The following document is from the PRIVACY Forum Archive at Vortex Technology, Woodland Hills, California, U.S.A. For direct web access to the PRIVACY Forum and PRIVACY Forum Radio, including detailed information, archives, keyword searching, and related facilities, please visit the PRIVACY Forum via the web URL: http://www.vortex.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PRIVACY Forum Digest Friday, 11 December 1998 Volume 07 : Issue 20 Moderated by Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com) Vortex Technology, Woodland Hills, CA, U.S.A. http://www.vortex.com ===== PRIVACY FORUM ===== ------------------------------------------------------------------- The PRIVACY Forum is supported in part by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Committee on Computers and Public Policy, "internetMCI" (a service of the Data Services Division of MCI Telecommunications Corporation), Cisco Systems, Inc., and Telos Systems. - - - These organizations do not operate or control the PRIVACY Forum in any manner, and their support does not imply agreement on their part with nor responsibility for any materials posted on or related to the PRIVACY Forum. ------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS Privacy and Impeachment (Lauren Weinstein; PRIVACY Forum Moderator) *** Please include a RELEVANT "Subject:" line on all submissions! *** *** Submissions without them may be ignored! *** ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Internet PRIVACY Forum is a moderated digest for the discussion and analysis of issues relating to the general topic of privacy (both personal and collective) in the "information age" of the 1990's and beyond. The moderator will choose submissions for inclusion based on their relevance and content. Submissions will not be routinely acknowledged. All submissions should be addressed to "privacy@vortex.com" and must have RELEVANT "Subject:" lines; submissions without appropriate and relevant "Subject:" lines may be ignored. Excessive "signatures" on submissions are subject to editing. Subscriptions are by an automatic "listserv" system; for subscription information, please send a message consisting of the word "help" (quotes not included) in the BODY of a message to: "privacy-request@vortex.com". Mailing list problems should be reported to "list-maint@vortex.com". All messages included in this digest represent the views of their individual authors and all messages submitted must be appropriate to be distributable without limitations. The PRIVACY Forum archive, including all issues of the digest and all related materials, is available via anonymous FTP from site "ftp.vortex.com", in the "/privacy" directory. Use the FTP login "ftp" or "anonymous", and enter your e-mail address as the password. The typical "README" and "INDEX" files are available to guide you through the files available for FTP access. PRIVACY Forum materials may also be obtained automatically via e-mail through the listserv system. Please follow the instructions above for getting the listserv "help" information, which includes details regarding the "index" and "get" listserv commands, which are used to access the PRIVACY Forum archive. All PRIVACY Forum materials are available through the Internet Gopher system via a gopher server on site "gopher.vortex.com". Access to PRIVACY Forum materials is also available through the Internet World Wide Web (WWW) via the Vortex Technology WWW server at the URL: "http://www.vortex.com"; full keyword searching of all PRIVACY Forum files is available via WWW access. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- VOLUME 07, ISSUE 20 Quote for the day: "Madness! Madness!" -- Major Clipton (James Donald) "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (Columbia; 1957) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 11 Dec 98 22:30 PST From: lauren@vortex.com (Lauren Weinstein; PRIVACY Forum Moderator) Subject: Privacy and Impeachment Greetings. I hope the readership will excuse me for diverging somewhat from the usual format of the PRIVACY Forum Digest with this edition, which contains but a single article. It is also a somewhat long item, for which I also apologize--but I feel that there are some crucial issues to address. I'll be returning to the normal digest format with the next edition. As regular readers of this digest may know, I endeavor to keep the Forum a place where divergent, intelligent views on privacy and related topics can be aired and discussed. I routinely reject extremist or highly politicized submissions. I don't feel that such materials usefully advance the debate about these issues, rather, I feel that they tend to do active damage. In fact, I try to keep the Forum as non-political as possible. Privacy concerns in particular seem to cut across all political and economic lines. When partisan politics enter into the fray, the results are usually non-productive at best and destructive at worst. So it is with reluctance that I find myself forced to comment in this venue regarding a largely political matter and the dangers it appears to represent within the privacy arena. Over the months as the many details of the current impeachment crisis have been revealed and exploited in various quarters, I've been asked many times to provide my opinions regarding the privacy-related aspects of this whole situation. Until now, I've chosen not to do so here. I should note that my thoughts on this matter would be identical if the situation involved a Republican president and a Democrat-controlled Congress. To even the casual observer, it should be obvious that privacy matters pervade the whole fabric of the situation from the very start. They are in fact at the very heart of the matter, in many divergent respects--the original consensual intimate activities, Linda Tripp's secret taping apparently instigated by the President's political enemies, the release of normally secret grand jury testimony, videotapes, phone call