Re: If it moves, we can track it!

From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 19:47:45 MDT


Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
>
>>I wonder when this system will come to Virginia. If we had it now, the
>>Virginia sniper would hardly even make it into national news - he
>>would have been caught after the first shooting.
>
>
> Am I the only one who thinks that a system allowing you to obtain complete
> trajectories and fingerprints of all moving objects on a 24/7/365 manner
> in realtime something that is bound to be abused, and abused horribly?
> Think of all the pattern matching and crosscorellation analysis you could
> do with that data. <SHUDDER>

What is it that you dread, Gene? Abused by who?
The government? As before, I presupposed you would
compensate away much of the government's power as
transparency increased. This is a critical point.
No government can be trusted with the power that
transparency would provide.

In the case of the Virginia sniper, the government's
role would be almost superfluous, for a band of armed
citizens would have taken him out by now.

> Technology is an asymmetrical enabler, since favouring centralism. Why
> giving up privacy, which is irreversible, in face of statistically
> insignificant threats? The mind boggles.

I think of them as statistically significant opportunities.
I like asymmetrical enablers. I tend to be on the side that
is always asymmetrically enabled. spike



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