Over the past week, there has been considerable debate among privacy advocates about the comments made by a senior U.S. security official at a conference in October. A portion of his speech is copied below:

Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, at the 2007 GEOINT Symposium, October 23, 2007 in San Antonio:

“When I’m at work, and throughout my day, security is safety, as a barrier against physical or emotional harm. When I go home at night, security is privacy, as an expectation of freedom from unnecessary burdens. In the intelligence community, we have an obligation to protect both safety and privacy…..

concern for privacy. Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it’s an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. The Long Ranger wore a mask but Tonto didn’t seem to need one even though he did the dirty work for free. You’d think he would probably need one even more. But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past…

Anonymity results from a lack of identifying features. Nowadays, when so much correlated data is collected and available – and I’m just talking about profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube here – the set of identifiable features has grown beyond where most of us can comprehend. We need to move beyond the construct that equates anonymity with privacy and focus more on how we can protect essential privacy in this interconnected environment.

Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. Instead, privacy, I would offer, is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured. And it is that framework that we need to grow and nourish and adjust as our cultures change.

I think people here [at the 2007 GEOINT Symposium], at least people close to my age, recognize that those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it’s not for us to inflict one size fits all. It’s a need to have it be adjustable to the needs of local societies as they evolve in our country. Eventually, we can only hope that people’s perceptions – in Hollywood and elsewhere – will catch up.

Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety…”

Last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke on the subject of liberty - a wide ranging speech that touched on British constitutional history as well as modern concepts of liberty, privacy and access to information.

It’s important to remember that the British system of laws and government is different to the Canadian system, but we have similar values about privacy, access to information and liberty.

“… I want to explore how together we can write a new chapter in our country’s story of lliberty - and do so in world where, as in each generation, traditional questions about the freedoms and responsibilities of the individual re-emerge but also where new issues of terrorism and security, the internet and modern technology are opening new frontiers in both our lives and our liberties…

… In my view, the key to making these hard choices in a way that is compatible with our traditions of liberty is to, at all times, apply the liberty test, respecting fundamental rights and freedoms, and wherever action is needed by government, it never subjects the citizen to arbitrary treatment, is transparent and proportionate in its measures and at all times also requires proper scrutiny by, and accountability to, Parliament and the people…

… The information age has, as Tom Friedman has so well drawn out, flattened hierarchies and potentially increased the power of all citizens. So we should not fear the advent of the information age - and it should not lead us to abandon or fear for our values - but at the same time I believe we require a new and imaginative approach to accountability and to winning people’s trust in the ways in which information is held and used…” (Text of Speech)

As we mentioned several weeks ago, Michael Chertoff spoke at the opening session of the 29th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners.

The Secretary of Homeland Security spoke about the tension between privacy and security, and questioned whether every step taken to strengthen national security must come at the expense of privacy? A few more details are available on the Secretary’s own blog.

Today, we finally uploaded his 30 minute speech. It’s available on video.google.ca, and we’ve embedded it below as well.

Dr. Ann Cavoukian, the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, recently spoke to the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo. (video available in several formats)

Dr. Cavoukian has argued that software developers need to build privacy concerns right into their work, and her speech is receiving favourable attention online:

“… There’s something incredibly refreshing about hearing a high-ranking government official say things like, “Privacy is integral to freedom. You cannot have a free and democratic society without privacy. When a state morphs from a democracy into a totalitarian regime, the first thread to unravel is privacy.”…” (BoingBoing)

“… Privacy is really important, and watching this talk makes me realize, I have not being doing my part as a software developer to respect users privacy. Hell I log way too much information, just to make debugging a little easier on the off chance I have to debug it in production. I’d encourage all software developers out there to watch this talk, and take its message to heart. …” (Slashdot comments)

As the Conference drew to a close, Professor Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa provided a brief but complete summary of the week’s discussions.

Today, in the Toronto Star, he provides a precis of his summary. (available in English only)

He underlines the central message drawn from the opening day from the conference: a message that resonated throughout many of the sessions that followed:

“…In a room full of privacy advocates, Chertoff came not with a peace offering, but rather a confrontational challenge. He unapologetically made the case for greater surveillance in which governments collect an ever-increasing amount of data about their citizens in the name of security…”