tapes, and other materials en masse to the media and Internet, the list goes on and on. The chronology, in all its salacious detail, has become the stuff of tabloids and comedy shows, and has, in many respects, made this country the laughingstock of the rest of the world's population, who don't understand what all the fuss is about. And it may only have begun. If the House of Representatives impeaches the President over these matters, presumably on a nearly party-line vote and in the face of public opinion polls which have shown remarkably stable support for the President, we may face months of wall-to-wall details of a sort that will make what we've seen up to now look like a picnic. If a Senate trial ensues, that body will be tied up during the entire period, as will the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who must preside over the process. We'll be treated to a parade of witnesses, all the personages about whom we know far too much already, as we delve into the intricacies of who touched who, when and where, and all that led from those events. But there will be more victims than those directly involved in the proceedings--privacy will be one of them. Even in the event of impeachment, it currently appears likely (based on currently available information) that the President would not be convicted in the Senate, and will continue in office. But the damage being done to the foundations of privacy in this country by what many perceive to be an unfair and privacy-invasive sequence of events may be irreparable. There's no denying that the relationship between the President and Monica Lewinski was one that most persons would find unethical and distasteful--we can take that as a truism. But it was also some other things. It was consensual. It was legal. It was also human. And it should have been private. And in fact, under almost any other circumstances, it would have been and remained private, not manipulated into a partisan attempt at a parliamentary-style recall. It was the result of human weakness and imperfection, to be sure. We now know from history that there have been previous Presidents who have exhibited similar failings, and one can imagine that the totals would be significantly enhanced if we added such activities by Congresspersons over the years into the mix--which is just to say that they're all human beings. And yet, what we're seeing now is a dramatic lowering of the bar for presidential impeachment, contrasting sharply with the almost total lack of such actions in the past, even in the face of activities and lies by previous presidents which involved institutional abuses of power that were clearly of national import. So what has changed? Part of the problem, I feel, is that we have tacitly permitted extremism to grow unchecked in this country. We have allowed hate to fester. Listen to the tirade of abuse, much of it of the most absurd nature possible, heaped upon political figures, especially the President, on a multitude of talk radio programs, most of which tend to be considerably right-of-center in their orientation. To the extent that we do not actively attempt to encourage balance, moderation, or at least some sense of reality into such discussions, the purveyors of hate are given a free hand. (I am in fact now organizing a radio program that will specifically provide a venue for rational discussion of all manner of political, social, and technological issues--drop me a line if you're interested...) In the sort of atmosphere that exists today, it's a small wonder that so many obvious violations of basic privacy, and basic fairness, have been perpetrated in an attempt to turn a distasteful and unethical, but legal and private relationship, into a mechanism to satisfy those who hated the man all along. We should all probably be quite used to pontification and hypocrisy when it comes to politics. But the tactics that have been employed, particularly in regards to wholesale attacks against basic privacy rights, by those whose goal all along was to find some way to "get" the President, have been breathtaking in their scope. When it comes to privacy issues, we tend to of necessity deal in lots of specific issues in isolation. Credit cards, encryption, telecommunications, databases, and so on. We don't often have an opportunity to see how privacy issues in many ways underpin the very foundation of our society and culture. In the current situation, we've seen some privacy-invasive techniques used against the President that would, unfortunately, be right at home in any technologically advanced police state. There are those who would suggest that the sorts of privacy problems facing the President would never be applicable to average citizens, that there aren't Starr investigations and limitless resources available to pry into the private lives of average folks. I'd submit that there is direct applicability. Events such as these can't help but set the tone for the entire nation. If gross privacy violations are deemed to be acceptable when attempting to impeach the highest elected official in the country, it seems only reasonable that such violations will be seen as acceptable by a much broader range of entities as well. In Nazi Germany during World War II, many people sat by quietly and unprotestingly as grievous wrongs were committed, simply because they weren't members of the groups currently being herded into the boxcars. What many of them found, however, is that eventually the terror would spread to them as well. It might be worth keeping this in mind before suggesting that the privacy abuses against the President of the United States, an imperfect human being as are we all, have nothing to do with the rest of us. Just my personal opinion, of course. Thank you for your indulgence. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein Moderator, PRIVACY Forum http://www.vortex.com ------------------------------ End of PRIVACY Forum Digest 07.20 ************************