» Friday, 18 December A.D. 2009

surveillance clock

One of the more interesting (and frightening) pieces I've read in a while is Jeff Jonas's Six Ticks till Midnight: One Plausible Journey from Here to a Total Surveillance Society. He explains the ACLU's Surveillance Society Clock and exactly why it's set where it is by laying out the rough sketches of what needs to happen before the activities of everybody can be tracked 24-7. (Aside: the ACLU utterly failed at this. If you look at their site without reading Jonas's post, it looks like general fear-mongering, since they don't provide any explanation of why the clock is where it is.) Also note the clock has moved up one minute since Jonas's post two years ago.

The really amusing/interesting/chilling part is this:

Oh yeah, one more thing, no more need for facial recognition (a very hard problem many years off anyway). In this coming world, all that useless video being collected can now be efficiently recalled because GPS data provides the missing link … who was where when?

While the exact technologies or the exact sequence of events may unfold quite differently, nonetheless such a future is coming. And this future is being created by us consumers, not the government!

Consumers are funding the surveillance economy, with the blistering pace of this extraordinary surveillance being driven by ordinary people who relish all the technological advances and willing to entirely trade in their information and privacy as they optimize their life.

One of the reasons I've become very interested in reading about history--a subject which I disliked in school--is this idea of unintended consequences. (The same principles come up in economic/political discussions too, except nobody seems to care...wait, that's exactly how history works, too.) Luther, for instance, almost certainly had no intention of producing the individualistic evangelical culture we have today--but you can trace a pretty convincing path between the two. Or economists making decisions based on some particular model of things and convincing themselves that said decisions will have the desired effect--without realizing that those same decisions are changing fundamental assumptions undergirding the model. (William Greider's Secrets of the Temple, which discusses the Federal Reserve's actions under Paul Volcker, has several examples of this.) There's no grand cabal of people, no portly, mustached executives and bureaucrats carefully designing a system to track everybody everywhere--we are doing this to ourselves.

posted by Nate @ 8:24PM