AMERICANS ARE FAR MORE OBSESSED WITH THEMSELVES THAN BIG BROTHER IS

My Social Security number is 349-40-7931. I don't mind telling you that
largely because I'm confident you have no interest in knowing it. You won't
even write it down. Of course, you could be a secret enemy of mine, eager to
use any available information to discredit me in some way. But I'm not too
worried about that, either. I have my share of secrets, just like anybody
else, but at the moment I can't think of a single one that's vulnerable to
exposure simply upon presentation of an ID number.

But I will tell you one secret belief I have that I'm usually careful not to
blurt out in polite company. It's this: I think privacy is the single most
overrated issue in the entire lexicon of public policy -- state, local,
federal or anyplace else. Of all the dangers that this society faces as it
starts the new millennium, one of the most remote is the risk that America
will become an Orwellian police state, watching everything citizens do and
taking down every word they say. And yet people all over the country lose a
lot of sleep every night worrying about it.

I have great admiration for George Orwell, as a writer and thinker, and as a
lifelong leftist who had the courage to expose communism for the
hypocritical sham it was. But in one important way, Orwell did posterity a
disservice. He depicted the surveillance methods of totalitarian society so
vividly and so convincingly that an entire generation of otherwise
reasonable Americans has convinced itself that Big Brother is watching them
even when the truth is that Big Brother has far more important ways to spend
his time.

"They could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to," Orwell wrote a few
pages into his novel, "1984." "You had to live -- did live, from habit that
became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was
overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

I'm not a simpleton. I know there are governments in this century that have
operated that way. The Stasi collected tons of data on the daily habits of
ordinary East Germans and filed them away for later use. The KGB knew who
the Soviet dissidents were almost from the moment they opened their mouths.
I am also aware that even in a free society, horrible miscarriages of
justice take place. Waco was indefensible. The police in a one-party
dictatorship couldn't have acted any more irresponsibly.

But mature citizens in a civilized country are required to make distinctions
between aberration and routine. Those of us who lay awake at night in
America in 1999 worrying about the government's desire to snoop on them are
mostly either (1) paranoid or (2) guilty of something. If there is a
legitimate threat to our personal privacy these days, it comes from
corporate capitalism, from the companies that make their living on the sale
of information for commercial use. It doesn't come from the county
commission, the legislature, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services.

But merely to say such a thing is to risk provoking shock and even ridicule
among most members of the educated elite in this country. In the past
generation, the idea that our precious privacy is under siege has
transcended ideological differences, from the Cato Institute on the right,
which says "the history of government programs indicates privacy rights are
violated routinely whenever expediency dictates," to Justice William O.
Douglas on the left, who wrote near the end of his life that "we are rapidly
entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at
all times, where there are no secrets from the government." Ask to see the
evidence for these propositions, and you won't get much. But you will be
branded as a naif, or a proto-fascist, or both.

That is why I am so impressed with the courage of Amitai Etzioni, who dares
to challenge the conventional wisdom in his new book, "The Limits of
Privacy." Etzioni is a reasonable man. He doesn't claim that our personal
liberty is unimportant, or deny that government possesses the technological
capacity to invade it. He merely argues that we have gone overboard in our
privacy obsession in recent years, and we need to tilt the balance back a
few steps in the direction of common sense and provision for the common good.

He offers convincing detail on why this is so. For reasons of privacy, for
example, we fail to require HIV testing for mothers and infants, even though
the information gained by such testing would save many of the infants'
lives. We refuse to give law enforcement officials the tools to decipher
encrypted computer messages, even though encryption makes systematic
criminality easier to practice with each passing year. And on and on through
a whole range of current public policy questions.

But of all the issues Etzioni takes up, none illustrates his point better
than the controversy surrounding creation of a uniform identification
process for American citizens.

The costs of not having such a system are hard to dispute. As Etzioni
recounts, there are more than 30,000 fugitives from the federal criminal
justice system running free on false identification. Each year, several
thousand convicted sex offenders seek work in the child-care business alone.
The use of fake identities by crooked taxpayers costs honest ones an amount
estimated to be as much as $5 billion a year. Another $5 billion is thought
to be owed by deadbeat parents fleeing their child-support responsibilities.
At the end of 1997, the Secret Service reported that it had arrested nearly
10,000 people during the year for various financial crimes involving false
or stolen identities, and placed the cost of that fraud to banks and
legitimate credit-holders at $745 million.

There's no way such figures can be exact. Quite likely some of them have
been inflated a little bit in the process of reporting. But if they are even
roughly accurate, they make it quite clear that identity crime is a genuine
problem in this country.

And it's a problem that could be solved relatively easily, by creating a
card or other universal identifier proving that the person in search of a
job or transferring money is in fact who he or she claims to be. We already
use Social Security cards and numbers as a de facto identifier for many
public purposes. It's just that they're easy to cheat on. How dangerous
could it be to create a new version that liars would have to respect?

Not very dangerous at all is the correct answer. But it's an answer that a
privacy-obsessed American polity is stubbornly unwilling to consider. In
1993, when the Clinton administration included establishment of a medical
"security card" as part of its national health care proposal, it soon
discovered it had made a major tactical error. Anything that sounded
remotely like a national ID card set the privacy lobby going full blast. Of
course, it doesn't take much to do that. Pick up any ordinary newspaper
these days, and there's a good chance that somewhere within its pages you
will find a warning that an identification system is merely the opening move
in Big Brother's bid for absolute power.

"Don't we remember the Nazi experience in Europe?" the editor of Privacy
Journal asked in The New York Times a couple of years ago. "Don't we realize
the dangers of allowing government to establish identity and legitimacy?"
Just last campaign season, a Nevada gubernatorial candidate offered up
identity cards as a sign that America was "rushing headlong into becoming a
socialist totalitarian society." Privacy zealots left and right are fond of
repeating the warning of former California Sen. Alan Cranston: ID cards are
"a primary tool of totalitarian governments."

Well, yes, they are. So are whips, but they are not a cause of torture. So
is tear gas. That doesn't make tear gas an emblem of totalitarianism. A
little common sense would be useful here. If America starts to go down the
road to fascism, it won't be because people are carrying identification in
their wallet. As Etzioni says, "Cards do not transform democratic societies
into totalitarian ones."

In America in the '90s, the obsession with privacy is more than just a
simple overreaction to George Orwell or to horror stories about something
that happened in Moscow or Beijing. It is a reflection of the
hyperindividualism to which the political system has succumbed in the past
generation or so, and the ways that prevent us from becoming civic grown-ups
in a democratic society.

One trait that marks just about all of us during childhood and adolescence
is an unremitting anxiety about what other people think of us. When we get
older, if we are lucky, we begin to realize that, in fact, other people
aren't thinking about us at all most of the time. Other people are worried
about themselves. The rest of the world isn't watching us with a pair of
binoculars.

The sensible thing to do is figure out what we want to do and then go on and
do it. Of course, some people never figure this out, even in middle age.
They go through life searching desperately for clues about the impressions
they are creating -- at home, at work, even among strangers on the street.
They are convinced their friends and acquaintances are judging the most
minute details of their lives, and making mental notes about their
performance for use later.

It's not a very pleasant way to live, and it doesn't bear much resemblance
to reality. As individuals, most of us manage to figure that out somewhere
between adolescence and middle age. If we learned a similar lesson in our
capacity as citizens, we would all be better off.

Alan Ehrenhalt is editor of Governing magazine. Reprinted with permission, ©
1999.