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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."
Anything that catches stupid people is good. I used to tell people years ago, when I ran a computer store: "Don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't be comfortable shouting across a crowded room." How hard is that to understand? If you can't figure that out, you have no business running a huge conglomerate like HP. Man, oh man.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
The Bill of Rights only lists a few rights that the founding fathers thought might most explicitly need writing down. They were very clear about not wanting people to become confused (or to be lied to) and think that the Bill of Rights enumerates the only rights they have. That's why it was reluctantly added as a set of amendments, rather than made a part of the main body. Please read the Federalist papers and other historical documents of the time.
Personal privacy is a natural right. Courts didn't just "make it up" any more than they might "make up" that you have a right to breathe. Some rights were considered by the founders to be so obvious that no reasonable legislature or court would infringe on them.
Government does not grant you rights. Rights come from right. Or if you prefer, truth, nature, or God. Government only restricts rights and/or takes them away.
The often repeated claim that "the right to privacy is nowhere in the constitution" advertises a deep ignorance of consitutional law by those who claim it.
While I am all for privacy rights, I must ask the question. Are we entering an age where unreasonable Search and Seizure isn't required anymore to commit acts that the population perceives as an invasion of their privacy? Is it now possible for passive and non intrusive observation to yeild the same results? If so, do we need to define our privacy or attempt to limit passive observation?
There is no guarantee of privacy anywhere in the Constitution- only a requirement that the evidence gathered can't be used against you in court.
/. would something this dumb be said. The constitution is not a computer program: "gee, you're right... you don't actually have a right to air"
Only on
So you're telling me the MLK's rights were not violated when the FBI threatened him with the release of his personal activities if he didn't do what the government said? Please.
That is silly.
Such a statement is analogous to declaring security dead because systems have been compromised in the past. Like security, the means to privacy must and are continuing to evolve. Adoption of these mechanisms may be a bit behind the curve, but that in no way means that privacy is “dead” for anyone or everyone. In the past, rotational cyphers, Enigma, and “security envelopes” were enough to keep your messages secure (for a while). These days, we have incredibly powerful tools for keeping our data private, we simply have to be willing to use them.
And that is happening. Who does not use strong encryption for conducting electronic commerce? Nobody. As for privacy in email and other forms of communication, eventually, after enough scandals like those recently at Hewlett-Packard, people will adapt to protect themselves. Then the baseline will be raised and those who would wish to violate privacy will resume efforts in advancing the sophistication of their tools. Then those on the privacy side will move on again. This cycle will repeat again and again.
Privacy is an arms race, in a manner of speaking, and just because privacy is behind at times in no way means that it is a lost cause.
Join Tor today!
Secrecy is no more dead than it has been for a long while. There are some people who just don't seem to understand the medium. Sending messages across the internet is not like passing a letter to a person across the table from you. It's more like passing a letter along through a chain of 20 people -- any of which can read it as they handle it. You don't send secret things that way, or if you do, there's this little thing called encryption that you might want to look into. Also, much like a letter, once it is out of your hands you can't gaurantee that it won't come up at some later time when you least want it to. Also, are you _sure_ you can trust the person you're communicating with? Can you even verify that you're talking with who you think you're talking to?
The same basic rules of secrecy that have always applied still apply today. First and foremost, if you want to keep something REALLY secret, keep it to yourself!
Privacy, however, is a different matter.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
I'm getting tired of hearing "there is no such right" because the constitution doesn't specifically call it out. It doesn't have to.
Please note that nowhere in the Bill of Rights are you guaranteed the right not to be murdered, or the right to bear children, or the right to learn to read. That doesn't mean you don't have those rights.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Speak for yourself.
Personally, I'm not at all convinced. I value my own privacy. Perhaps more objectively, I recognise that no-one is perfect, and if you dig hard enough you can turn up dirt on anyone. I also recognise that most people in the world are basically good, decent people, and I would prefer to respect a reasonable level of privacy and live in a world where we saw the good in people. You can't do that in a world where everyone's whole life story is computerised, often against their will and without their knowledge, and the media delight in data mining on anyone of any conceivable interest (or at least, worth a few more sales).
Now, governments on the other hand, they should have no right to privacy; on the contrary, IMHO they should be required to justify any attempt to withhold information from the public to an independent authority. Businesses should also be subject to much stricter openness requirements than individuals.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
How to be consistent? One man's treasured "transparency" is another's outrageous "death of privacy". Certainly no technical distinction exists between my IMs, your IMs, and Foley's IMs. Nor is there a technical distinction between the way Foley's secrets were exposed and the way anyone else's could be exposed.
You have to be careful with the attitude that we have rights that aren't innumerated in the constitution because pragmatically anyone can misconstrue anything into a right (ie, I have a right to kill my kids because, as my father used to say, "I brought you into this world and I can take you out!"). The vehicle that was supposed to prevent congress from making laws against rights was voting them out of office. If a majority of people want everyone to have a right to a certain amount of privacy, than they shouldn't vote for people that would vote for those kinds of laws. Now you can argue how effective this vehicle is, but it doesn't change how the system was set up to work.
www.joshferguson.org
That's correct: al Qaeda members have done things that put them outside of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
However, although that's true of al Qaeda in general, there is currently no way to appeal a claim that one is not a member of al Qaeda. Wearing civilian clothes is in fact a terrible crime in a terrorist, since it puts civilians at risk, but it's something that civilians do all the time.
Under the current interpretations, the mere accusation that one is a terrorist is enough to put one forever beyond the possibility of release. There is no court to whom you can appeal your innocence. Making it legal for the US government to put you away forever, merely on somebody's say-so, is a very dangerous legal precedent, whether the Geneva Convention applies or not.
A) the people being tortured are often innocent of any "terrorist" activity, as seen in various extraordinary rendition victims that ended up being released months later (but of course not apologised to or compensated for or given justice by punishing those responsible for months of torture)
B) The US has no real chain of command for responsibility purposes anyway. Bush and his cronies dont have "the buck stops here" signs, they have "I didnt do it, blame him, I know nussink" signs. Its not a punish those responsible system so much as a blame the (probably innocent) scapegoat for your mistakes and crimes.
I find it hilarious (in a laugh till you cry morbidly sort of way) that everything americans accuse other "terrorist nations" or "rogue states" of doing, they are doing themselves.
They are basically like a big primary school bully, walking around punching people and stealing their lunch money, all the while crying to the principal that some of the victims tried to fight back.
Now Im not religious, but it seems a decent percentage of the idiotic americans behind such behaviour claim to be, perhaps they should actually read that book they love so much, something about removing a log in your eye?
let the flaming begin (oh no you didnt...)
watch "the money masters" on google video