Thursday, January 02, 2003

From Wired, a recap of the Bush Administration's "year of surveillance: Take, for example, the Bush team's most notorious proposal of the year: the Total Information Awareness system. TIA is an "ultra-large, all-source information repository" (PDF) meant to track citizens' every move, from Web surfing to doctor visits, travel plans to university grades, passport applications to ATM withdrawals. and New guidelines from Ashcroft, issued in May and upheld by a federal review court in November, allow law enforcers to comb through commercial databases "even when there is no suspicion of criminal activity," Hoofnagle said. "It stands the constitutional approach to law enforcement on its head," Tien added. "Even if you want to frisk somebody on the street, you have to show reasonable suspicion. That's not the case here. This is 'We'll gather information on everyone -- just in case we need it later.'" From the December 30th Washington Post: "The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has hired retired Admiral John Poindexter to run the Total Information Awareness System (TIAS). Replete with the Masonic pyramid and omnipotent eye of the dollar bill as its logo, TIAS is intended to gather as much information as it can from databases worldwide to track down terrorists and other threats to national security. Critics, including several key members of Congress, say it is a blow against privacy rights, since the system as designed will." What I want to know is where's the outcry? I as a technologist, understand what this kind of database power can mean. Don't other people? Perhaps they believe that the government will never be able to piece together the initiatives to make it work. Or perhaps, as I said earlier, they believe that the government will only infringe on "bad" people and the government will be responsible caretakers of the accumulated information. Well - I've been there - I've been a gate keeper of personal databases. To continue with Wired's Lord of the Rings analogy - personal databases are like the Ring. They have the potential to corrupt all who want to use it - even when they start out with the best of intentions. The safeguards and controls are being removed from use of these databases. As a result, it is my strong belief that the government initiatives should never ever get off the ground. Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety 2:20:00 PM    comment []

From Ed Cone, an entertaining account of his interview with Jerry Garcia. I'm not a Deadhead, but The Grateful Dead were so ahead of their time in many different ways: I found a tape of a brief interview with Jerry Garcia, made backstage between sets at a Grateful Dead concert in Irvine Meadows, California, on Easter weekend 1987. I was a 24-year-old reporter for Forbes, on assignment with Allan Dodds Frank, the brilliant financial journalist who got shitcanned by CNN last week. We wrote what I think was the first article about the economics of the Dead’s unusual strategy of allowing fans to tape its shows—an idea that would later be applied to the Internet and software businesses. 2:05:30 PM    comment []

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