Monday, December 23, 2002

Cities Say No to Federal Snooping One of the many reasons I love this country. We are a feisty lot. I only hope the will of the people will prevail. 3:42:06 PM    comment [] John Perry Barlow on the Total Information Awareness program: "The All-Seeing Spy" (excerpt) We now have a new, improved Eye ultimately designed to peer into every cranny of your private life and from that knowledge build a safer future for multinational corporatism. It is unilateral omniscience equipped with an ideology, a moral agenda, a zest for imposed order, and the overwhelmingly dominant supply of Weapons of Mass Destruction (along with the proven capacity to use them). With such a system comes immense power of extortion. When the government can know all our secret shames and we can know nothing of what it has gathered about us and how it interprets those data, we are at an enormous disadvantage should we seek to raise our voices against it. Moreover, what was devised to combat terrorism can be used to investigate other "crimes" of a more cultural nature. ... Which implies that the same posse that's currently asking itself "Who would Jesus bomb?" would finally have the means to impose its cultural practices on you while preventing you practicing your own. Such a system would also have an appalling capacity for error as well as a susceptibility to absurdly arbitrary leaps of judgement. (I keep thinking of the movie Brazil, in which a computer error that turns the name "Tuttle" into "Buttle" causes a haplessly innocent family man to be tortured to death. ) I recently heard that the government had examined all of Safeway's California customer relations management files to look for people who had been buying a lot of hummus (a well-known terrorist delicacy). Imagine what the idiots looking for hummus-eaters will ask of a system that can know everything. 2:22:48 PM    comment []

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