Of Bill Gates and black helicopters

Back in my day
    By Chris Clemens

I come from Utah, the heartland of American paranoia. One of my high-school teachers loved to show his devotion to the Idaho-bred Bo Gritz school of fanatic conservatism by reassuring his students that when the apocalyptic government conspiracy finally exploded, he would "die with an AK-47 in one hand and a Bible in the other." One day he had half my class convinced that AIDS was the government's new attempt at population control. I think he's guarding his emergency food supplies somewhere out in the Arizona desert now.

As anyone who's ever watched The X-Files knows, though, there are plenty of different ways for the world to end. The conspiracy my high school teacher lived to warn about was the classic military-industrial complex—you know, the people who sell their children to aliens in exchange for intergalactic engine parts and things like that. But it's been a while since sightings of black helicopters filled the front page; the military has been downsizing for years.

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Fortunately, right-wing conspiracy weirdos have nothing to fear. A brave new world of sinister possibilities has emerged in the form of the Internet. With consumers agreeing to accept "cookies" on their hard drives in exchange for the right to enter most websites, the government doesn't need to invade our homes anymore—we've brought Big Brother inside on our own. When GeoCities was found guilty last August of illegally disseminating consumer information it gathered on the web, consumer groups screamed 1984. In late March, the Internet privacy company Zero-Knowledge Systems announced that it had developed a relatively simple program that could bypass the safety protocols on Intel's new Pentium III processor and place a computer's serial number in a cookie file even when the computer's protection utility was activated. With the Y2K bug threatening a global computer meltdown at the end of the year and money-grubbing Internet companies compiling stores of data on every last person in the country, I'm sure that my crazy old high school teacher has found new justification for his theories. The global conspiracy isn't gone—it's just gone online.

I, however, am a firm believer in the power of capitalism. The fact is that Internet privacy violations are bad for business. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone in this country uses the Internet. Most of the people who don't—approximately 61 percent, according to a Business Week/Harris survey—probably stay away because of privacy concerns.

The reaction of the Internet sector to the GeoCities case was one of frustration and annoyance: thanks to GeoCities' irresponsible actions, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Federal Trade Commission are threatening new and tougher privacy standards for all Internet content providers unless these companies show that they can regulate themselves. And with the novelty of the World Wide Web beginning to wear off, many fear that the court system will cease to be as lenient on Internet companies as it has been in the past. Websites—particularly e-commerce sites—may soon require licensing from a company like TRUSTe, a new privacy verification system, in order even to do business.

Naturally, ignoring privacy protection won't stop those who want to move to the hills to protect themselves from the encroachment of the tech revolution. And in some respects, who can blame them? A disturbing amount of personal information is available online, much of it data we would like to believe is confidential. And with the user-friendliness of today's computers, a lot of technology morons—like myself—are all too easily lured into trusting sensitive information to cyberspace. We need stricter safeguards and more legal innovation in the cyber-consumer protection market. Fortunately, we have a lot of lawyers who stand to make a lot of money telling Internet companies what they can't do. In the end, America might be in better hands with the tech revolution than it was under the military-industrial complex. Unless the aliens are running Intel, too.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• The problem with trial by lawyer, 3/26/99
• There's more to life than 'The City', 2/26/99
• Give something back, 1/29/99

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