How Laptops in Education Can Help Dictators, Hurt Learning

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on worries that the OLPC's BitFrost security protocols could hand a ready-made surveillance system to controlling 3rd world governments. The laptops identify themselves regularly to a server that can disable individual machines reported stolen — a system that hands a government a kill switch for every unit. BitFrost also has the potential to have machines attach a unique ID to every internet transaction, helping out anyone wanting to track net internet use. A freely available paper from a recent USENIX conference spells out the concerns." Relatedly, an anonymous reader points out a story at Slate about a study which examined the impact that free PCs had on poor students in Romania, writing that "giving the kids machines without a corresponding level of parental supervision just resulted in distractions which ultimately damaged academic performance. By contrast, allowing children access to machines in a supervised setting, say an after school program via school labs, might mitigate some of the negative effects."

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[Americano]

I understood his point just fine.

I'm not sure you did. His argument was that any technology has the potential for misuse - essentially, that dictators will repress their people with or without this particular piece of assistive technology. Therefore, the conclusion seems to be that any concern about the ease & scale at which a technology enables said repression is misplaced, and irrelevant.

The laptop's usefulness outweighs the near-zero access to information they had before.

The laptop's usefulness to who? Do you really think a repressive regime is going to say, "Well, we don't want you to access that information, but hey it's the internet, have at it?" Or is it more likely that people accessing "unauthorized" content will be flagged & targeted, and that this security system makes flagging that access orders of magnitude easier for the government?

As far as surveillance, that happens on any network, all the time. We're only quibbling about the degree, not if.

And so since it "happens on any network", it's not worth being concerned about?