Peddling Big Brother

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As a newcomer to the world of computers, the government of Thailand was surprised and flattered last summer when it won a prize for being a "hero of the information age" from the Smithsonian Institution and Computerworld magazine. The award, which focused world attention on the Interior Ministry's efforts to computerize the country's social services, proved to be a mixed blessing. Technocrats may admire systems like Bangkok's, which by 2006 will have stored vital data on 65 million Thais in a single, integrated computer network. But civil libertarians are appalled. Simon Davies, an Australian expert on such technology for the watchdog group Privacy International, says Bangkok's prizewinning program is, potentially, "one of the most repressive surveillance systems the world has ever seen."

Thailand's population data-base system -- the largest of its kind -- has become a symbol for an alarming trend. Even as Western nations place new limits on what they permit computers to do with sensitive personal data, some of their biggest computer firms have begun selling to Third World governments systems that are far more invasive than any permitted back home. In some cases, though not necessarily Thailand's, computers with vast potential for misuse are being sold to governments with long histories of human-rights violations.

At first glance the Thai system, which is being considered for possible adoption by Indonesia and the Philippines, seems harmless enough. Every citizen over age 15 will be required to carry a card bearing a color photo, various pertinent facts (name, address and so on) and an identification number. Most Thais are happy to get their IDs, which distinguish citizens from noncitizens (including a large population of refugees) and simplify all sorts of bureaucratic transactions, from receiving health-care benefits to enrolling a child in school.

But behind the cards are a $50 million computer system and sophisticated software that could enable a Big Brother government to create a dossier quickly that would tell it just about anything it wanted to know about anybody. The program, which runs on three top-of-the-line Control Data mainframes, is known as a relational data base, and it permits bureaucrats to correlate the files of otherwise disparate government offices. If the < necessary links to the revenue and police departments are put in place, a few key taps could cross-reference criminal records to tax records to religious and family information in order to draw a startlingly detailed description of any individual or group. Thai officials say they have no plans to create those links.

Most industrialized nations have evolved legal codes to protect their citizens from such invasions of privacy. The basic principle is laid out in the U.S. Privacy Act of 1974, which at least in theory restricts the government from taking computer data gathered for one purpose (say, the census) and using them for another purpose (say, tax collection). Another guiding precept is that unique numerical identifiers -- like Thailand's ID numbers -- should be avoided because they make dossier preparation temptingly easy. That is why the American Civil Liberties Union gets so upset when a Social Security number is used beyond its original intent.