Tag: transparent_society

Age of quacks

If you didn’t know Baltimore has a permanent Rumor Control hotline, you’re not alone. The municipal rumor-snuffing center is little promoted today. Rumor Control’s mission is squash misinformation, loose talk, and wild-haired stories that might affect the health and safety of the city. It was established in 1968 to ease tensions and provide information amid the riots that followed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Once its services were advertised on the sides of buses. Now about the only place you’ll find the number is buried in the phone book’s blue-paged government listings. “Most of the calls that come in today just want to know what Rumor Control is”.

i wonder if the panopticon singularity hedged with augmented social networks will be able to stem the tide of quacks?

Emergent transparency

Someone once said to me that they no longer read newspapers, because whenever they read an article about an area they were an expert in, the article was invariably 90% bollocks. Key facts would be missing, or misunderstood; known charlatans would have been interviewed and treated as holy; old or misleading conclusions would have been made. And if, this guy reasoned, that was true for the stories he knew about, it must be true for everything in the paper. Why, then, should he bother reading it?
Government is having the same problem, but it is made worse. It’s not that experts grumble into their beer about obscure nuances of law, as they’ve done that for 1000s of years. It’s not even just that experts can point out the fallacies of proposed legislation on the internet – and reach a large and active audience – although this is increasingly true. It’s that the internet specifically allows everyone to become an expert in whatever field. What we have is not Emergent Democracy, as many would have it, but Emergent Transparency. It’s not enough for a minister to say “Trust Me” anymore, because 5 minutes with Google usually finds every single lie, or spin, or misplaced understanding. To return to my non-newspaper buying friend, it’s not just that 90% of the statements about things I know about are wrong, but that I now know 90% of everything you make statements about. The internet hive mind is fact-checking as you go.

ben hammersley on why voters are staying away from the voting booths in droves. with the end of practical obscurity, a new polis needs to emerge.

endorsement

with the dust off my body, and water around me in sufficient quantities, i can once more muse on this blog. one very nice person i got to know on this trip is chris kelly, berkman alumnus and currently running for office in palo alto.
from my limited personal experience with politicians, chris really cares and has a clue. he is working on privacy issues in his day job, so i quizzed him on the transparent society. chris wants to shape a policy around brin’s notions which sounds sensible to me.

Dust

Al Molnar recently devised a transceiver-on-a-chip that’s 50x smaller than a cell phone, consumes 1000x less power, yet operates at the same frequency. Outfitted with their own TinyOS operating system, the motes self-organize into ad hoc wireless networks and pass their data from one to another bucket-brigade style until the information reaches a central computer for processing. In March, members of the Smart Dust research team, including graduate students Jason Hill, Ben Cook, Mike Scott, and Brett Warneke, took a major leap forward in their quest to combine ultra-low power computation, communication, and sensing into a single tiny device. Hill successfully tested his design for a new single-chip “spec” mote that’s only 5 millimeters square and includes a transmitter built by Molnar.

world wide watchers

Basically, it attempts to protect chemical plants, reservoirs and airports—all targets where terrorists could get horrifying results with relatively little effort—by a system involving 10M Webcams and a stay-at-home army of watchful citizens.

this doesn’t go nearly far enough. to make this really secure, webcams need to be everywhere. watch the watchers in an endless recursion.

unabomber feelings rise

it was only a matter of time before gun nuts would come out of their caves and claim that giving everyone a gun would have prevented this tragedy. typical of backwards-facing people..

especially eric s. raymond.

We have learned today that airport security is not the answer. At least 4 separate terror teams were able to sail right past all the elaborate obstacles — the demand for IDs, the metal detectors, the video cameras, the X-ray machines, the gunpowder sniffers, the gate agents and security people trained to spot terrorists by profile. There have been no reports that any other terror units were successfully prevented from achieving their objectives by these measures. In fact, the early evidence is that all these police-state-like impositions on freedom were exactly useless — and in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center lies the proof of their failure.

my answer:

lets face it. this event will increase surveillance everywhere. no point in returning to the caves and carrying guns. actually, it is largely irrelevant whether you carry a gun or not. what is truly relevant is whether you will be allowed access to all these surveillance systems, so that it becomes peer-to-peer surveillance, or if some hidden agency controls it all. think decentralization. nobody cares if you run around with a gun, you will be closely watched, anyways. trying to ignore this reality is a weakly disguised attempt to flee into an unabomber utopia.

End of freedom

this event will mark the end of individual freedom as we know it. calls for increasing surveillance at the expense of personal freedom will be stronger than ever. everybody opposed to giving up his personal freedom will be framed as a suspect.

expect the following:

total ban on encryption
machine-readable identification cards mandatory
increased use of video surveillance, face recognition
closer law-enforcement cooperation on an international scale
heavy increases in military spending
censoring of dissident views on the internet

now would be as good a time as ever to read the transparent society by david brin.

Can we stand living our lives exposed to scrutiny … our secrets laid out in the open … if in return we get flashlights of our own, that we can shine on the arrogant and strong? Or is privacy’s illusion so precious that it is worth any price, including surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful?

update
wired reports that the fbi has installed carnivore internet surveillance equipment at major internet providers within hours of the attacks.