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NY Times reports that Mitch Kapor resigns from the board of Groove
Mitchell D. Kapor, a personal computer industry software pioneer and a civil liberties activist, has resigned from the board of Groove Networks after learning that the company's software was being used by the Pentagon as part of its development of a domestic surveillance system.
Groove's growing involvement with the Total Information Awareness Program scares the hell out of me too. It troubles me even more then Groove's new pricing policy, Microsofts expanding stake in the company and the continuing lack of a native MacOSX client together. As Tim Bishop writes :
I've played around with Groove a little bit, and I am very impressed. And I don't have any problems with our intelligence community using good tools -- in fact I am delighted that they have good tools. But to have those same tools being used for Total Information Awareness is an abomination. As the article points out, commercial software developers are going to start wrestling with the same issues that physicists have wrestled with since World War II. To what degree are they responsible for the ends to which their tools are put? I'm afraid Groove is facing some serious image problems at least and risks losing the hearts and minds of future users and developers. I wish Ray Ozzie would pick up his weblog to shed some light on these issues and take away the growing feeling of unrest in the global ecosystem of Groove enthusiasts and developers.
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