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Mindfully.org
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After the initial shock of the July terror bombings in London had faded, investigators began scouring thousands of hours of surveillance tapes, looking for clues to the identities of the bombers. This one event, from the coordination that made the attacks possible, to the response of the investigating authorities, exemplified the conundrum of our times. Technology, particularly the Internet, is knitting the world ever closer. That closeness allows terrorists to spread fear by using the media to amplify the power of their actions. At the same time, technology gives authorities new ways to identify attackers who may have perished in the commission of their crimes. This modern media environment has a simple message, says Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology at the University of Toronto — we are all connected, for good or for ill.
"What's happening today is that terrorism is riding on electricity,'' said de Kerckhove, a disciple of Marshall McLuhan, the now deceased Canadian philosopher who coined the term "global village" in the 1960s. "Everybody in the terrorist movement, where ever they come from, knows they are playing for show. This is a software war, a mind war." And, de Kerckhove adds, it's a war we can't escape, because it is being fought with cell phones, Web pages and the traditional media — all of which are tools we can use to uplift or to destroy.
This is the good-news, bad-news story of our times. A technological coin-flip rules our lives. Heads we win. Technology gives us marvelous ways to communicate and comparison shop, express ourselves and connect with kindred spirits anywhere in the world. Tails we lose. It is increasingly difficult to tune out of this connected world, whether it is something as simple as wanting to switch off the cell phone to enjoy some solitude, or the nagging concern that personal information collected about us is floating around out there, where identity thieves or Big Brother can misuse it. Technology gives — but at a price.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., puts the problem into historical context. We live, he says, in the age where inventiveness may have trumped wisdom. "This is an issue we struggled with throughout the 20th century across a range of technologies," Rotenberg says. "We named the Nobel Prize for scientific achievement after the man who invented dynamite." Similarly, he calls the atomic bomb one of the great achievements of World War II. It ended a bloody war at a horrific cost. Today, its peaceful expression, nuclear power, provides energy for millions of people, but generates worrisome waste. The ups and downs of electronic technology are just the latest in a series of techno-dilemmas. Rotenberg quotes this hopeful saying from the quintessential American inventor, Thomas Edison: "What man creates with his hand he should control with his head."
But what happens when technology allows attackers to get inside our heads, as with the Sept. 11 bombings? History may mark that event as the point where small, fanatical teams proved that off-the-shelf technologies could be used to topple institutions and humble the most powerful nation in the world. And the power of that act, says de Kerckhove, the McLuhan disciple, was amplified by the fact that the scene was captured, communicated and witnessed again and again through media. "The planners of the 9/11 attacks knew exactly what they were doing,'' he says. "The first plane struck and got everyone's attention and then the second plane struck and we all watched together in horror."
Those attacks sent a shudder through the nervous system of the body politic and free people began asking how open could they afford to let their society be. From his post at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Rotenberg tracks the details of laws like the Patriot Act, which extend government powers to collect and sift information. "We're seeing a trend toward open-ended surveillance, this view that we should capture everything on everyone," he says. Library records, phone calls, e-mails and other facts are all grist for collection mills. Surveillance cameras are becoming ubiquitous, even for uses such as monitoring red light runners in San Francisco. How all this information gets sifted and used is an ongoing concern. "We know electronic fascism could be around the corner,'' de Kerckhove says.
That terrorists are using technology to probe for weaknesses is hard to dispute. "Evidence strongly suggests that terrorists used the Internet to plan their operations for 9/11," retired Army colonel and security analyst Timothy Thomas writes in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College.
Robert David Steele is a former Marine Corps infantry officer, covert operative and government intelligence agent. He is now a private intelligence consultant in Virginia, advising companies and government agencies on things such as how much detail they want to put online about the layout of railways, ports and power plants. Steele has no doubt terrorists are using our open systems against us. But though he advises caution about how much we reveal about critical infrastructure, he doesn't believe intelligence collection or surveillance can protect us. "We focus everything on trying to alter other people's behavior instead of trying to listen to them," says Steele, who uses terms like "immoral capitalism" to explain why some people are willing to blow themselves to bits to get our attention. "If the United States continues to practice immoral capitalism," he warns, "there aren't enough guns or technology on the planet to stop this country from being eaten by pissed-off locusts."
And so the debate rages. Who is more at fault, us or them? Can technology get us out of a fix that technology also helps put us in? Do we risk creating Big Brother? Technology expert Dorothy Denning, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, thinks it may be wrong to focus concern on the intentions and powers of government. "Government has limited resources," she says. The corporate and private sectors control the vast majority of electronic networks, and have both the tools and rationales for electronic surveillance — whether it's posting surveillance cameras to catch pilferers, or filtering e-mail messages to screen out potential sexual harassment.
The corporate and consumer realm presents another facet of the tech dilemma. Networks put the world at our fingertips when we want movie times, or the address of a long-lost friend. But these same networks are gathering facts about our purchases, preferences, habits and friends. The professional life of Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, is one long sigh of resignation about the chipping away of personal privacy, punctuated by occasional bursts of outrage when a name-brand financial institution loses a laptop containing thousands of Social Security numbers. "The main problem here in the United States is that there are no overarching privacy protection laws on the books,'' Givens says. By contrast, Europe, Japan and other industrialized nations set stricter baseline rules that all private data-collectors must follow.
Opposing Givens in many of these personal privacy debates is Marty Abrams, director of the Center for Information Policy Leadership. Abrams does not dispute that many nations have blanket rules on privacy, while the United States knits a patchwork of protections for credit reports and medical records. But, says Abrams, in an information economy, privacy protections should be balanced against the need for speedy innovation. He says the U.S. system allows more air to fan entrepreneurial embers, while European-style protections are more of a wet blanket. "We have the strongest consumer economy with the most choices and best prices in probably the entire world,'' Abrams says.
But the privacy debate doesn't exist in a vacuum. In a connected world, information, once collected, does not sit idle. It is tapped, accessed and resold. And since Sept. 11, private sector data collectors like ChoicePoint and LexisNexis have been competing to sell data and data-sifting services to government law enforcement agencies. Could Big Brother outsource data collection? "I'm concerned about this,'' says Simson Garfinkel, a technology researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book "Database Nation."
Bay Area author Howard Rheingold has been thinking about technology, privacy, surveillance and personal freedom from the era when typewriters were writers' most advanced tool. Twenty years ago, as an early contributor to the online forum, the Well, Rheingold coined the term "virtual community." In 2002, he wrote "Smart Mobs," a book that predicted citizens equipped with camera-bearing cell phones would become news gatherers — something that happened in July, when Londoners snapped shots of the carnage and confusion that followed the terror bombings. To Rheingold, competing trends in technology — the empowering of individuals, their entrapment in a web of surveillance and their susceptibility to acts of terror — are simply facts of modern life. "It's an age-old conundrum," he says. "Technology gives us power to do things. It also gives bad people power to do things to us." By and large, however, his outlook is hopeful. The connective forces of technology may have a greater and more lasting power than the invasive or destructive ones. The future, says Rheingold, is in our hands. "The power is not in the technology itself. It's in what people know about it."
source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/08/14/CMG35DOLQO1.DTL&hw=abate&sn=002&sc=926 16aug2005
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