After reading “The Government Is Trying to Wrap Its Mind Around Yours,” by Nita Farahany at the Washington Post, transparency technology seems to be ushering in a surveillance nightmare. It invades your privacy. Its tools are imperfect and misinterpreted. Something called “civil liberty” will cease to exist and some nebulous entity called “The Government” will assume total control.

Yet, when it’s you being watched, it’s “surveillance.” When it’s everyone else, it’s “transparency.”

Why does all discussion about surveillance seem to go from the top down? Is it so impossible to believe that general adoption of transparency technology could foster greater civil liberty?

What if anyone with a mobile could scan the President of the United States and know when he’s lying, faking, acting under coercion, or subject to some mystic delusion?

It’s not the window we fear, it’s the one-way mirror.

After all, surveillance, one side of transparency, merely produces information. The fear is which side may view that information —and which side may not. Will society rift between watchers and the watched? Yet, when both sides work together, transparency can be good, even necessary, to the health of our society. For example, institutions like the SEC enforce corporate transparency so that the public can monitor the health of public companies. These companies may lose some competitive advantage by ceding some privacy, but the composite effect is that all companies better serve all people. Isn’t this kind transparency a good thing, and why do we not strive for more like it? Couldn’t technology like Perceptrak not just watch “the street,” but Wall Street? Or Congress?

The answer is not to call for “balancing” scientific advancement or to rabble-rouse with threats of school shootings and mind-reading voodoo. Somewhere between “last Thursday” and “Star Wars,” the discussion we should be having is what technology exists today, what tools we may have tomorrow, and how we as citizens may apply transparency technology to better organize ourselves now. Otherwise, expect a rash of irrational, fear-inspired legislation spawned by sensationalist ignorance to gimp biological science and social progress for decades.

Someday, privacy, like aging, may become a quaint relic of a primitive society —but we’re not there yet. Until then, it’s our obligation as scientists, doctors, and opinion leaders to educate the public to ensure that tomorrow’s bioinformatic technologies exist to benefit everyone.