| 12 May 2006 Little Secrets Katherine Hepburn once observed: “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.” She is right, on so many levels. But in the course of having our fun, we construct an alternate world, the one in which we can do what we want. In that construction we place our little secrets, those small personal matters whose disclosure might alter the way the world looks at us. Fashion and law change over time, and what might be considered “fun” in one generation might become inconvenient in another. Senator Bird of West Virginia regrets his dalliance with the Ku Klux Klan when he was younger, and I am sure he was not happy to have to speak of it on the floor of the Senate. At least he was able to address the matter on his own terms. We would prefer to protect our secrets, though that is not possible in all circumstances. The deposition is a legal mechanism by which a citizen is deprived of their right of privacy. I have been deposed by a rapacious attorney, sworn under penalty of law to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. It was pretty yucky, and I don't recommend it. Many people in town much more illustrious than me have had to go through that process, including President Clinton. I think we all winced when the implacable attorneys hammered home their questions. At some point one hoped that the President could say: “Mind your own beeswax! None of your business!” and put an end to it. That is not possible, since the process grinds on with an inexorable momentum. Karl Rove has been deposed three times now about his role in the unmasking of a CIA operative. His colleague from the White House, I. Lewis “ Scooter” Libby is under indictment over his deposition. The number of people who have been convicted over sworn testimony is legion. President Nixon, a famous wartime chief executive, was forced to leave office not because he ordered the Watergate Break-in, but because he lied about it later. Martha Stewart went to jail, not because she manipulated her stocks, but because she misrepresented the circumstances in her deposition. There are worse things. Imagine being dragged before the Grand Jury. But the principle is the same. Ask “Dusty” Foggo, formerly the Executive Director of the CIA. He had the FBI at the door of his home in San Diego and outside his office on the 7th Floor at Langley. I shudder to think what it would be like to have them cart away my records and hard drives and data discs. All my little secrets, spread out on a Justice department work bench. I don't think there is anything there that would interest law enforcement. But that is subject to the interpretation of the day. According to a poll taken about whatever it is the NSA has been up to indicates that a significant majority of us don't care that three of the four remaining phone companies have turned over their massive data bases so that Fort Meade can analyze them for associations. The information has already been collected and stored, so there is nothing new that has been taken from us; it is only the name of the monolithic organization that has the information. The Phone Companies have been doing things with the information they have for years. Some the technology was developed to track financial fraud, and includes data fields for numbers called and calling numbers and the length of them. They say this can be used for “link analysis,” a means by which the gigantic data base compiled of the enormous ones provided can be searched to determine relationships between callers. They say it is the largest data base in the world. I don't know about that. All one would have to do is link that one to another, and it could double and treble unto the ultimate limits of virtual memory. There are laws that protect our little secrets. The Communications Act of 1934, as amended, has been augmented by provisions of other public law, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986. I once labored for two years over the legal construct of what authorities pertained to information being transmitted (“data in motion”) versus data that was in a computer hard-drive or locked in a desk (“data at rest”). The issue was who was authorized to steal it, legally. Such is the problem of the law chasing technology. The law will never catch up, conceptually, and only brushes against the science when an abuse has been uncovered. Everything the government would like to know is already out there. Our credit card records tell the tale of every purchase and movement, every impulse buy. Our credit applications lay out all our resources and obligations, and we willingly share our most precious information with Wells Fargo or Wiechert Financial Services to get a roof over our heads. That we do not want to share that same information with the Government is our right, though we are apparently sharing it already, and without consent. There are savvy operators out there who highjack databases and sell the information off to the highest bidder. The data doesn't even have to be correct, just tied to some data field that can be linked to an association. That is where the little secrets can get alarming. According to the polls, not many of us are too concerned about the prospect. I don't think I talk to anyone linked to al-Qaida. At least I don't think so. If I come home some afternoon and find the FBI carting my little secrets away, I will be open to the possibility. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |