Week 13 Readings

The “No Place to Hide” Web site (I found it at http://www.noplacetohide.net/) was very interesting.  I skimmed the final chapter of O’Harrow’s book, and, I guess none of it really surprised me.  Since 9/11, I do feel we have become a “surveillance state,” for better or worse.  I want to be left alone, yes, but I also want airlines to catch folks like the underwear bomber before I get on a plane.  So is this the price we have to pay, in the age of technology?  As long as we have the technology, there will be people (and governments) who want to use it--again, for better or worse--at the expense of our privacy.  I guess I have accepted that my habits are known to others:  where I shop, how much money I have at any given time, what books I read, what coffee shops I frequent, who I’m calling and when.  And if someone wants to use that knowledge against me, I imagine there’s very little I can really do about it.  Really:  what can one single person do about it?

The Electronic Privacy Information Center’s history of the Department of Defense’s “Total [later Terrorism] Information Awareness” highlights the problem of squaring individual privacy with the government’s use of technology.  The Terrorism Information Awareness system “was envisioned to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant.”  It would “capture the ‘information signature’” of people the government pegged as potential terrorists or criminals, using financial, medical communication, and travel records.  Interesting to see that computer scientists voiced concerns about privacy and security risks of TIA.

The thing I always think about when it comes to matters of privacy is not so much the information being gathered but how one interprets it, who interprets it, etc.