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

Ninth Amendment: "I don't get no respect."

[Kadin2048]

This is a good point.

I think what it boils down to is this: the Constitution isn't an exclusive document. It wasn't intended to mean, "everything is illegal, except for a few certain things." They enumerated the really big important stuff that they thought the Government needed to avoid, but they weren't giving Congress a carte blanche to trample on the other rights that people had always assumed that they had.

Unfortunately, the Ninth Amendment doesn't seem to get a whole lot of respect from the USSC or anybody else. It pretty much gets ignored; rather than drawing on the "pneumbra" and other IMO shaky legal arguments, I think it would have safe to just say 'hey, people have always had a certain right to privacy, therefore it's protected under the Ninth Amendment.' That makes it harder to chisel away at established freedoms, even if they weren't one of the top eight that made it into enumerated Amendments, or into the body of the Constitution itself.