The Rise of the Computer State by David Burnham

by David Burnham

The Rise of the Computer State is a comprehensive examination of the ways that computers and massive databases are enabling the nation’s corporations and law enforcement agencies to steadily erode our privacy and manipulate and control the American people. This book was written in 1983 as a warning. Today it is a history. Most of its grim scenarios are now part of everyday life. The remedy proposed here, greater public oversight of industry and government, has not occurred, but a better one has not yet been found. While many individuals have willingly surrendered much of their privacy and all of us have lost some of it, the right to keep what remains is still worth protecting.

Paperback

First published May 1, 1983

About the author

David Bright Burnham was an American investigative journalist who worked for the The New York Times. His work investigating corruption in the New York Police Department, in which a key source was detective Frank Serpico, served as a basis for the 1973 film Serpico.

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written almost thirty years ago in 1983 and in many ways its age in these fast-moving times of digital surveillance certainly shows. However by dint of a pertinent shower of questions and nicely presented cases, I believe the book still asks very perspicuous questions about privacy and the limits to allowable surveillance.

It is particularly interesting on the threats posed by interconnected databases at the time and some of the arguments against a federal FBI, CIA, NSA or even NIH-based database potentially covering all citizens and its potentially negative effects on state or city police enforcement make for fascinating reading and discussion. As the title suggests, the author is more worried by the threats to privacy state-recorded data poses to individuals and groups than that posed by huge corporations, although some corporations such as ATT do not escape critical scrutiny.

Take for example the nowadays mundane issue of cross-checking welfare recipients to government employees in search of possible welfare fraud. When data on welfare recipients and government employees were compiled into separate databases in different institutions, did they consent to such cross-checking? For the vast majority of, say, government employees is it right to scan through their data without having grounds to consider them suspects of welfare fraud? What happened to the principle of presumption of innocence?

For many readers, especially non-US citizens, such arguments are difficult to take seriously. Any government has a duty to ensure that public money is spent correctly, its officers might even be considered negligent if they did not check for welfare fraud, besides, one might argue, what possible breach of privacy would come about from discovering welfare cheats? One might as well argue that videocameras in banks breach their customers' right to privacy and that, since such such recordings may help identify bank robbers, they also do away with the presumption of innocence. More reasonably, we might argue that, in both cases, the data is only used to prosecute the guilty. But is it? How do we know? And what happens if the systems makes erroneous matchings, based on data input glitches or software errors? What sort of due process mechanisms are in place? What is the cost to the innocent citizen of clearing his or her name?

Burnham provides more extreme and interesting real-life cases provided by databases of people arrested or accused of crimes. Is it correct to deny employment to people based on their arrest records? This has happened with some frequency in spite of a fact which ought to be crystal clear: being arrested or even accused of a crime does not mean you are guilty of it. Again, what happens to presumption of innocence? And what happens if the arrest record mispell a name thus pointing a (warning?) finger at the wrong person?

Burnham is particularly good at describing key legislation attempts to strengthen privacy safeguards from Roosevelt to Reagan, most of which either failed or were watered down considerably.

It must be said that Burnham practically ignores discussion on privacy rights from outside the US, there are some faint nod to a handful of countries (Sweden amongst them) but nothing that sheds any real light on the matter.

The book is of interest mainly to those readers who wish to take a step back from today's complexity and study some key questions and cases played out historically, in a world with no social networks, no Google, a few thousand ATMs, budding electronic funds transfers (EFT) and just after the antitrust case against AT&T was settled.