The Electronic Frontier Foundation is doing a very cool project called the Blog-a-Thon, where everyone is invited to blog about the first time they did something to stand up for their digital rights.

Mine would have to be the summer of 1993, just before I started law school. I’d already been a avid Internet user for 7 years at that point, but my first digital activism was on an old-fashioned land-line telco issue.

I took an unpaid internship with then State Senator Lynn Adelman, who was trying to get the Wisconsin Public Service Commission to regulate Caller ID in Wisconsin, to provide privacy protections for telephone users.

What we wanted was free per-line blocking of Caller ID for consumers, if they requested it, and for that to be included by default for consumers with unlisted telephone numbers.

I organized witnesses for the hearing.

We had police officers, who testified about the risks Caller ID poses for officers who are working undercover, consumer advocates who wanted to protect the rights of people to call businesses and ask questions without disclosing their telephone numbers, advocates for battered women who worried that Caller ID might provide abusers with the ability to harass their victims, even when the victims might have a legitimate need for occasional ongoing contact, ie for child support or in dealing with a family emergency. We also had civil liberties advocates, privacy advocates, and telecommunications & privacy academics who testified that if only a tiny minority of people used Caller ID blocking, as would almost certainly be the case if it was made available only on a per call basis, then it would fail to protect vulnerable consumers such as undercover officers. And we had regular people who just wanted an easy way to keep their telephone number private.

Unfortunately, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission seemed to hear only about 3% of what we said. They ultimately ruled that domestic violence shelters, "certified" battered women and undercover police officers should be eligible for per line blocking of Caller ID. But no one else. Not even for money.

I still don’t know what a certified battered woman is. 

What’s interesting to me is how much losing the Caller ID regulation issue changed the landscape of the privacy fight.

Today, it sounds bizarre that people would oppose Caller ID and be concerned about the privacy implications. But back in 1993 and 1994, I was a passionate advocate. My friends knew not to even let me get started on the subject. And I was a holy terror once in 1997, upon discovering that my housemates Patrick and Mark had secretly ordered Caller ID for our communal telephone, even though they knew how I felt about it. (Wanting to avoid my wrath, they hid the Caller ID device in Mark’s room.) Today, even to me, that concern about Caller ID seems almost Don Quixote-like.

And THAT is precisely what is so dangerous about the erosion of personal privacy. We don’t usually lose privacy protections in great dramatic moments. Instead, they get slowly smaller and less effective. When privacy protections are gone, instead of feeling exposed and at risk, we more often simply accept that "this is how life is."

Which is why we need organizations like the ACLU, EFF, CDT, and others to keep trying to protect privacy and other civil liberties in the Internet age. And why groups like the American Library Association keep fighting to remove or restrict Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which lets the FBI secretly subpoena library records for practically any excuse. Without them, even more of our personal privacy will become laughably obsolete.

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