Big Brother is watching you, but myopically

Forwarded to me, indirectly, this.

How is it that Radio Shack has my address and telephone number and knows that I bought a t.v. cable from them back in 1997, and yet, the Federal Government is still asking me where I was born and on what date.

For Christ sakes, do you guys do this by hand? My birth date you have on my social security card, and it is on all the income tax forms I have filed for the past 30 years. It is on my health insurance card, my driver’s license, on the last eight goddamn passports I have had, on all those stupid customs declaration forms I have had to fill out before being allowed off the planes over the last 30 years, and all those insufferable census forms that are done at election times.

Would somebody please take note, once and for all, that my mother’s name is Maryanne, my father’s name is Robert and I would be absolutely astounded if that ever changed between now and when I die!!!!!!

Speaking as someone who deals with personnel information systems both at home and abroad — yes, this is all done by hand. Or, rather, it is done in disparate systems that are not allowed to talk to each other, for reasons both silly (laziness and lack of funding) and either profound or more silly (fear of what would happen if the info were generally accessible).

As a preface, this is not universal. In the US, we have very weak laws and regs about businesses having our personal information (hence the Radio Shack note above). Companies ask for this stuff, and we tend to freely give it to them, and more often than not leave the box checked (or unchecked, as the text varies) so that they can share that information with their customers.

For the government, however, we have a profound, visceral mistrust, epitomized in the archetype of back country folks mistrusting what the “revenooers” might do if they know your name. Not only do we only reluctantly part with information to different government agencies, but those agencies are usually forbidden, by law, from sharing that info. We tie the hands of government to make sure that the DMV doesn’t know about the meds we are getting through Medicare, the Post Office doesn’t know what our tax filing info is, and the Passport office has no idea what real estate we own. And when there’s talk of sharing any of that information without a court order, let alone routinely, it’s usually greeted with gasps of horror and dismayed demands.

Interestingly, in most of Europe it’s the opposite. The government knows everything about you, but businesses can get in horrific trouble if they retain anything more than they need for any longer than they must, and are subject to all sorts of pain and grief if they share that info with anyone else.

There are a lot of cultural reasons behind this. In the US it is complicated by the multiple layers and arenas of government in which we act — local, state, federal — and their mistrust of each other and our distrust of all of them. What we mistrust most is the power that information provides, and the opportunities for abuse it can give someone. Do you really want the police to be able to easily, right their in their prowl car. be able to call up your tax records? Your Social Security payments? Your Social Security Number? Your public library accounts? Your daughter’s emergency contact numbers? Your passport application? How about that little old lady at the DMV — should she be able to see all that info? Or some guy at the IRS? Or someone at the County Clerk’s office?

How about the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the CIA — should they be able to pull up all that data with a single keystroke?

Yes, one could come up with legitimate reasons why that information should be shared — and all sorts of reasons why we’d be afraid of how it would be abused. The data the different parts of government have about us, in aggregate, are much greater and personal than Radio Shack knowing that, two years ago, I ordered a three-pronged, two-slot widget (60VAC) from their downtown Fresno store.

And, yes, it’s intensely frustrating. I moan every year when I have to fill out five different contact information cards and forms for Katherine at her school. Even at that level, we’re sometimes talking about different agencies and groups that are asking for that 90%-overlap info, and that simply are not allowed to draw it from some sort of database at CENTRAL Central Intelligence. Some of that is laziness and inefficiency (I suspect a single form would probably do, so folks could photocopy it themselves and turn in separate copies), but part of it is that there are barriers in place to make sure that nobody sees the information provided except the individuals to whom it was provided for a given purpose.

Do you really want to have the Customs Office preprint your customs form for you before you land on your plane, so that it has your address? How efficient will it be in getting those forms onto the plane (as it takes off from Milan), and then handed out to the right people (with name, address, etc.), and what happens when there are gaps? Is that actually more cost effective than your just writing in your address one more time? And, of course, if they do that, they’d want to be able to fill in all of the other info (where were you staying, for how long, etc.), which means getting that info before you leave into some sort of central form that’s accessible both to ICE and to the airline and in the right spot you’re departing from. Is that actually better, even discounting how that data might change during the trip, than taking a minute or two on the plane to write it out ourselves? Will it make life that much easier? 

There’s also a casual security angle — if I’m trying to pretend to be someone else, and I get handed a form with all that information pre-filled, not only do I have more data than I had before about you, I don’t have to guess at the parts I don’t know.

But most important remains the concern about the government (as a single, menacing monolith) threatening us and having power over us by having all that information easily accessible. It’s nice when a business (say, Amazon) already knows my street address. But information exchange rarely stops there in a government setup — address begets age begets SSN begets work history — and why did you leave your job last year, Mr. Smith, and might that have something to do with your driving under the influence this evening, or your opportunity to check out these books about the Rodney King beating last month, and would you please step out of the car, sir? The opportunity for individual or institutional mischief does seem to be something worth worrying about, and it’s much easier and safer to forbid all interchange rather than trying to pick and choose which data fields to allow or prevent.

Back in the late 70s, Eugene McCarthy said, “The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is [its] inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.” The most inefficient part of the bureaucracy is, in fact, how little it knows. There’s actually something to be said for that, as, given the power it potentially wields and the information it has in aggregate about us (knowledge being, of course, more power), the government bureaucracy could potentially use all of that to our advantage — or to our disadvantage.

At the moment, we, as a society, seem to have chosen to be more fearful of the latter than naive about the former.