Cryptography, data retention, and the panopticon society (abstract)
Authors: Blanchette Jean-François , Johnson Deborah G. 
Published: November 2005

As we move our social institutions from paper and ink based
operations to the electronic medium, we invisibly create a type of
surveillance society, a panopticon society. It is not the
traditional surveillance society in which government officials
follow citizens around because they are concerned about threats to
the political order. Instead it is piecemeal surveillance by public
and private organizations. Piecemeal though it is, It creates the
potential for the old kind of surveillance on an even grander
scale. The panopticon is the prison environment described by
Foucault in which prison cells are arranged in a large circle with
the side facing the inside of the circle open to view. The guard
tower is placed in the middle of the circle so that guards can see
everything that goes on in every cell. When we contemplate all the
electronic data that is now gathered about each of us as we move
through our everyday lives --- intelligent highway systems,
consumer transactions, traffic patterns on the internet, medical
records, financial records, and so on --- there seems little doubt
that we are moving into a panopticon.
The social issues that arise from this are too numerous to
detail here, but data retention is an important part of it. In the
paper-and-ink world, documents are filed, files are boxed, boxes
are put away or thrown away. The capacity for data retrieval and
manipulation is, thereby, limited by the sheer difficulty and cost
of storing, finding, searching, and manipulating large numbers of
paper files. This inconvenience functions as a mechanism whereby
the system forgets past information, not unlike the way we
ourselves forget. However, the story is very different in the
digital world; digital information is easy to store, easy to search
and manipulate, and inexpensive to keep over extensive periods of
time. Digitalized information systems tend, therefore, to collect
extensive ancillary information and to retain this information
indefinitely. Such lack of forgetfulness is likely to hamper the
ability of individuals to shed their past, and start over with a
clean slate.
Concerns about data retention were expressed in the early
literature on the social impact of computing (Westin and Baker,
1972), but for the most part the issue has dropped from sight.
Rarely, has the social good of discarding accumulated personal data
been addressed. In this paper, we want to make the case by
examining diverse cases in which retention of information by either
business or governmental institutions hinders the ability of
individuals to start over or to act autonomously. We hope our
argument for the good of forgetfulness will challenge the standard
framework in which such issues have traditionally been debated. The
privacy debate exemplifies the traditional framework insofar as it
has been characterized as involving an inherent tension between, on
the one hand, the needs of organizations and institutions for more
accurate and efficient information systems so as to further their
goals (law enforcement, employee efficiency, etc.) and, on the
other hand, the desire of individuals to have information about
them kept private. Regan (1995) argues against this framing of the
privacy issue in favor of one that recognizes the social importance
of personal privacy. We will examine the non-forgetfulness of
information systems as a problem threatening not just individual
interests but social good as well.
Cryptography is often cited as the technology that will give us
privacy and mediate against surveillance. One of the uses of
cryptography, encryption, will allow us, some hope, to create
confidentiality and relationships of trust that will facilitate
many of the social arrangements we now have and perhaps make them
even more secure than they are now. Electronic cash, for example,
could be created in such a form that it would have the anonymity
associated now with hard cash (and perhaps even more.) Others are
less optimistic of the potential for cryptography to re-create
relationships of trust in the new medium.
One important point that already seems clear is that even if
encryption technology will protect the confidentiality and
integrity of electronic transactions and data, it will NOT stop the
observation of traffic patterns on networks. This seems an
important distinction to put on the table. Our patterns of
communication will continue to be available, no matter what is
encrypted, and an amazing amount of information can be gleaned from
this data. In a sense, it means content integrity but no anonymity.
This will indubitably impact how we interact and with whom we
interact.