How much does your freedom cost? Most of us would say that our freedom is priceless. Most would say that freedom is our right. Most would say that nothing can take our freedom from us. Most would be wrong.
Much like the agrarian and industrial revolutions which came before, the information revolution has changed our lives. Instead of living to produce, we live to inform. We are no longer defined by what we can craft physically, but what we can craft with words, music, decision, deals, or style. Gone forever are the days of Marx's free artisan. We live now in a society driven, produced, and destroyed by knowledge.
So great is the importance of our own information that business sectors have been founded merely to protect it. We buy information and we buy protection for our information. We pay for services which do nothing but monitor our information to ensure it isn't changing without cause. We pay so that we can have information delivered to our house instantaneously through internet and cable access, something our forefathers may have scoffed at; yet we do it willingly.
There are some who believe that nothing is free. If we are blessed with quick and (mostly) accurate information, then are we cursed in some other facet? If we have been given the gift of technology that allows mothers and sons to communicate face to face over a span of hundreds of miles, have we sacrificed something in exchange? The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, father of Taoism, once said "If you would take, you must first give." We are clearly taking, what have we given?
Most commonly we have given something rather benign: time. We send encrypted messages in order to maintain informational integrity whilst traveling the internet. We willingly sacrifice the time required to encrypt and decrypt our messages. We willingly sacrifice the time required to send passwords to authentication servers. We willingly sacrifice the time needed to scan our email for viruses and filter out dangerous or invasive email.
The more cancerous of the gifts we lay on the altar of information is our privacy. We feel threatened by the ease at which hackers, terrorists, and other such villains break through the barriers we have created around our information. When we feel threatened, we turn to our government. When we turn to the government, we are doomed - as Lao Tzu wisely observed - to "give first."
September 11, 2001 was a day when our course as a nation changed. Until that day, we fought constantly to regain those privacies sacrificed to the gods of the Cold War. After that day, we gladly brought our sacrifices again to the altar in the form of the Patriot Act. Our own government bureaus responsible for protecting us now have access to any of the most personal and intimate facts they desire. On a whim and without hard evidence any citizen of the United States has the chance of being put under government scrutiny. No secret may be held inviolate, and no information may be too private. We know, but we trust. We trust in the rule of law, the respect of our peers, and common decency for a fellow member of society.
Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg and instigator of the first high profile hacker chase in history, believed that the internet in its infancy was held together by trust. In some respects he believed the internet to be an extension of the society we live in. He expressed his own sadness in the breach of that trust by those seeking personal gain. If we cannot trust internet users at large to respect the bounds of normal society, can we expect it from our government?
Our rights come at a price. When the price is met, we exchange our goods and depend on trust.
How much does your freedom cost?
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