Surveillance Update

Several things occurred within the past few days on the privacy/surveillance frontier. First, the EU Parliament decision we mentioned yesterday is being widely reported as an assault on privacy (the European press barely mentions the spam angle we covered yesterday). As far as I can tell, this decision will loosen the EU's protections against surveillance, but does not implement any spying itself - national governments are free to NOT spy on their citizens, in the (perhaps unlikely) event that they don't want to do so. In the U.S., the FBI will be increasing their general surveillance - that is, they'll be doing more surveillance unrelated to any suspected crime, using commercial databases, etc. We can expect the Bureau to be used for more overtly political uses in the future - spying on the not-in-power political parties is no longer prohibited and will, therefore, occur. The NYT has an interesting analysis. Finally, the Washington Post reports that banks will be creating a massive financial database/blacklist of terrorists, wife-beaters, anti-globalization protesters, etc.

Comments

No more wifebeaters?

[El Jynx]

Get with it. Being masturbated by my wife is one of the highlights of our relationship. Especially if it happens while I'm playing Q3... Explosive orgasms! Riding the rocket! Orgasmic fuel cells! The sky is the limit.

Jynx

Where do you want to shag today?

not so terrible?

[tps12]

I know my reaction was just about par for the course, chanting "surveillance bad" along with all of the other slasheepbots. But before you mod me down, I suggest actually following the links in the article, and reading them carefully (revolutionary idea for /. I know!). I did, and I can say I'm starting to be convinced.

First of all, we have to recognize that the global political landscape has undergone some serious changes in the last few decades. This is not your father's intelligence community. It used to be about people: spies, informants, narcs. Now it is about information, and more often than not that information is digital, available on-line. Surveillance is nothing new, but it is changing shape.

Furthermore, look at what they're up against. There is a huge amount of information out there. Even the humble Linux kernel source represents more data than can be digested in a week by a single person (although egcs(1) doesn't appear to have any trouble with it!). As part of my career I am responsible for filtering valid email addresses from gigabytes of online data, and I can testify that this kind of data mining is arduous and thankless.

Finally, the American intelligence community is well within its Constitutional rights to create these databases and monitor our transmissions. It is the price we pay for freedom. I don't think I'm alone in saying that I will gladly give up a little privacy in exchange for a lot of security.

Just give this a chance.

Why can't /. summarize anything????

[MongooseCN]

Finally, the Washington Post reports that banks will be creating a massive financial database/blacklist of terrorists, wife-beaters, anti-globalization protesters, etc.

I searched the article and didn't even find the word wife or global. Where did this summary come from? Wife beaters? Why would you even make up a lie that a bank is profiling wife beaters? Is that suppose to add sensationalism to the article? Because I don't think many computer geeks are wife beaters...