Uncle Sam Mines Your PC
Posted on April 28th, 2009
by Daniel McCarthy |
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Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, who writes in the May Atlantic about government mining of Internet searches, would make a good Stasi agent, if only there were still an East Germany. He writes:
In fact, some searches could be viewed as a form of dialogue between citizens and their government. Why shouldn’t what constituents are exploring online be the government’s business in a healthy democracy? A spike in searches on ’student loans’ in New Orleans, for example, could help education officials decide whether to expand local college-aid programs.
Yes, Uncle Sam is just a benevolent vacuum cleaner, sucking up bits of your personal data and aggregating them in order to offer you better bribes services. What Bhattacharjee is describing, translated from the Web to the real world, is the equivalent of police standing around in public places recording and compiling the conversations of every passer-by. And guess what happens if a patriotic snoop happens to overhear a lot of “hate speech” or seditious talk about “liberty”?
Perhaps the Atlantic ought to run this piece as a follow-up.
Filed under: liberties
Clumsy ironic use of “dialogue”; more nuanced with “constituents” (not citizens, endowed with inalienable rights, but units of a voting bloc, presumably endowed with endless needs; through usage the once proud “constituents” is doomed to become the tacky, government-employed cousin of “consumers”).
And oh how helpful our government can be! Oh glorious future! Unworried constituents of a Helpful, Healthy Democracy, take up your clarion, google, and do your part redistributing America’s not yet depleted wealth!
McCarthy wrote:
“And guess what happens if a patriotic snoop happens to overhear a lot of ‘hate speech’ or seditious talk about ‘liberty’?”
You know I suspect that the dangers and even consequences of that kind of result from such snooping is even less than a much more subtle evil.
By coincidence I re-watched the recent film “V Is For Vendetta” the other night and in one scene they had police vans going along the streets somehow listening in to the conversations inside the houses. And then later they had the head of the police reporting to the “Chancellor” the percent of negative references they picked up about this or that subject and the percent of positive about another and etc. and so forth.
And this I think will be the far more common, likely and yet more insidious use of this kind of snooping: Not the blatant, in-your-face stamping out of dissent, but instead the use of the results to know how to better manipulate, what to lie about, what the public is susceptible to and what not, when to change its lies and etc. and so forth.
So I wonder if that isn’t the future instead of the primary use of this kind of stuff to stamp on dissidents.
In any event to see the gov’t gathering this kind of data for the public’s benefit rather than its own as this Bahattacharjee fellow does would just seem to take a rather breath-taking degree of callowness. Just how long is it going to take people to overcome what may be democracy’s greatest challenge which is the recognition that when a politician says he want to help you, what he really means is he want you to help him?
Cheers,
No one seemed to care when GWB was putting this program in place. Only now. Why is that?
How is this new? Being able to monitor search behavior for groups of people isn’t anything approaching new.
http://www.google.com/trends
The article is actually a little confused. It takes examples for software that makes an individual’s searching anonymous and then uses an argument involving tracking search trends for large amounts of people. There is a large difference between having a statistic added to a total and having your IP address recorded for posterity.
Oh, and to “me”: We did care. We just didn’t expect any better from him.