Dr. Dobb's Journal February 2001
Recently, I was working the late shift behind the bar at my favorite Silicon Valley hangout, Foo Bar, when Larry, Mo, and Curly Joe walked in. I'm sorry to say that I've run into people who question whether I actually work at Foo Bar, or whether there is such a place, or even whether these three journalists exist. All I can say is that some people have an overly literal view of the truth. I pick up so much juicy scuttlebutt on these Foo Bar nights that I long ago decided I'd gladly work there as often as possible, whether it was a real place or not. On this particular night, Mo, who currently reports for a San Jose-based daily that shall remain nameless, climbed up on a bar stool, ordered her new favorite drink, a Glenlivet Glen Ross, and announced, "I see IBM has hired themselves a CPO."
"Indeed? A Chief Petty Officer?" Larry asked, smiling as I poured his Chardonnay.
"Chief Privacy Officer. It's a way of saying they're getting serious about privacy. Just spin, I'm sure, but I suppose now every dot-com will have to appoint a CPO."
"That reminds me of a story," Joe said, and Mo and Larry moaned in unison while I placed a bottle of cream soda in front of him. "It was just after World War II," he began. "A retired brigadier general moved into a palatial wooded estate on the edge of town. At the entrance to his long curving driveway, he erected a sign saying, General Arthur, Private Drive. Just down the road was a very different neighborhood: prefab houses designed for returning GIs. In front of the first of these modest dwellings, there promptly appeared a sign reading, Private Greenbaum, General Drive."
Mo squinted thoughtfully, then said, "Reader's Digest, 'Humor in Uniform,' circa 1962."
Joe said he thought it might have been a little earlier, and added that he thought there was a related joke in the IBM story, something about the difficulty of an officer dealing with private matters. Larry told him it needed work. Mo said it wouldn't work.
Larry lifted his glass to the light and gazed into the backlit wine, a habit of his when he's formulating a thought. "Privacy and publicity," he announced, "are but two sides of the lately devalued coin of repute."
"I'll buy that," Joe said. "My first editor back in Eau Claire used to say there are just two kinds of people — those who want to get it in and those who want to keep it out."
"They're the same people," Mo said. "Look at spinmeister Joe Lockhart. He went from keeping Clinton's actions out of the news to getting Oracle's in."
"Agreed," Larry said, holding up his glass with a different intent. "And there are just three tools — thank you, Michael, nothing looks so lonely as an empty wineglass — three tools for controlling the flow of information — encryption, legislation, and spin."
"Sometimes," Joe whined, "I think there's too much whining about privacy."
Mo snapped, "Could you keep your thoughts about privacy to yourself?" Joe, offended, slipped off to the bathroom.
"Take Carnivore, the FBI's technology for scanning e-mail," Larry went on. "The Carnivore story beautifully mixes encryption, legislation, and spin."
I mentioned a story I'd read about a pocket lie detector. "Apparently it can detect lies over the phone, so it should be able to filter-out spin on television."
Larry didn't see it that way. "The spinmeisters have that one beaten coming out of the gate. They know it's easy enough to foil lie detectors: One simply never tells the truth. Lie detectors don't find the truth, they only flag lies. If you always lie, they are rendered useless." He brightened. "I suppose that means that perpetual lying is a powerful weapon against invasions of privacy."
Mo jumped back in. "Perpetual lying may be a powerful weapon against some invasions of privacy, but it doesn't help when the invasion is physical."
"Like random drug testing?"
"Right, although that at least has been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court."
"When you're in your car. Not in the workplace."
"True. But when we are finally all doing all our work in our cars during day-long commutes, the car will be the workplace. That's how we win. Gimme 'nother, Mike."
Joe came back from bathroom just then and wanted to know why there was a computer screen displaying ads above the urinal.
"That's a Viewrinal," I explained. "The company making them figures that's one place where they can count on a captive audience."
"Umph. Well, at least it's just a downlink. It is one-way, isn't it?"
"For now," I said. "It is for now."
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com