There is no such thing as privacy in a globalized word.
- Joan Chittister
Whether you believe Edward Snowdon is a hero, a traitor, or a naive idealist, his situation has pointed to much broader questions about transparency and privacy.
Picture a six year old bouncing through the house. He notices a set of car keys lying on the table and decides to go for a ride. Why not? He has watched the grown-ups in his family driving the family car. He know just what to do and heads down the street, manning the driver's seat.
Not kidding! Occasionally a child does just that. I remember a little boy who drove 16 miles from one northern Minnesota town to another before he was "apprehended."
We humans are in much the same situation with our use of powerful digital devices. Pick up your cell phone and text someone halfway round the world. With the Internet, your computer gives you the opportunity to order items from multiple companies across the country (or out of the country). We watch events happening elsewhere in the world while paying our bills - without searching for a stamp or a US Postal mailbox. Many of us use social media sites and have conversations with lots of people simultaneously. We hear the verdict of a trial in Florida and the number of Tweets rises into the millions soon after the jurors announce the verdict. I write this blog and readers from every continent read my words (except Antarctica - at least up to this point).
In turn, your computer is watching you. Ads proliferate that are tailor-made for your preferences. Your personal demographics are public property. Sophisticated commercial use of data about you exceeds the capacity of the Federal government to track you.
The printing press has been said to be one of the greatest inventions of all time. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, books became available for people, who previously were excluded from reading words printed on paper. Until that time most of the people in the world learned exclusively via oral stories, stationary messages inscribed on rocks, or in Western Europe, stories portrayed in sculpture and paintings affixed to great cathedrals. The books that did exist were laboriously produced by hand, one book at a time. Even if we understand cognitively what it might have meant to live in an illiterate world without books, emotionally it is difficult to imagine all of its ramifications.
We live in a similar time. Can you really remember what it was like when communications were limited to letters and phone conversations - and long distance was used only for emergency purposes? A time when you had to go to stores to purchase any item you wanted or needed? When news was limited to newspapers in large cities, but not available in small towns?
The difference between printing presses that produced one book at a time and the digital capabilities of today is that a person could observe the press itself and see how it worked. Today, computer chips are non-observable miracles. And my new computer is so thin that it sits on my desktop - and has no little slot for discs to enable me to download software. Instead, everything is on-line. What next?
We have been handed powerful tools that few of us understand their inner workings, much less fathom their multiple capacities to engage the world. We are six-year-olds with the keys for the family car. It's easy - we have seen others clicking away at keyboards. We can do it too.
Should we be spying on other countries? Because other countries are spying on us, should we be spying back? What does national security mean anyway? It has not taken many decades to move beyond the time of bugging rooms with secret microphones and recording conversations on reel-to-reel tape recorders.
I have no words of wisdom to contribute to this transparency/privacy spying debate. Nor do I know where all this digitization will take us. The Dick Tracy of my childhood used this marvelous wristwatch to communicate with his sidekick - all fantasy of course. Now look at us - electronic devices that already are obsolete when we walk out of the store.
Oh, gotta go! My cell phone is vibrating . . .
