A 1967 prescient article by Arthur R. Miller shows that forty years ago, electronic health records and a national criminal data base seemed just around the corner, just as they are today.
As today's rapid advances in computing technology fuel heated debate over the proper ethical, legal and practical boundaries to state and commercial data collection, it is easy to forget that although the technology is novel, the issue is nothing new.
At the turn of the 19th century the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham envisioned the Panopticon, a prison designed to create the 'sentiment of an invisible omniscience and an idea developed as a metaphor towards the end of the 20th by French post modernist Michel Foucault for what he saw as the modern state's tendency to 'discipline and normalise'.
A long tradition of dystopian novels, such as Kafka's 'The Trial', Zamyatin's 'We' and Orwell's '1984', warned of the dangers of the overbearing, bureaucratic state while, in grim reality, the oppression of people under communism was facilitated by a massive exercise in the collection and collation of information. Computers were rare and primitive in East Germany, yet the state maintained secret files on a quarter of its population and perhaps one adult in seven informed on their friends, neighbours and colleagues to the Stasi.
The one unifying theme in past predictions of the future is their hopelessly dated nature today, a truism forgotten by some devotees of today's more fashionable prophets of doom, but noted American legal scholar Arthur R. Miller [1] did write a prescient article "The National Data Center and Personal Privacy [2]" in the Atlantic Monthly of November 1967 warning of the dangers posed to personal privacy by computerised Government data banks.
His arguments, further developed in 'The Assault on Privacy: Computers, Data Banks, and Dossiers' in 1971, remain interesting less for their occasional paranoia regarding Governmental intentions than for their similarity to concerns raised as if novel today. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It might be sobering for technological enthusiasts to note that forty years ago, electronic health records and a national criminal data base seemed just around the corner, just as they are today.
Miller remains a prominent figure in this eternal debate. One last irony is that the villain of Miller's piece, the all powerful, ubiquitous computer network, is the means by which his work warning of its dangers lives on today.