See-Through Society :: essays research papers

IntroductionGovernments like to think theyre in control. Especially in times of crisis, they try hard to portray an image of being iodin step ahead of their enemies, wanting us to think they are subject to run decisive action that will solve problems once and for all. Since 9/11 in particular, western governments have reasserted their commitment to monitoring the movements, conversations and keystrokes of anyone they odd of posing a threat to national security. One of the most spicy profile examples of this has been the US Governments proposed Total (later renamed Terrorism) randomness Awareness (TIA) scheme created by DARPA . Ambitious in scope, one of projects state aims is to create a counter-terrorism in remainsation system that increases nurture coverage by an order of magnitude.The TIA project quickly sparked controversy and it didnt take long for a response to the idea. Government Information Awareness (GIA) is a website that allows anyone to post and retrieve informa tion close to members of the executive, legislature, judiciary and senior executives from US companies . Set up by a group at MITs Media Lab, it plays the numbers game, believing that millions of eyes can outperform the efforts and resources of a a few(prenominal) thousand experts. Their stated goal is to, develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government.This short paper argues that GIA is part of a wider dynamic, towards enforce transparency of institutions that have traditionally held positions of control. It focuses not so much on the information gathering activities of traditional institutions such as governments, law enforcement agencies or multinational companies but instead on the activities of non-institutional actors such as NGOs, active networks and individual members of the public. It doesnt focus on privacy (that important base is left to other contributo rs to the Foresight exercise), but instead on openness. screening to the hackersTo look forward, it is often useful to look back and when it comes to thinking about the future of the internet it is especially instructive to look back to its origins. contempt its host funding and early applications, the internet wasnt really created with military objectives in mind. Instead it was created by hackers not the stereotyped teenagers bringing bug out the Pentagons computer system from their darkened bedrooms, but clever programmers for whom a hack is just a neat programming trick.