How Cookie-Gate
Crumbles
by Solveig Singleton
People get upset about the darndest things. The most
recent tempest in
Leviathan's teapot is the use of a rather commonplace
Internet technology
called "cookies" to track the viewing of ads on the drug
czar's web site.
The White House chief of staff has demanded that
Barry R. McCaffrey explain
how the practice of monitoring traffic using
cookies began. But this latest
installment in the demonization of
cookies is absurd. Here's why.
The war on drugs has strained
civil liberties to the breaking point. The
police can seize your
property without trial under forfeiture laws, and even
if you are found
innocent, you will have an awful time getting it back again.
The war
has brought us routine surveillance of ordinary people's bank
accounts, the
expansion of wiretapping powers and the incarceration of
hundreds of
thousands of nonviolent criminals. Worst is the transformation
of
inner-city neighborhoods into de facto war zones, the inevitable result of
Prohibition-style black markets.
All of this, apparently, is just
fine with the press, the public and
politicians on the Hill and in the White
House. Yet they are shocked, simply
shocked, to find the drug czar's
web site using cookies. One doesn't know
whether to laugh or
cry.
Central to understanding this is the idea that people can get
used to
anything. The human and societal cost of the war on drugs is
staggering.
But cookies? A lot of people don't know what they
are or how they work, and
new and unknown is scary. Never mind that
cookies, like binoculars or
satellites, are pretty benign, although they can
be used for evil purposes.
Should we cower before cookies, like
isolated tribesmen who believe the
explorers' camera will steal their
souls?
What are cookies, and what do they do? Cookies are
little data files that
are saved to an Internet user's computer. These
files track purchases loaded
into online shopping carts, record how many
times a user has seen a certain
banner advertisement and so on. They
help web sites identify when a regular
visitor has returned, so that the
visitor need not re-enter his
identification information every time.
Cookies tell the server, "This
visitor has been here before" or "This
visitor has seen this ad three times
already."
Cookies were invented
by Internet pioneer Lou Montulli in 1994, when he was
working for the
brand-new Netscape. Netscape was trying to help web sites
become
viable commercial enterprises. But the web sites were not very good
at
customer relations. In an ordinary store in the "real" world of malls and
main street, the shopkeeper can eyeball shoppers coming in, identify regular
customers, check out suspicious characters, get a feel for whether his
visitors are locals or tourists, likely buyers or merely browsers and make
sure that shoppers can find what they are looking for. Web sites had
no
mechanism for collecting this information; on the Internet, every visitor
was
an anonymous stranger. Without cookies or some other tracking
technology,
web sites are blind and deaf. So it should hardly come as
a big shock that
cookies are widely used across the Internet. They are
simply a part of the
way the Internet works.
If you don't mind the
inconvenience of a cookie-less world, it's easy enough
to disable
cookies. If you are using Netscape Navigator, go to the taskbar
and
click on "Edit." Select "Preferences," go to "Advanced." Next click
on
"Cookies" and select "Disabled," or ask to be warned before your browser
accepts a cookie. If you are using Internet Explorer, go to "Tools,"
then
"Internet Options" and select "Security." Go to "Custom," scroll
down to
"Cookies," and again select "Disabled."
The fact that many
people have not yet heard of cookies does not mean that
they are some kind
of sinister surveillance, any more than is Caller ID. It
simply means
that the Internet is new and that many users, having come online
for the
first time in the last two or three years, are ignorant of its
nuances. If you're looking for serious threats to civil liberties, the
war
on drugs is a good object of your scrutiny. But cookies can't
batter your
door down with automatic weaponry. They are just a
technology that makes the
Internet more
convenient.
Solveig Singleton is director of information
studies at the Cato Institute, a
nonpartisan public policy research
foundation based in Washington, D.C.