Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy, SUNY Stonybrook

We are speaking with Professor Peter Ludlow. He’s professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Maybe we can just start/could you maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and what prompted you to get involved with your book "The High Noon?"

Well basically I’m a philosopher of language philosophy of logic and I’m not exactly entire sure how I got into the "High Noon" business. I sort of got into the cyberspace a little bit accidentally. For various reasons I had to hook up with the electronic frontier foundation and I ended up on the well spending some time there and a lot of issues came up and I mentioned to one of my editors at MIT Press that someone should put together a collection of some of this stuff. And then she basically has nagged me for a couple of years until I finally did it.

I notice that you/not many people put a complete book up on the web and I was wondering what motivated you to do that for this particular collection?

Well you know it seemed like a natural thing to do, particularly since a lot of the essays in the collection were arguing the case you know that information wants to be free and so forth. I took a long time to convince the Press to do it. I mean they’ve actually published a number of other books like monographs on the web. For example the City of Ditz thing. That book is published on the web and there’s a couple of others. But they thought well this is a collection and somehow it’s not an artifact in the sense that a monograph was. So I didn’t have to argue against putting the thing up. What I had to argue was that there’s no interesting difference between a collection and a monograph.

Interesting. Ok maybe we can move to the idea of privacy now?

Sure.

And I was wondering if you could maybe just talk a little about the notion of privacy sort of where it’s been, where it’s going, that kind of thing.

Well I mean I keep running into talks and essays where people have claimed that privacy is some sort of modern invention or that it’s some sort of enlightenment invention. But I guess I just don’t believe that. I mean the word itself is Latin right?

Uh huh.

And it basically means free from the state (I,NU) individual and/I mean I’ve got to think that the notion of privacy goes way way way back. I mean I’m not even sure/it’s sort of a cultural concept. I mean I think it might be something that’s been with us from the very beginning.

Yeah, do you think then that it’s a particularly United States oriented kind of notion like we sort of seem to be more of an individualist society?

Well yeah/I mean people say that. I get e-mail from people right in other countries saying well this is you know/what is it with this American fetish for privacy? But I don’t know. That doesn’t make much sense to me. I just/you know I just actually don’t believe that it’s sort of a strictly American thing. I don’t believe it’s a strictly modern thing. I think it’s/I think that the notion of privacy has been with us from the beginning and I think there’s some sense of privacy that you’re going to find in every culture.

Yeah definitely.

I mean you might not recognize it immediately right? Because you’re not necessarily you know thinking in terms of intercepting messages or something like that. But I mean everyone’s got some sort of notion of personal space right?

Right.

And it’s not always reducible to property right? Which is what we try and do sometimes. So I just/until someone comes up with really good evidence, I’m just going to continue to believe that the notion of privacy is sort of cross-cultural and it’s not a modernist invention that’s basically been with human beings for ever.

Yeah and what do you think/how about the idea of the myth that sort of people are losing more and more privacy, especially with the advent of communications and technology? And I was just wondering what your sense about that is, you know?

That’s probably not a myth. It’s probably almost like certainly true. You know you spend/I was in England a couple of years ago and you know they have the video cameras everywhere. I think even moreso than here and then every night they would have/not every night/there was a weekly TV show which was/all the content came from surveillance cameras right? And so you know it reaches the point where you’re caught by a surveillance camera/I forget how many times a day now, you know, 40 or more.

Really?

And you know potentially any/all of your electronic communications are interceptible right?

Yeah.

So kind of in principle it seems to me quite correct that privacy is slipping away.

Yeah and then what do you think though that the sort of average common citizen can do in these kinds of circumstances? I mean there’s been like a lot of sort of grass roots movement on the web about the clipper chip and things like that. But it seems like a lot of this is so large and so daunting and there’s nothing to sort of stop the creation of these huge data bases with lots of information about us and/I don’t know. I was just/yeah.

I mean in a way your question is just well what can a private citizen do about any sort of political/I mean basically it’s a political decision that’s got to be made but you’re not going to have these large-scale data bases or these large-scale medical data bases with certain kinds of information. It’s a political decision that you’re not going to have the clipper chip. Well ok you know/so then whatever/I don’t know what people can do then/I guess it’s whatever they do whenever they do something political. If they’re acting as individuals, I guess the only thing they can do is you know to/simple things like don’t broadcast a lot of information on your web page because you know everyone with a web browser has access/sorry everyone with access to a search engine can like get it, right? Disable your cookies you know.

What kinds of information for example on your web page would you/do you think/I mean apart from like street address and things like that/I mean is there...?

Well I would never put a picture of my daughter on the web page. Because I think people who do that are nuts, right? There’s no reason to have any sort of personal information on your web page. You can send it to people individually. I mean if it’s sort of crucial for business type purposes/I mean that’s one thing. But you know if you want to be voyeur that’s fine. You can put up little digital movie cameras all over your house right? We know people who do that. But I think it’s necessary to reflect on what we’re doing right?

Yeah.

Because you’re not thinking that/not only is the information out there, but it/well I don’t know. You just have to exercise common sense/more than common sense. I think you have to exercise restraint about the amount of information you make available on the web.

How about the rise of filtering software? I mean this has been a lot of/large topic of discussion among our students and how it’s being used in schools. I guess I was/recently that case in Virginia in higher education where they you know deemed that it wasn’t a good idea/that professors couldn’t just go willy-nilly and look at any kind of sexual site that they needed for say their research. But they had to go through and get permission and like that.

