TECHNOLOGY AND CIVIL RIGHTS

Although anti-technologists almost invariably favor some variety of coercion, they often oppose technology for its alleged threats to civil rights. Typically, Jungk's The Nuclear State tried to make out that nuclear power would lead to a police state, and Naders demagoguery about what he dreamt up as "the plutonium economy" tried to make the same point.

But technology itself is neutral: weapons are used for coercion just as they are for the defense of freedom, and there is not one item of technology that cannot be either used or abused.

Quite often the anti-technologists do not realize that what they really object to in an innovation is its increased efficiency. When tape recorders first appeared, there were laws prohibiting the recording of telephone conversations, or at least requiring to give warnings by beeps that the conversation was being recorded. This, it was claimed, was to protect the right to privacy.

But that was not the real reason. There was no objection to anybody taking notes during a telephone conversation, and nobody even vaguely associated it with invasion of privacy. Yet what is a tape recorder but a note-taker? What people really objected to was that it took notes too accurately and too reliably.

Europeans (who generally don't mind having to register their address with the police) vehemently object to the idea of fingerprinting anybody but criminals. They have no such objections to photographs on drivers' licenses and other identity documents. Yet fingerprints can be matched by computer, and photographs can't: what they object to is that the identification is too efficient.

Most people also favor the principle of parole (that it is given lightly to repeat offenders is another matter entirely). Yet a computerized system of checking on parolees is too controversial to be introduced. The prisoner is granted parole on condition that he wear a band with a small radio transponder round his ankle. A computer keeps track of the location of hundreds of such parolees, sounding an alarm if one tries to take the band off or leaves a predetermined area without reporting to his parole officer. So promising is the system that it has been suggested for use on light offenders who are helping to overcrowd regular prisons.

But most anti-technologists consider the system too "demeaning." In fact, it is simply more efficient than the present system. It is also less demeaning than being confined to an overcrowded prison; and it protects parolees, who are more likely than others to be suspected of crimes in their neighborhood, from false charges: the computer will give them a firm alibi if they are innocent.