The Transparent Laboratory

Some unpopular ideas about privacy

I've just started reading David Brin's The Transparent Society. I've been recommending it to people for years as one of the most important books on its particular topic, but in spite of that, I've somehow never gotten around to reading it. His basic premise is that rather than trying to preserve our privacy, we should accept the inevitability of losing it, and instead focus on creating a "transparent society", where freedom is based on transparency rather than privacy. For example, although the police might be able to track our every move using street-mounted surveillance systems, we would have the ability to monitor what they were tracking. The basic idea is that abuses are largely prevented by the fact that they cannot occur in secret. It's a very interesting idea, and one which I think I'm coming to favor.

In any case, it occurs to me that this has potential applicability to managing the proliferation of dangerous biotech. The two traditional arguments have been either that we need to radically restrict access to certain technology (for example, DNA synthesizers), or else that our best defense against rogue biotech is the rapid and widespread dissemination of the underlying technology to (presumably mostly) legitimate users. An interesting middle ground is to allow widespread dissemination of the technology, but with mandatory public visibility of its use. For example, you could have a system where DNA synthesizers were widely available, but they all published the sequences they were synthesizing to a publicly visible site.

In principle, this gets you the benefits of wide dissemination of the technology combined with the ability of watchdogs (both governmental and non) to keep an eye on any dangerous or criminal uses. There are some obvious problems with circumvention of the technology, but I think they might be solvable. For example, devices could be required to use a "remote firmware" system where the device didn't contain critical firmware that it required to operate, but instead accessed a remote (and centrally managed) controller. Although it would in principle be possible to circumvent a system like this, I believe it could be made secure enough to block all but the most capable and well-funded attackers. It's not perfect, but it might be the least dangerous option available to us.