“… we’ve confused security with control, and instead of building systems for real security, we’re building systems of control. Think of ID checks everywhere, the no-fly list, warrantless eavesdropping, broad surveillance, data mining, and all the systems to check up on scuba divers, private pilots, peace activists and other groups of people. These give us negligible security, but put a whole lot of control in the government’s hands. Computing is heading in the same direction, although this time it is industry that wants control over its users. They’re going to sell it to us as a security system — they may even have convinced themselves it will improve security — but it’s fundamentally a control system. And in the long run, it’s going to hurt security.”
full quote @ Schneier on Security [link via Compiler]

I don’t know if they’re even bothering to put forth that ruse. In today’s panopticon, we aren’t just internalizing state surveillance, we’re digitizing it.

I recently attended a lecture by Dr. Ronald Leenes from the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology & Society: Google/Doubleclick vs The People. While the support for data mining and behavioural targeting is ostensibly to analyze a pool of anonymous data to create better content for the user, the reality isn’t so simple. It is true that the data collected is not immediately related to one’s civic identity (e.g. clickstream data, IP address, browser/OS etc.), but having all that data aggregated at the very least, narrows down your total anonymity into smaller anonymity subsets and in some cases, could “out” you.

But that was not Leenes’ main concern. He was suggesting that the focus on whether data collected is sensitive or not obscures the larger issue of how the industry is managing and analyzing data, and for what purposes (something they are very opaque about). Are these technologies facilitating user discrimination more than improving content? However, as this lecture leaned more on the technical side, these implications were never really explored.

What I find strange is the fact that while the internet might not know about you, it really knows your behaviour well. In fact, it probably knows how you act, your online stream of unconscious, far better than you know your self.

The Canadian government is passing a new restrictive copyright law that in the words of Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post, “promises to be the worst copyright law in the developed world. It will contain an “anti-circumvention” clause that prohibits breaking the locks off your music and movies in order to move them to new devices or watch them after the company that made them goes out of business — and it will follow the US’s disastrous lead with the DMCA in that there will be no exceptions to the ban on circumvention, not even for parody, fair dealing, time shifting, or other legal uses.”

You can get involved by:

• commenting w/questions for Industry Minister Jim Prentice on the CBC blog Prentice has declined to address the CBC questions.
• checking out Michael Geist’s 30 Days of DRM call to action list which includes actions like getting librarians involved and addresses of politicians to write to with your concerns. Geist also offers his analysis in the 30 Days series, which is worth a read.