Database Nation.

Declan McCullagh's "Database Nation" (June) reminded me of a slogan from Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil: "Information--Key to Prosperity." Both the film and his article observe how ideals such as personal liberty, dignity, and privacy interfere with the good life that society's institutions work hard to arrange for us. For McCullagh, viewing personal data as private property over which individuals should have control "chokes" the "engine" of the economy, which desperately needs data about our idiosyncratic behaviors in its fuel mixture. Gigantic cross-tabulations of personalized information become the latest high-performance additive to keep our economy tuned up and humming smoothly.

The general public, according to McCullagh, simply does not realize the degree to which its interests coincide with those of giant corporations. Why should citizens bother to protect their trivial personal data when they are among fellow legal entities? No need to obsess over the confidentiality of one's habits, hopes, and heartbreaks since, in the new economy, we are all family!

Talented MBAs from our principled corporations could rework this portion of McCullagh's message to have greater mass appeal, as a public service. Otherwise, silly neo-Luddites like Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, and Theodore Roszak will go unchallenged. Technophobic ideas like theirs can only stand between us and the custom-packaged happiness each and every one of us deserves. The databases will find us deserving ... won't they?

Raymond Lyons

Cleveland, OH

While the article "Database Nation" will predictably raise worries about Big Brother and George Orwell's 1984, perhaps a better point of reference is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. As Neil Postman made clear in his seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death, Orwell and Huxley had very different dystopian visions of the future.

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books," Postman wrote. "What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.... Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.'"

For a libertarian to write a paean to the virtues of giving up the citizen's basic right to privacy in favor of the consumer's basic desire for convenience--to, in effect, embrace the excess, irrelevance, and triviality that Huxley warned about and which is inherent to any culture of consumption such as ours--makes me think that Huxley was right.

John Book

Newport Beach, CA

I got the June reason today, and that was indeed an impressive cover. I showed it to everyone at my local post office, and they were very impressed. One clerk said, "What's the name of that movie about the spy satellites?" "Enemy of the State?" The clerks wanted to snag the issue because they were excited about having their post office on the cover of a national magazine, but I insisted on keeping it.

Martin Morse Wooster

Silver Spring, MD

Your personalized cover shows several problems with the "Database Nation" that Declan McCullagh trumpets--what can go wrong when incorrect databases are merged or when supposedly correlating information is used to connect two records. The aerial shot supposedly showing my neighborhood instead shows a rural farming area about 40 miles north of me. The street names are similar, and I suppose a naive programmer could think that I and some other Lewis are one and the same. But good guesses are nut enough when use of the databases spread throughout our lives can result in the denial of financing, medical coverage, or housing.

Many people are having trouble boarding airplanes because the CAPPS system identifies them as threats. And when information is wrong, it is often impossible to correct or to trace back to the source. Talk to someone who has tried to get a credit report fixed. In the meantime I'll be in my backyard, hoping the crop dusters have a better mapping system than you use.

David B. Lewis

Bearsville, NY