The W007...a President's New Phone

A lawsuit was filed with US Federal court in San Francisco to invalidate the new law which allows wiretapping without a court order. The suit was filed by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, who also represent the Guantanamo inmates. Apparently, the FISA court seemed to be delaying US govt's earnest attempts to catch terrrrrists. In fairness, this legislation could probably be plugging a loophole by explicitly removing barriers for interception of any communications with foreigners.

From my perspective, at least this new legislation has a sunset clause and needs Congress to renew it in six months. Hopefully, there'll be enough Americans who dare to talk about the President's new clothes...to restore their constitutional rights and fix the root cause of the problem. I honestly believe that the root cause is a foreign policy that creates many more problems than are intended to be resolved.

There's already some fallout, with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe citing the US program to justify using "the dictator's toolkit". So before you think I'm engaging in Bush-bashing, I'll come right out to say that the same issues are occurring in many more countries with much less debate or oversight.

There also seems to be an attempt to apply the law in retrospect in order to grant AT&T immunity in the lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Ironically, AT&T testified in court during the 1920s, "The telephone has become part and parcel of the social and business intercourse of the people of the United States, and this telephone system offers a means of espionage to which general warrants and writs of assistance were the puniest instruments of tyranny and oppression."

As Bob Dylan used to say, the times they are a-changing. All that we've grown to understand about peace, war, dictatorship, democracy, elections...are a-changing. Pretty soon, the concept of property ownership will also be reversed back a few hundred years. Back then, search warrants weren't required, since all property belonged to the state.

Protect our Privacy...for our own Security

A recent issue of the Scientific American talks about the need for privacy from an interesting ethical and engineering perspective.

Privacy is needed by..."a lion that sees a deer down at a lake and it can't let the deer know he's there or [the deer] might get a head start on him. And he doesn't want to announce to the other lions [what he has found] because that creates competition. There's a primal need for secrecy so we can achieve our goals."

Privacy is also necessary for individuals to be allowed room to make mistakes and to grow. Just as a child stumbles while trying to walk, he is taught to enjoy the experience and grow with the encouragement from parents. This is based on the universal principles of repentance and forgiveness. Societies that have room for such principles to be practicable are more likely to flourish since people would not be afraid of being branded a failure but to learn from their mistakes. Bankruptcy laws are a good example of a mechanism which allows a person to recover in spite of failed attempts.

Too many systems are engineered to collect information, without regard to how the data will be used or it's relevance after a certain time period. The marketing department will always ask for more data about customers, demographics, behaviour, etc. It is also relatively simple to satisfy requirements for data collection given the computing capacity we have for storage and analysis. But in spite of the data gathering and analysis capability, there's too many instances when marketing is still done with the sophistication of telemarketing...mobile advertising being the main culprit.

In a Scientific American interview, Latanya Sweeney, makes an excellent point that "the privacy problems that I've seen are probably best solved by the person who first created the technology. What we really have to do is train engineers and computer scientists to design and build technologies in the right kind of way from the beginning."

So far, making engineers aware of human computer interfaces is only just beginning to show results with the recognition given to products that enhance usability. The next step, to make engineers aware of acceptance and social adoption requires them to think of barriers to technology. We already engineer systems that refrain from intruding on personal physical space. We are quite capable of engineering systems to enhance people's mental capacity and productive use of time. However, too many engineers presume that when systems intrude into people's privacy and temporal space, there are justifiable benefits but do not offer users a viable means to choose to opt-out of those "benefits".