Americans are a liberty-loving people. Our earliest national motto was Don't Tread on Me. Even after a sickening terrorist attack, we resist national identity cards.
Yet we face an ever escalating assault on our privacy and liberty by both Big Brother and big business. And some of our most libertarian instincts turn our to be perverse in their effect.
Business routinely misuses financial, medical, consumer, and credit records for marketing purposes. Our health records are supposedly personal and confidential. In theory, insurers get access to these records only to pay claims. But they are also useful commercial data. The Wall Street Journal reported on how marketers get medical records from insurance companies -- for example, data collected by urologists are turned into consumer sales pitches for adult diapers.
The Bush administration recently scrapped medical privacy regulations issued in 2000 by the Clinton administration, as required by a 1996 privacy law. The original rules required patients to consent before their records could be sold for non-medical purposes. Instead, the administration would merely require hospitals and doctors to notify patients of their privacy policy.
The administration has also resisted toughening laws on the sharing of credit and financial data, favoring instead disclosure. In principle, you are free to shift to a bank or insurance company or credit card vendor with more respect for your privacy -- if you can find one.
The rise of the Internet and e-mail opens the door to further abuses. It is child's play for proprietors of Web sites to capture information about their users' buying habits, financial data, intellectual pursuits, and political orientation and then sell that information to entrepreneurs or convey it to police agencies.
Self-regulation is utterly inadequate. Web hosts like Yahoo and Excite have weakened their privacy policies in order to sell information on their users, and there is no adequate set of Internet privacy regulations.
All of this suggests an ideological paradox. In general, conservatives prize personal privacy. But conservatives grow uneasy when government is proposed as the guardian of privacy.
Part of this view reflects a general suspicion of government; partly it reflects the right's alliance with business, which profits from the invasion of consumer privacy. But there is no other institution besides government capable of enforcing ground rules that apply to everyone. When assaults on privacy are pervasive, the sovereign consumer ''shopping around'' is no remedy.
Of course, government itself is becoming more of an invader of privacy. Efforts to give privacy higher priority were set back by the terrorist attacks. In the so-called USA Patriot Act, enacted after Sept. 11, Congress dismantled much of the wall between intelligence gathering and criminal prosecution.
Wiretaps, invasions of e-mail, and other searchers and seizures ordinarily circumscribed by the Fourth Amendment are now fair game if the stated purpose is to go after alleged terrorists. But the definition of terrorism was so broadened by the same law that it could apply to some of the tactics used by Martin Luther King.
In a sense, we Americans have the worst of both worlds. Business has found new ways to violate our privacy, but we don't trust government to rein in business. And terrorism has given government an excuse to expand its police powers, well beyond what the national emergency requires. No wonder we are uncertain where to turn.
Conservatives and liberals both distrust a national ID card. Yet the data that would be contained in an identity card already reposes in countless private credit files and public Social Security, passport, and motor vehicle records. It would be far more rational to have a national ID card, but then strictly limit its use. We could be more secure that terrorists were not boarding flights and criminals not using guns and also that confidential data would not be abused.
In Canada, with its national health system, data collected for health purposes is effectively used for research and epidemiology, but its commercial exploitation is constrained. Several European nations with national identity cards also have much tougher controls on how data collected by both government and industry may be used. In recent trade talks, liberty-loving America representatives objected to European regulations that prohibit unauthorized use of consumer data as a violation of the freedoms of business.
The Founders of this republic appreciated that it takes an effective government to safeguard liberties. Otherwise, the rights of some private citizens are trampled by others or by reckless government itself. Each generation needs to relearn this paradox in new circumstances.