What school was that? Actually professors couldn’t ...?

Yeah I think it was the University of Virginia and they wanted them to get specific permission to be able to do that kinds of research. And it was upheld, I believe.

It was. That’s pretty freaky!

Yeah.

That’s actually pretty scary. I mean to think that they would actually control the information that you could access if you’re an academic?

Yes, uh huh, I guess that’s a freedom of speech issue too.

It’s more than a freedom of speech/it’s like a freedom of thought issue, right?

Yeah.

I mean that is very bizarre.

Well it just may be an anomaly but it’s one of the things that keeps/that’s coming up at least recently in the news.

Yeah right. No I can’t imagine what the justification for that could possibly be.

Yes, well how do you feel about it at the K-12 level? I mean using filtering software in schools? Do you think that sort of thing is necessary? Or are the same kinds of issues sort of being raised?

I guess it’s kind of inevitable isn’t it?

Yeah.

I don’t/I mean I can’t imagine that I would be you know using filtering software at home. But I guess there’s/from whatever community pressure whatever we’re just going to see filtering software at the K-12 level and it’s probably not only unnecessary but it’s probably unfortunate as well and basically I don’t trust/I don’t trust any of those you know net-nanny or any of those corporations because I mean I suspect they’re filtering a lot more than just content that’s obscene. I suspect that they are probably filtering content that is politically objectionable. I mean I/there are stories you know about sort of certain gay rights sites for example being filtered as objectionable. Or abortion sites or women’s rights sites, right? Well so you can see it’s an extremely dangerous tool to have right? Because it’s very difficult to just tweak it so that the only thing you’re filtering is stuff that’s obscene or harmful to children.

Yeah so you inevitably sort of pull more things into the net than you would have I suppose.

Right and you’re trusting/you know you’re trusting these people who work in these companies and who knows who they are right? I don’t know anything about those people. And so why should I trust them to make these sorts of decisions about what’s objectionable? They could be political freaks, right?

Yeah I think a lot of teachers also feel though that they want somebody to be sort of making the decisions. They feel sort of disempowered to a certain extent as it is and they feel like they have to put a lot of trust in decisions and higher authorities and this is sort of another example where I don’t think that they feel as if it’s such a breach of putting that these kinds of decisions in those cans. But like you say it is corporations that are doing/it’s not necessarily ...

The teachers kind of like the idea that they have this ...?

Well I think they feel as if they’re put in a double-bind. They have all these people telling them what they should be doing--parents, teachers, and that quite often they feel as if they’re not/that the people aren’t letting them make those decisions. So they just as soon have someone who maybe knows what they’re doing make those decisions for them you know because...

Right, exactly. So then you can say/another way of/right/another name for that is passing the buck right?

Yeah.

You can say well look you know you/it’s easy to tell the parents that the teacher whatever/you know the teacher-parent conference/well see I/we have the sort of cyber-sitter there and it’s screening all this stuff and it’s out of my hands you know? And I recognize how that would be a nice thing to be able to say to an angry parent right? But on the other hand there’s something quite not right about that.

Yeah a sort of diverse responsibility to a certain degree I suppose.

Right.

Ok, then I’d just like to sort of ask a final question of you/then what about privacy then is important? What are some sort crucial issues here that sort of might be able to summarize ...?

Well I mean that’s why I think these people who e-mail me saying privacy is not such a big deal over here in whatever Bulgaria, it’s like I think they must be nuts because if you think about it, privacy is like a pre-condition for the ability to have a whole bunch of other rights. So the very/to even have political freedom for example, privacy has to be possible right?

Right.

Because you have to be able to discuss your political positions and discuss political strategy in private right?

Yeah.

I mean you/if you were a Republican you wouldn’t want James Carver for example to have the right to sit in on all your strategy meetings, right?

Yeah.

It’s/privacy is a pre-condition for any sort of commerce, right? If I’m sitting around discussing what I’m going to make my bid for right, when I’m going to bid on a contract to build a building or something like that/I mean I want to have privacy in that case. And if I don’t have that, then I don’t have fair competition, right? If I don’t have privacy there’s no such thing as intellectual property, right? Because if anyone could have access to my hard drive, as it were, they could see what I’m working on, what I’m inventing as I’m inventing it. So it would just dissolve the notion of intellectual property. It’s even sort of necessary for pursuing relations with other persons who are supposedly your enemies or who are supposedly outsiders, right?

Uh huh.

Because if people caught on that you were as it were negotiating with or sleeping with the enemy, right? Then it would be stopped immediately. So that’s why sort of Henry Kissinger’s first meetings with China are always secret, right? You’ve got to have the initial meetings be secret so if you don’t have privacy in that sense, everyone ends up cocooned in their own little groups of individuals and no one takes chances about reaching out to the other. So I mean there are all these reasons why privacy is important, and I don’t know why people sort of insist that it’s sort of passe or if it’s like in this sort of/the new post-modern age, it’s not important any more. But to me it just seems completely obvious that it’s not just important but it’s sort of/it underlies a whole bunch of other rights that we have and take for granted.

Yeah, that’s great. Ok. I want to thank you very much and I hope to get this up and running pretty soon.

Sure, and have fun this semester with this stuff ok?

Ok, thank you.