Some years ago I heard a fascinating presentation by John Almonds, then Director of Security at BT; he was describing (among other things) cases of fraud prevention involving mobile phones and premium-rate phone lines. The setup his staff discovered in one building was a rack of mobile phones, all dialling out (unattended) to premium-rate numbers. The phones were stolen handsets with cloned SIMs. OK, so why would anyone want to dial a dozen dubious chat lines at a time? Easy - it makes a lot of money at the SIM-owner's expense... provided you are the owner of the premium-rate number.
Conclusion: if you're prepared to turn some of your starting assumptions upside down, you will often find a perfectly rational motivation for subverting an existing system.
Wind forward a few years, and on this blog you will several times have heard me ranting about the lack of a truly anonymous ballot system in English elections.
Starting assumption: a voter in a democratic election, provided they can be confident that their vote will count once and only once, will want that vote to be anonymous - that is, it should not be possible to link a given ballot paper back to the identity of the person who cast it. Turn that assumption on its head: why would a democratic voter positively want to be able to prove that they had voted one way rather than another?
Answer: because someone might be prepared to pay them to do so, if they could prove how they had voted.
Hence the ban on camera-phones in polling booths in the recent elections in Italy.
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Is there any other social purpose for anonymity, other than protecting people from improper influence?
Posted by Richard Veryard on May 14, 2008 at 10:33 PM GMT+00:00 #
Plausible deniability. By the time Blair finally went, it was hard to find anyone who would own up to actually having voted for him.
Posted by Robin Wilton on May 15, 2008 at 06:54 AM GMT+00:00 #
And how exactly does society benefit from that, either short-term or longer-term? I think society generally tends to benefit more from non-repudiation - the "stand-up-and-be-counted" principle - than from anonymity. If anonymity is only there as a security mechanism, to counter certain specific types of vulnerability and abuse, then it is a means-to-an-end rather than an end-in-itself.
The defenders of anonymity and privacy are eloquent on the dangers - administrative inquisitiveness, gratuitous leaks, fraud - but perhaps need to explain more carefully what is the purpose of anonymity and privacy - what are the benefits to the individual and to society? Indeed, does society benefit in any way from anonymity and privacy, or does this debate expose a fundamental conflict of interest between society (so-called "public interest") and the individual?
Posted by Richard Veryard on May 16, 2008 at 09:41 AM GMT+00:00 #
Hi Richard - in the case of anonymous/private ballots, I think what it exposes is the entirely real possibility of conflict of interest, not between individuals and society, but between individuals or groups with conflicting interests.
The point about a ballot is that it's used to establish the legitimacy of delegated power... including the power to do things, in the common interest, that some of the voters don't want. Therefore there's a strong incentive for unscrupulous interest groups to use whatever means they can to influence the outcome in their favour. The anonymity of the ballot protects against that.
If, however, you mean the wider question whether anonymity and privacy are good for society in things other than ballots, I would still say yes. Arguably, given that I've been born into a society, all my actions happen within a social context. But by no means all my actions are social. (Not necessarily anti-social, you understand, but frequently unsociable...).
I think it's a basic (consequentialist) ethical principle that as long as my actions affect only me, they are no-one else's business. I'd be tempted to see that as an end in itself.
What's more, I think that introduces the concept of a 'scale of sociality', at one end of which you have actions which ought to be private, and at the other, actions which ought to be visible (cases in which transparency and public accountability are essential). Somewhere on that scale there is a boundary which marks the point beyond which I ought to have exclusive power over whether something is made public or not.
Posted by Robin Wilton on May 16, 2008 at 11:19 AM GMT+00:00 #
Robin wrote: "The anonymity of the ballot protects against that".
Possibly. However, any claim of the form "security mechanism X protects against vulnerability Y" raises a number of questions.
* How effective is X at protecting against Y?
* What alternative mechanisms could be devised to protect against Y?
* What other effects does X have?
* In particular, how does X-preventing-Y affect the wider sociotechnical system?
* Overall, does the prevention of Y provide sufficient justification for X?
Posted by Richard Veryard on May 16, 2008 at 12:28 PM GMT+00:00 #