Big Brother Is Watching Us. We Are Watching Big Brother. Who's Ahead?
The most important single economic law that applies in the modern world is this one: "As the price falls, more will be demanded." A variant is this one: "As the cost falls, more will be demanded." If this law is not true, then economic theory is not true.
Obviously, there has to be this qualification: "other things being equal." This is crucial in the science of economics. Of course, we know that everything is not going to be equal. Another law is in place: "You can't change just one thing." But if we did not use the qualification, "other things being equal," we could not explain the fact that sometimes you can lower the price, and more is not demanded. If somebody thinks that the lower price is due to the fact that the item is stolen, and your offer might be part of a sting operation set up by the police, then a falling price might not lead to more being demanded. In other words, the potential buyers perceive the item as being different from what is being offered to the general public by an honest retailer.
Also, prices drop in a recession. Other things are not equal. In a recession, we expect prices to drop. But, the economist says, what he really means is this: "more will be sold than if the price had not dropped."
THE LOSS OF PRIVACY
I apply this to the field of privacy. It is obvious that we are losing our privacy. The government is part of this, but it is not the major part. The major part is the fact that online commerce and Web searching can be monitored by Google and Bing and other free search sites. Basic to the business plan of Google is monitoring everything we search for, everything we communicate on Gmail, and all the rest of it. They want to sell us things. They want to enable retailers to sell us things. Free searching is an advertising strategy. It is presented to us as a free service, but it is an advertising device.
We do not have to use Google to search for things. There are other ways around this. There are various search devices that enable us to remain anonymous. The public is aware of these alternatives. Nevertheless, people use Google all the time. Google is not worried about the various proxy search engines that preserve anonymity. They are part of its business model.
The public has demonstrated by its lack of concern about digital monitoring, that it really does not care about privacy. People are willing to forfeit privacy in order to gain the many benefits of being able to search for information on Google.
The same is true of Facebook. People get tremendous value out of Facebook, or else they would not use it. I am not one of these people, but I realize that most people use the service. They have "friends." They communicate with these people on a regular basis. They share videos with them. They share pictures with them. They interact with them.
They know that they are losing their privacy as a result of Facebook. There is some concern that the state may be using these services as ways of monitoring people.
I'm sure that the cost of accumulating digital information is dropping to such an extent that the National Security Agency believes that it has dramatically increased its ability to monitor what we are saying.
But consider this. How many people had heard of the NSA before online searching and online monitoring became so easy? James Bamford wrote a book about it over two decades ago, showing how pervasive NSA snooping was, but the public never heard about this. There is a brief scene in the movie, Good Will Hunting (1997), which talks about the NSA. Again, the vast majority of Americans never heard about it. But today, millions more Americans have heard about the NSA than was true before the advent of digital communications. The ability of the NSA to hide has dramatically decreased. Stories about the NSA are now everywhere, because Edward Snowden had the ability to download all those digits and then hand them over to Glenn Greenwald. That would not have been possible in the good old days of the NSA, before it had access to digital data on us.
I would say that the greatest single victim of snooping has been the NSA. I don't think anybody in history has ever been able to produce more bad publicity for a government agency than Snowden did for the NSA. But the public really doesn't care. Congress has not shut down the NSA. So, once again, we find that people are really not that concerned about the loss of privacy. I don't think it would matter if Snowden had released twice as much information as he did. The public still would not care. Congress still would not care. By "care," I mean "cut the NSA's budget."
THE LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS
Is the public wrong? Is this one of those cases where the law of large numbers leads to a dramatically incorrect conclusion?
We know that the ability of large numbers of people to estimate accurately the number of jelly beans in a jar is much greater than the ability of almost anyone privately to make this estimation. If we add up all the estimates, and divide the estimated of jelly beans by the number of people making the estimates, the estimates get much closer to the number of jelly beans in the jar. This discovery was made by Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, about 150 years ago. Experts have known this for a long time.
The vast majority of people look at the surrender of privacy, and their behavior tells us that they do not care. Google is not suffering a loss of users because of their fear of the loss of privacy. If we learn anything from the law of large numbers, we learn this: people don't really care about the loss of privacy. There are individuals who do care. But if we look at people's actual behavior, the availability of zero-cost Web surfing is so great that hundreds of millions of people have voluntarily decided to let Google track them.
If they are incorrect in their assessment of the threat to them, then we are seeing one of the great mistakes in the history of large masses of people. If they are wrong about the danger of the of their loss of privacy, then the benefit of democracy is essentially mythological. Allowing large numbers of people to vote in a political election is believed to place restrictions on the state. It allows the public to veto the state. If people's use of Google, Facebook, and similar digital communications systems is a mark of their ignorance of the threat to them, then democracy clearly offers no particular benefit. If the law of large numbers does not apply faithfully to people's decisions about their own self-interest, then how can the law of large numbers provide any checks on the expansion of state power when it comes to voting? If people cannot figure out what their self-interest is in their daily use of the World Wide Web, why should we expect them to have any comprehension of what the state is doing in general when they step into a voting booth?
If you disappeared one day, and the reason you disappeared was because some federal agency had arrested you under the Patriot Act, and does not have any obligation of informing anyone else about its actions, what should your family do? The family would go to the police, but ultimately, it would be stonewalled. The family would then go to your Facebook account and announce that you have disappeared; that's where you might get some help.
If I were placed under attack by some federal agency, I have ways of communicating this to the general public. I have a large mailing list, and I have a website. I would be able to get my story to an enormous number of people, compared to the number of people I could have communicated with two decades ago. The average man with a Facebook account has a huge audience of people who could help him if the state took action against him.
WE KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING
We keep hearing about this digitally expanded state. But the expanded state is now under surveillance to a degree that was never possible before. There is YouTube. Cell phones are everywhere, and cell phones can be used against agents of the state. They are subject to monitoring to a degree that was never before possible in the history of mankind. As the price of monitoring government officials falls, more is demanded. More people are monitoring the state than ever before.
In political science, there is no greater truth than this: bureaucrats do not want monitoring from outside the ranks of the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are terrified of exposure, even when Congress sits on its hands after the exposure. Bureaucrats do not want to be caught doing something against the book. Yet today they can be caught doing things against the book to an extent that has never been possible before. They can be monitored. They can be humiliated in front of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. All it takes is a YouTube video that goes viral.
So, on the one hand, we see that the state has been empowered to monitor us as never before. At the same time, the state is being monitored as never before. The public can make political judgments today in terms of better information about what the state is doing to the public than was ever possible prior to the Internet.
The state is technically capable of extending its jurisdiction as never before. But the people are capable of resisting every such extension as never before. This is a two-way street.
The law of large numbers tells us dramatically that the loss of privacy is a minimal threat to us. Day after day, we make decisions that verify the fact that we don't care. The overwhelming majority of people do not care that digital monitoring has shrunk their areas of privacy. They don't care as individuals; they also don't care as a group. They may be wrong, but it's not a good idea to take a position that is categorically opposed to the decisions people are making as individuals in their daily lives.
So, I am not really all that concerned about the loss of privacy as a result of the World Wide Web. I think the vast majority of humans are correct: in the trade-off between the loss of privacy we have suffered as individuals versus the loss of privacy which the state has suffered, we are ahead as individuals.