Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, February 4, 2003

Implementing surveillance in our lives -- Comment()
JD's New Media Musings points to Universal Transparency: "Surveillance will play an increasingly important part in our lives and can be implemented in many different ways. All of us are very concerned about Orwellian outcomes, so we are taking a proactive approach and proposing variations on Universal Transparency as a way to prevent an Orwellian outcome. Universal Transparency means allowing everyone to see most everything, no one group holds the power of surveillance - it is distributed in a democratic way!"

-- Comment()
t e c h n o c u l t u r e: "The Boston Globe has a great cover story on Google entitled A Nation of Voyeurs: How the Internet search engine Google is changing what we can find out about one another - and raising questions about whether we should."

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Total Information Delusion:

The Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project may have stalled due to opposition in Congress, but even if the effort goes forward, many computer scientists doubt the effectiveness of the technology. [...] TIA leader John Poindexter underestimates the complexity of understanding human behavior, especially since computers today still do not fully grasp language. The Information Awareness Office Poindexter runs contains 12 other programs besides TIA [...] Palo Alto Research Center computer scientist Francine Chen says that even a relatively accurate technology would produce too many false positives to be useful when applied to a population of approximately 300 million people. [...] Lunt concedes that no technology can provide 100 percent privacy protection.

For information about ACM's U.S. Public Policy Committee, visit http://www.acm.org/usacm