Exposed by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119741671
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Exceptions to the Rules

One of the most significant reasons to resist government regulation of privacy is the simple fact that government likes to exclude itself from the rules it makes. (This is especially true of the US federal government.) If privacy is something to truly value, to the point where secrecy is the means we agree to protect it, then everyone should be included in the limitations on collecting/processing/using privacy data.

Of course, this would make a lot of the activity that government performs either impossible or useless: law enforcement, taking the census, or even tabulating voter registration would not exist if identification and recognition of individual people were not allowed.

We see manifestations of this line of thinking even when legislation is created specifically to hamper the federal government's ability to keep data secret from its citizens: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) stipulates that the federal government must disclose any information requested by a citizen or resident of the United States … with a few exceptions. It is the exceptions that create the loophole the government can use to continue hiding information.

For instance, germane to this discussion, one of the exceptions allows for redacting the personal information of a person—if you make a request, say, to the US military for any record concerning people named “Ben Malisow,” the military might deliver some documents about that person, but certain lines of text will be marked out so as to make the person's private data (such as Social Security number, home address, etc.) illegible. Other exceptions include evidence for pending legal cases, classified material that could harm “national security,” trade secrets, internal personnel matters, material prohibited under other federal laws, financial information, privileged communication between agencies, and, for some reason, geological information about wells.18

There are enough exemptions that, should a bureaucrat be sufficiently determined, preventing the release of information would not be all that difficult, even though this is expressly counter to the entire purpose and intent of the law.

Sometimes, governmental exceptions are relatively benign, if annoying, such as when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) interpreted federal law and implemented rules associated with “robocalls” (using automated means to call telephones) and granted an exception to politicians.19 Other exemptions are fairly horrifying, such as when the FBI operated a child pornography website.20

Attempts to protect personal privacy through secrecy, administered by a central authority, will be subject to exemptions like these, and the disproportionate power of government over the individual will only continue.

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