No Place To Hide
The link didn't work so I googled it and read the last chapter of the book. Talk about horrifying. I was aware that the downside of lovely things like cell phones and the internet, etc. was that more of my information was being made available to anyone who might care to get into it, and I have tried to avoid an electronic footprint as much as possible. This class, to a certain extent, has utterly obliterated my efforts. That being said, I made mistakes in the past, too, like using my MAC card to pay for minutes on my anonymously registered prepaid cell phone, (there went ALL that effort). I think perhaps the scariest thing in this chapter is the "Smart Dust" and I can't get over the idea that something that small could monitor my activities and report them back, for years at a time, without battery replacement or any alternate power source. That's absolutely horrifying.
And as for the argument that "if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about." Yeah, sure. But even if you aren't doing anything wrong now, who's to say the laws won't change and all of a sudden all those years of doing whatever innocent thing you enjoyed is now being used to indict or persecute you. I know it's extreme to say what if they misidentify you, but my brother Emmett got caught for underage drinking in Montgomery County PA when he was 16. It was his second offense, and as a result they suspended his driver's license (since he didn't have one, it was to start whenever he got it). When the Montco court system entered the information, however, they suspended my COUSIN Emmett's license (also 16, but WITH a license). And that's a relatively innocent mistake, relatively easy to correct--translate that to a terrorist watch list and unless you happen to be a Senator or Congressman, good luck getting off the list. I learned about the "I'd rather 9 guilty men go free than one innocent man be imprisoned" quote at a very young age, and I really took it to heart. On this issue, I err on the side of Civil Liberty. If they do their job well enough, the guilty guys won't get away.
Total Information Awareness
More scary-ness...This is an excellent resource for information, however, as it seems to aggregate stories from a pretty wide variety of sources, both governmental and media. Lawrence Lessig talked a little about government information tracking programs in Code 2.0 , and I seemed to gather that it would merely involve coding the programs to retain anonymity unless a "hit" was made. I understood the main problem to be that no one in their right mind trusts the government, so we want to see the code to ensure that we are truly anonymous; the government, on the other hand, doesn't show anything they don't have to, and so refuses to show the code on the grounds of national security. Ridiculous, I know.
Video on You Tube
" This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International Inc." (YouTube)
Week 13 Muddiest Point
15 years ago
3 comments:
I enjoyed reading your post and agree that it is scary. I don't like the whole 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about' either. That's the equivalent of putting your head in the sand and ignoring the world around you. I don't always play the 'slippery slope' card, but here it's relevant. If these things go unchecked, what will it be like in 50 years?
Maggie,
I also use to think that if you weren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about. I believed it until a friend of mine was pulled off a plane because his name, a very common one, came up on a watch list. It remains a problem for him every time he flies. Such a problem that he now prefers to drive.
I agree with your comments about the horrifying nature of the depth of intrusion that can be obtained. I shudder to think what "they" have on me, before we knew to be careful. The decisions we all made based on convenience and ease will come back to bite us in the...well, you get my drift. And the enhancement to surveillance capabilities will keep pace with the technology available. Yikes...
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