This piece by David Fenton, "Big Brother no myth" in this week's eWeek caught my eye. Privacy invasion by the government has very much been on my mind, as it has been on many other people's. Take today's court ruling that it's OK to search people who have the audacity to use the Boston public transportation system. (The author of the TalkLeft blog says she's been getting searched a couple times a day this week!) Or the fact that your ISP has the right to read your email. Or a million other creepy examples I could name if I wasn't feeling lazy.
But I found this article disappointing in an important respect. The scary examples he includes are 1) the GMail automatic scanning system which allows them to feed users "relevant" ads, 2) a brain implant for depression that may get approved by the FDA, and 3) a national screening program for depression proposed by President Bush.
The GMail thing? Well, if you use Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail, or just about any web-based email, your messages are already scanned for spam content. This is on top of the right ISPs already have to read anything they want.
The brain implant? Yeah, I don't want my brain touched, probed, or augmented surgically. On the other hand, if you've ever been severely clinically depressed or know someone who has been, you get pretty eager for a treatment that will help when nothing else has. I don't want to see a treatment approved which hasn't been studied carefully, and the jury is out on that one. Yet surely the author wouldn't turn down a pacemaker for his heart, and this seems analogous.
The screening program for depression? I suspect these guys have been pushing for this sinister attempt to control our brains as well. Bastards.
Fenton ends with an important point — that techies should consider the moral dimensions of the work they do and keep in mind the potential for abuse. In the five years since I graduated from the Information Management & Systems Program, and especially since 9/11 and all the Homeland Security crap that followed, I've thought about how the TIA folks, or the people trying to figure out how to screen passengers on planes, or remove ex-felons from voting rosters with greater precision, would have loved to hire some of us.
Right concerns, wrong targets, in this case, I think. And all the more surprising, since he apparently worked for the Air Force for 20 years in the area of information gathering and should know whereof he speaks...
