The Age of Technological Transparency

endychavez writes "Executives and politicians may be starting to realize that privacy is dead and secrets can no longer be kept in the information age. There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive. Just ask Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley. In a piece at eWeek, Ed Cone from CIO Insight talks about the specific technologies that brought them down." From the article: "Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival. We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun's blogging CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak more directly to stakeholders. But transparency needs to be understood as more than a slogan or a strategy. It's a reality. It can be imposed on you by the Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not."

Comments

Re:Filtering

[hotdiggitydawg]

If I'm on my *personal* computer and I instant message a friend, I have an understanding that the content is destined to travel directly from point A (my IP address) to point B (the receiver's IP address). Yes, it will travel through other people's routers and networks on the way, but it's generally assumed that such traffic isn't subject to review by humans, in-transit.

Garbage - there are plenty of IM services that are not peer-to-peer. And even if they are, you can bet that such traffic IS subject to review by humans. Ever heard of tcpdump or ethereal?

Sorry, but even Sen. Stevens has a better understanding of the net than you - at least he worked out it was a series of tubes. Chatting over IM is more like sending someone a postcard in another country. You're trusting the the postal staff at both ends (and the convicted fraudsters serving out their community service at the mail-sorting centres) not to do anything with the supplied information. If you send sensitive information that way, you're merely hoping that the signal gets lost among all the noise, and sooner or later you're gonna get burned. Security by obscurity does not work - security by trivial obscurity works even less.