Giving the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume the best of intentions in proposed and real shifts in the approach to privacy seen in recent US expansion of warrant-less surveillance. (That benefit is a real stretch in itself, but I'm a generous guy.)
Sadly, a little knowledge can be dangerous. Many people "know" that opening up communications to surveillance will catch the bad guys at a minor (maybe even unnoticeable) inconvenience to the average person.
Lauren Weinstein writes:
"... the ultimate irony in the situation is that such
moves are likely to have the unintended consequence of speeding the pace at which such surveillance techniques become ineffective against the real bad guys.
Increasingly, the people we'd really like to catch -- especially at higher levels -- are assuming that their telecommunications are being monitored, and moving increasingly to heavily encrypted communications, stenographic obfuscation techniques, and other mechanisms to protect their communications.
This leaves the communications of ordinary, innocent persons open to broad snooping from governmental or other entities, especially in the wake of the sorts of sweeping "vacuum cleaner" data collection techniques and surveillance mistargeting that we know takes place (e.g., mass diversion of backbone Internet traffic) despite the administration's continuing attempts to block information about its ultimate extent.
Most of us rarely encrypt our communications since (a) we don't usually feel an obvious need to do so, and (b) truly automatic and easy to use crypto mechanisms have yet to be widely deployed. "What do I say that anyone would care to listen to?" is a common refrain, but it's never certain which harmless statements today might be considered "actionable" in a new context tomorrow.
If we had complete faith that our leaders would not abuse the wiretapping powers provided to them, this would be more of an academic discussion than anything else.
Unfortunately, both long-term and recent history show that abuses of such surveillance systems are an endemic part of their structure."
Have you written anything (yeah, ANY thing) that taken out of the context of a thread and clipped to support a particular view might actually be a complete misrepresentation of your view? Was that in a blog post, or a white paper? That email to Uncle George or post to a "closed" forum?
Any student of history can put 2 & 2 together and come up with about 6 million (in one religious category alone, never mind the hundreds of thousands in various other categories from ethnicity, nationality to sexual orientation). And the trend toward outsourcing data collection and analysis (everything from prisoners processing credit card payments to datahouses leaking health records) means that the benevolence of government is not the only concern.
Knowledge creation calls for much more than aggregating data. It is an outcome of intellectual capacity filtered through cultural norms, attitude, and competence.
What protects against bias and incompetence? Well, evidence-based practice helps on the accountability front. With effective management of the recorded information resources that are evidence of the decision making processes, accountability can be pursued.
But, this calls for valuing the effort required to generate evidence of decision processes and transactions--and the effort required to ensure their authenticity and reliability over time.
Luciana Duranti and others are working on these challenges in the
InterPARES Project.
Views?
