Information Just Wants to Be Free

In my prior two postings I postulated that information wants to be free and cannot be contained.  That term is anthropomorphic isn’t it?  Information isn’t a being that can be attributed with human emotions or desires such as freedom.  However, the fact remains that it doesn’t appear that it can be contained. 

Genetic information is going to express itself in the environment.  We cannot keep it restricted to certain farmers who have licensed seeds to obtain particular properties such as crop yield or particular nutritional values.  Those plants when they reproduce will spread their pollen and seed and that which was legally constrained will travel via breeze, stream or animal carriers to places unforeseen. 

The information stored on computers also has a way of getting out.  Either you share it and give up the rights to your privacy for some presumed benefit.  Or, it gets stolen via a mistake by the steward of the data.  Or, the law is used to exert the right of eminent domain.  It gets out.

Last week the US government’s efforts to secretly monitor telephone metadata and social network information was exposed by the Guardian and the Washington Post.  So, not only do these disclosures  indicate that government will get to your data.  But, it indicates that government’s own secret information cannot be contained and kept classified either. 

My grandfather once said, “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want on the front page of the Shelby Daily Globe.”  His advice was to an eight year old was made in a world before ubiquitous computing and communication.  It was made in the context of a small Ohio town over fifty years ago that left doors unlocked and keys in the ignition.  People were going to know your business so you you’d better be responsible or pay the consequences. 

I think the statement is as true now then as it was then and it applies to both individuals and governments.  Too many people have a fantasy that they can make up online identities and interact with the outside internet.  They think they can hide behind a digital anonymity or the state’s secrecy laws and million-person security apparatus.  But, it just is not so.  You can’t hide information; you may delay its exposure but eventually information will be disclosed and used.

Peter Steiner's cartoon, as published in The New Yorker