you would want to hide your information is if you’re doing something wrong. If you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide.”

And that is absolutely true that that is the rationalization that elites will use against privacy. However, it’s a little hard for them to use it if their data is available. If a CEO or a politician must also be stripped naked, now we’ve turned that notion against them. We can ask them, what do you have to hide? And of course somebody’s tax returns come into mind.

The point is that there is a basic truth to that nasty Orwellian aphorism, and that is that in the future world, if most of the people know most of what’s going on most of the time, then you should not be so much harmed by what people know about you.

Now let me turn that right around and tell you that there is an extremely dangerous exception to what I just said, and that is social credit, which they are spreading in China.

I was hoping you were going to get to that.

Here’s the deal: For 200 years we have increasingly applied accountability to the mighty. The Security Exchange Commission insists on revelations from corporations, and we had got the Freedom of Information Act and the right to shine cameras at the police in public. If we have a transparent world, then we won’t get Big Brother. You can’t have Big Brother if the telescreen shines on Big Brother and the party officials, even if they start out with all the guns.

But there’s a second order effect. What if we all know what’s going on and 51 percent of the population decides to be oppressive conformity-enforcing prudes and legally and openly with their 51 percent majority pass laws that we find oppressive? Well, that’s a secondary failure mode. That’s a really awful one and it’s portrayed in Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful short story “Harrison Bergeron.” What do you do about that secondary failure mode? Because that is exactly the secondary failure mode that the Chinese are trying for with their social credit system.

Charlie Booker had a wonderful depiction of this in his series “Black Mirror” in an episode called “Nosedive.” The point is you must have a secondary defense, and that is our love of eccentricity. And if you take a look at the movies that you watch these days, suspicion of authority is the principal underlying meme. Even if it’s a bossy, pushy mother-in-law, there’s some authority figure that the protagonist has to resist. But other themes are tolerance, diversity, and appreciation of eccentricity. Very often at the beginning of a film the audience bonds with the principal character by witnessing that principal character engaging in some kind of eccentric activity. It doesn’t have to be the eccentricity that the audience member has — just the fact that they are being different in some way.

You could argue that America has never been more open to eccentricity than it is right now. How many adults twenty years ago would say they like superhero movies? Probably a lot fewer than today.

Exactly. There are more weird hobbies than ever before. And so the fundamental defense against social credit oppression by a conformist 51 percent is that reflex. It’s the reflex that says mind your own business; leave me alone. If we have transparency and it prevents Big Brother by shining light on the mighty, that gets rid of the worst oppression. But the second worst oppression, oppression by the majority, people legitimately and reflexively fear.

If we have a transparent world the burden doesn’t come off us. We have to continue to fight for a tolerant and diverse and eccentric and accepting world. If that’s the case then the Chinese politburo will fail with its social credit system. People will gain social credit by being quirky.

When I talk to different audiences, there’s a lot of negativity about technology and the future. “AI is going to take all the jobs or it’s going to kill us.” Or, “we’re going to have a social credit system in this country.” Or, “we’re going to have this terrible surveillance society.” Or, “we’re going to have these genetic advances, but then they’re going to force all of us to use them on our children.”

It’s sort of a non-stop march of how all this stuff is going to go wrong. I don’t see positive anticipation of the future and the ways technology can help in that. So I think to myself: What is the positive story of the future that I can tell people to say that it’s going to be okay, and we can actually have much richer and fuller lives in the future than in the past?

It’s a spectacularly important question. The question really is, how do you strike a balance? Because right now there are powers around the world who benefit from gloom and our failure of our confidence. Now, this does not mean we should go to the opposite extreme of being Pollyannaish. There’s a reason why our ancestors who saw a rustle in the foliage thought 75 percent of the time that it could be a lion and 25 percent that it could be something I could go and eat. We’re all descended from the ones who worry, and there’s plenty to worry about.

But worry without confidence is insanity. It just leads to dour growling cynicism. The question is, can we gain confidence from the pure fact that we’ve done extremely well for the last 50 years? We’ve dealt very well with at least 70 percent of the problems that we’ve come up with and confidence that we can do more is the missing ingredient. You can find more confidence from Peter Diamandis’ book “Abundance,” from Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and these guys are not saying be complacent. They’re saying look at what we’ve accomplished so that you can be confident enough to save all our lives by doing more.

Us Boomers are going to get out of the way eventually and everything will be much better off, especially when one of the greatest movies ever, “Network,” and its Boomer anthem finally starts to fade. It’s a horrible message: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” We have just finished the greatest year in space in this century so far and almost nobody is aware of it. We should be screaming from the rooftops, “I’m as proud as hell and nobody’s going to stop us.”