The law of unintended consequences
The Canadian Privacy Blog has an interesting tidbit stating that the Department of Homeland Defense is sharing passenger information with the CDC (The Center for Disease Control), apparently to address pandemic and other health concerns.
Now this seems to be a good thing. If the media is to be believed, every chicken mcnugget is a potential source of Avian flu these days and given the way many of us trot the globe, it's easy to see how a pandemic could start and quickly get out of control because of air travelers. In circumstances like that, most of us would want health authorities to punch through bureaucratic walls, find the disease carrier and stop the spread, privacy be damned.
But. But just for a second, I'd like to resurrect the dreaded liberal boogie man--the slippery slope argument. One of my big problems with DHS and the Patriot Act is not the use for which they want to put the data (catching terrorists) and not even the principle as an abstraction. It's based on a very real fear that the information, once collected for counterterrorism purposes will sit there and be used by other agencies for other things. And at some future date, these new purposes may be ones that the Americans of today would find morally reprehensible.
Clearly that doesn't include pandemic control, but this is really just the first step down that hill, each subsequent action will be easier and faster until governmental data usage is out of control. Hence the slippery slope. By the way, it may look like we're just talking about travel information like flight times, but DHS has much more information than that linked to each passenger record.
So what's next? Certainly child pornographers deserve to be stopped, no matter what. How about spousal abusers? Classified information leakers? Sounds farfetched? Remember that Tom Delay used similar government powers to try to stop Democrat Texas lawmakers from leaving the state on an airplane to avoid a gerrymandering vote.
Posted on April 25, 2006
