Part 2: The Myth of Fingerprints
Before the afternoon session, I stopped through the press room, and saw the governor of Maine, Angus King, speaking intently with a group of local residents who were volunteering at the conference. It's a remarkable thing about a small state that you can see an unaccompanied chief executive directly engaging his constituents, listening to what they have to say, and practically having to be dragged away to get prepped for his panel discussion following.

The topic of discussion with this group of volunteers was the issue of fingerprinting teachers, which is required in Maine. A small group of educators protested this policy in front of the opera house. Their flyers noted that other professionals who worked with children were not subjected to this kind of background check, and that the incidents involving child abuse at the hands of teachers in Maine didn't involve previous offenders so they wouldn't have been caught through fingerprinting. King said that they had already had calls from people asking if Maine fingerprinted teachers, who would hang up when told yes. His opinion was that these were predators searching for venues, which were running out as other states also adopted this provision.

Ironically, King was serving on a panel about privacy and Big Brother, which also featured Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public-key cryptography, and Ira Glasser, executive director of the ACLU.

Former gubernatorial aide Anthony Citrano moderated the panel. Citrano, who is also president of the Camden Technology Conference, posed the question, "Can legislation and public policy protect us?" Each speaker had a substantially different answer.

Diffie spoke first, and noted that he couldn't teach anything to the audience because "you're not allowed to teach in Maine unless you're fingerprinted." He added, "It's a sad [comment] on the state of erudition [that] if you know anything they think you know everything."

But he proceeded to offer a coherent description of the battle of privacy, which he perceives as a conflict over the management, storage, and distribution of data that describes individuals, and the lack of control or input into that process by those individuals. "The main problem is not that you have no privacy," he said, "but it is that you have no power." You might opt for confidentiality in applying for a credit card, he said, but then you don't wind up being offered one.

He defended the right to anonymity in society, arguing that there are many legal and reasonable bases for wanting to have transactions that are untraceable. Money laundering has been demonized and "people [are] being persecuted for taking actions to defend their privacy." He worried about the fact that tools for delving into people's behavior are increasingly refined, and that more and more information about oneself is stored outside of our bodies.

Glasser gave an exegesis of the origins of a few key statements in the Bill of Rights that form the basis of today's constitutional debates. He noted that the printing press, like strong encryption, was seen as a tool for sedition back at its origin, and its use was closely controlled. It took hundreds of years before printing was free of restraints, and then it was unfettered only in limited venues. "The First Amendment is an instrument of a desire to protect [free speech]," he said.

He connected freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly with oral, printed, and physical freedom. Glasser argued that the "ACLU is the most conservative organization in America because who else is running around trying to protect the values in an 18th century document?" The Bill of Rights is an "anti-democratic" mechanism to assure rights of minority opinion holders so that dissent gets protected regardless of prevailing views.

Glasser said that each revolution in technology offers the government an opportunity to attempt to re-argue rights that were settled long ago. The Internet created a new context for discussion of old liberties. He cited the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which the ACLU immediately engaged, and the Supreme Court struck down.

"People do have a stake in the privacy of their own information," Glasser said, and law and politics can matter if people have the will to revise and adapt.

Gov. King offered his insights as an independent politician, and obviously somewhat libertarian executive, which revolve around keeping government out of transactions better performed as a negotiation between interested individuals, whether involving consumers and business, or other combinations of parties.

He said that one can buy a list of deer-hunting-license owners, but that tax records in Maine are kept private. "I can't find a principle to distinguish" the two kinds of information, he said, although it's clear that tax records must remain private. He noted that binoculars may allow one to obtain previously technologically impossible access into someone else's private life, "but do we want to pass a law about binoculars?"

A lively Q&A followed. Diffie first rebutted the governor by noting that deer hunting is voluntary, taxes mandatory. "If you choose to make paying taxes in Maine voluntary, I'm sure the people would welcome that option."

An editor from the New York Times asked whether technological change was threatening individual autonomy. Gov. King responded that each consumer makes choices about participation. Diffie rejected that notion: "The problem is that you are acting as if this were a free marketplace of equal powers."

Diffie elaborated on a side point in his speech about the "automation of atrocities against children," by decrying the fact that parents are trying to control what children learn. We are "growing a generation of slaves," he concluded.

The Governor responded that Diffie's statement was "complete bunk." He said that not focusing what children learn abdicates a fundamental responsibility of parenthood, teaching values and intructing the difference between right and wrong. Diffie admitted having no children, while Glasser interjected he has raised four kids "10 blocks from Times Square" in New York City without notable harm. Glasser said the "instrument of intervention between parent and child is often the state," and described the ACLU's defense of abused children whose parents continue to assert rights over them.