Black Hole

Information in the Computer Age

By Alex Heatley

Winston Churchill

The Spanish Inquisition was conducted without the aid of computers. Pol Pot didn't bother with computers when he committed his atrocities. So why do people make a big issue of the computerised databases that are held by governments and corporations?

Because the computer makes it easier to keep track of people. If you want to find all the people with the surname of Harris, you could look through all the phone books for people with that name, or you could ask Telecom to give you a list. The first method would take several days to list everyone; the second, less than an hour. Don't have a phone number? Check the electoral roll. Not on the electoral roll? Look for bank accounts.

The advantage of computers is speed. Looking through three million cards to find all the left-handed people in the country would take a long time. Using a computer -- even the slow ones that the government uses -- would take less than an hour. With more speed, more detail on each person can be kept -- name, birthdate, sex, age, address, criminal records, savings, school records, medical history, driving offences, credit rating, ethnic status, sexual orientation, political leanings, religion...

The most trivial things are now stored on computer. In Wellington, a record is kept every time a book is taken out of the public library. Using a computer you could print out a list of those people reading "subversive" Mills and Boon books.

More importantly, you generally don't have access to your own records, yet others do. Politicians have used their position to release records on people they didn't like from the Wanganui Computer Centre. Could you do the same to them? Banks can buy information about your credit history from commercial companies, but try to keep their own performance secret.

We live in a goldfish bowl where those with access to computerised information have the power to find out about us, while keeping their own information concealed. But what is worse is that the information can be changed maliciously. Imagine if someone decided to change your credit rating from good to poor. How could you find out? Or what if your medical records were altered to show you were a hypochondriac?

That's why computerised record keeping is such an important issue. It's not that it allows repression -- we can do that quite well without computers -- but that it makes repression much easier.

(Alex Heatley works in the field of Computing and has been tempted to change a few records...)