Quicknote: The greatest risk to privacy - and security, accordingly - that I have witnessed in my lifetime, has been created, perpetuated, instituted, by the actions - unknowingly, I would presume - of normal, everyday individuals. They were simple actions, but they all broke the foundational binds of trust in our society.
People are right to be concerned about things like privacy, information security, and so forth. There are real and serious reasons to be genuinely concerned. However, it has been my lifelong experience that the greatest of all infringements to privacy have been done by the hands of normal everyday people, what one might call common folk. That means me, you, and everybody else in this room.
It's not that we are evil, not at all. It's just that we have very bad habits and that - I am beginning to believe - we are fundamentally flawed in this area. I don't think that humans come prepackaged with a good enough sense of what the boundaries are between the private and public realms, possibly because these are cultural constructs and not actual physical borders or frontiers between things in the material universe.
With that being said, the borders that bind together the two separate, non-communicating realms of The Private and The Public, are no less real, and important. That is, it is important to keep them separate, but as I have just said, human beings don't seem to be well-equipped to respect such things as privacy, and security, accordingly.
Yes, for not respecting someone's privacy could be putting them in danger. You might not know that, it is in fact not your privacy, but theirs. It's why you should respect it, because it does not belong to you, but to the individual whose privacy it is.
Since this has become almost the bane of my very existence, I will be logging events on this blog whereby individuals have broken the binds of trust, binds - or bounds if you will - that are foundational to living in a just and democratic society. I will not name names, but since my privacy was infringed upon, if you are vigilant enough, you might be able to trace it back to the case in point (the infringement). In doing so, the private information never meant to be private will be revealed to you. It was already revealed, but you probably never noticed. Since it was revealed by someone else, and pertained to my private realm the best I can do is to attempt to reclaim it. I find that I can best accomplish this by pointing out the infringement - of my own private information, revealed publicly - and making an example of it.
I cannot go back in time and change things, I also have no power over others. I also cannot live in isolation. I too must live amongst people, in this society, and if others are not respecting such things as the binds of trust, i.e. by infringing upon people's privacy, knowingly or unknowingly, there is nothing I can do to stop them. But, as I said, I can set an example.
I have very high standards when it comes to these things and for very good reason. I was born with the exceptional ability to see true risks in everything. I also see false risks, erroneous risks, and can do the math to adjust for the discrepancy, the errors of judgement. I end up with a more or less neutral value that is not too optimistic or too pessimistic but just right. And over the course of my 36 years, these judgements have never failed me. I am a natural-born assessor of potential risks. I am telling you that it isn't evil corporations or banks or governments that are putting the very foundational binds of trust at risk in our civil societies. It is normal, everyday people. It is part of what I am calling The Little Evil(s). Small, perhaps even entirely anodyne, behaviors by individuals that infringe upon things such as privacy and so forth, and that taken in the aggregate actually create Evil with a capital E, The Greater Evil.
Evil is not some force of Nature. Evil is in us. I am evil, you are evil, we all have a little evil in us. It is part and parcel of this thing we call being human. It comes alongside our very birthright. It is our birthmark, the reason we are flawed and not perfect beings. The sooner we realize what our little evils are, and take measures to correct them, the better life will be for all living things on this planet.
Remember, I too am a purveyor of little evils. This thing I called a Quicknote is a little evil. It is meant to slight those that would do me harm, do harm to my privacy, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. This slight is a little evil, but smaller than the little evil of infringing upon my privacy, which, if it ever came to that, could put my life in jeopardy, or cause an existential risk or threat to my life, in the very worst case. All because someone did not respect the foundational binds of trust of our democratic societies. A little evil, but that can do great harm to individuals.
You shall not be named. Nothing will be revealed that was private except my own personally identifying information that you disclosed without the right to disclose it. All I am doing is logging it on my blog. It's my privacy, and I am told that I an inalienable right to it. Yet no court of law will take such petty, trifling matters into consideration. They are not important enough, and I wouldn't want a court to have to decide. This is my privacy, after all, and I can do something to preserve it. I have that power, not a very great power, but a power nonetheless.
More and more, people are concerned about Surveillance. Yet who is it that you see spying at you from behind the Venetian blinds when you go freely walking down the street? It isn't the State. It is your neighbor(s). There's nothing wrong with keeping an eye on things, safety is an important public good in our communities. Vigilance is a very important thing to be cultivating. But one must parse things correctly and accept that we are all peddlers in little evils, tiny evils, anodyne evils, petty, trifling evils of this world.
It does no harm, does it, if I tell someone I am with - indoors - that I just saw Mrs. Smith leave her house, walking her dog? Of course it doesn't. Except that it might. It depends who I just told, and if they relay that message and to whom and so on and so forth. It doesn't take long for the message to make it into the wrong hands, of someone who might capitalize on the fact that Mrs. Smith has left her house, and at what time, and with whom - her dog in this case.
Here is the basic rule. There are cases when it is the correct, proper thing to do, to tell someone such things. In fact, it is our duty and responsibility to do so, again, because we live and want to continue living in decent, civil societies, in our wonderful democratic nations. What messages one must relay are ones where there is something seemingly wrong with the picture. There is nothing wrong with Mrs. Smith walking her dog. She probably does it once a day, maybe twice or more. It is a redundant piece of information, entirely regular in the Grand Scheme of Things. But even when one sees someone unfamiliar, this does not mean it is an evil-doer. We are all little evil-doers, as I just said. It is not for us to judge. For all you know, it might just be Bob Dylan. This actually happened recently, he was stopped by police for taking a walk in some neighborhood where apparently he was either unwelcome or unfamiliar. But it was Bob Dylan. So please leave Mrs. Smith alone. Let her mind her own business, and mind yours instead. One has to learn to parse these things properly. If you think you see a risk of violence, or aggression, or else coercion of some form or another, please take immediate action. But then again, you are not to take the law into your own hands. There are trained persons for such always complex and difficult matters. Recent history ought to have taught us all a very good lesson about such vigilantism - or anything resembling vigilantism, even if remotely.
Otherwise, relay nothing. Do as doctors do with our medical dossiers and as priests and lawyers do. The Commandment on bearing false witness has an important, often overlooked corollary: Bear truth only. A private truth is not a truth you have borne witness to, if it is not your privacy. Carry on, pretend as though you never saw anything. It happens at times, we unknowingly stumble upon something we weren't meant to spy upon. If it isn't something dangerous, then carry on. Mind your business.
It doesn't have to be a trade secret or even a state secret for us to mind ourselves if I can put it in a less dramatic tone. These little evils, however, if we are not careful in treating them with care and compassion in our hearts and intelligent discernment, concern and vigilance in our spirits, will grow to become a canker sore, and may risk the very sovereignty of our great nations. It is a general rule that such small, simple things as individual behaviors, when taken in the aggregate, can grow to processes of great complexity, of massive complexity. Things can emerge that are quite ugly. Yet no one wanted to do anyone any harm. Right. I've heard that one before. When we were kids we told our mothers, "It wasn't me." Of course it wasn't. It wasn't any one of us. Then who was it? It must have been this strange ghost, this character living in our house, named It Wasn't Me.
Let us not live in a world with 6 billion persons named It Wasn't Me. That's all I am trying to say. Godspeed and may you carry on.
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