March 3, 1991

ABOUT three weeks ago, I ended up in the hospital after an auto accident in Menlo Park. At home the next day, I got three separate calls from telemarketers who had “heard about” my accident and wanted to know if I needed legal assistance. Each time I asked for more information about who they were representing, they hung up.

How did these people get my unlisted telephone number? In my book, this was an unconscionable invasion of privacy. A growing number of citizens are having experiences like this, and I can guarantee you that as computerized data on individuals and groups is being collected and exchanged at an exponentially increasing rate, issues around technology and personal privacy will become epidemic.

As I’ve said so many times before, the only way to protect our freedoms and privacy is to educate everyone ˆ the public, the press, policy makers, technologists ˆ about how these technologies can be used and abused as we continue our transit into the Information Age.

Later this month members of these diverse groups will have the perfect opportunity to get such issues into the public forum. For four days starting Monday, March 25, they’ll converge on the Airport Marriott Hotel in Burlingame for a conference called “Computers, Freedom and Privacy: Pursuing Policies for the Information Age in the Bicentennial Year of the Bill of Rights.”

The conference is sponsored by an impressive group. It includes the venerable IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Networking Association, a number of groups within the IEEE and ACM, including those involved with intellectual property, computers and society, scientific freedom and human rights, communications and information policy. Also involved, not surprisingly, is the increasingly visible Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in Palo Alto, a group that has been critical in getting these issues to the mass consciousness.

Conference director is Woodside-based Jim Warren, who organized the first West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in 1976. The roster of topics and speakers is nothing short of remarkable. Among them is Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional Law at the Harvard Law School (and the No. 1 candidate for the Supreme Court if the Democrats ever get to appoint anyone), who will talk about “The Constitution in Cyberspace: Law and Liberty Beyond the Electronic Frontier,” and William Bayse, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s technical services division, who’ll discuss “Balancing Computer Security Capabilities with Privacy and Integrity.”

It’s impossible to list the lengthy roster of noteworthy academes, technologists and crime-stoppers on the program. The mix of sensibilities was the raison d’etre for Warren’s launch of the conference. “I was really offended by a hatchet job that ComputerWorld magazine did on Mitch Kapor (founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions electronic freedom and privacy issues) for daring to suggest that civil liberties might be an issue,” Warren recalls. “When I got into this, I realized that all of the sides were preaching to their own choir but weren’t talking to each other.”

When he pulled together his team, he says, most said they’d be happy to just get the divergent groups in one room at the same time. “But I said I want to do more,” he says. “We can make a difference with this; we can get people to start committing to resolution.”

So the closing session on Thursday is called, “Where do we go from here?” Warren et al will select people during the conference they’re impressed by, and have them come into the final session to specifically address the questions: What would you propose? What are the next steps you propose we all do together? And what will you, personally, commit to doing because you’re in a position to make changes? What a concept ˆ to get powerful people to drop their rhetorical ballast and commit to doing something.

Denise Caruso can be reached by writing to her at P.O.Box 5199, Belmont, CA 94002. She can also be reached electronically via America Online (DCaruso), The WELL (dcaruso@well.sf.ca.us) or MCI Mail (Denise Caruso).