This is not a dress. This is a sacred robe of the ancient psychedelic monks

I tend to believe that governments use major events to increase control over their greatest opponents, the people they govern. One can see this through the free ride 9/11 gave the Bush administration, the massive curb in privacy and freedom that followed, or the privatising of the school system in New Orleans while people were reeling from Hurricane Katrina, the list could continue...

I read something interesting in a nytimes.com story today (read here), it was interesting and disappointing in two ways. The first issue concerned the Democrats apparently considering backtracking their promise to repeal the new laws passed in August allowing the U.S's NSA blanket approval to wiretap all foreign based communication (the Protect America Act). This could mean any US citizen being legally tapped if they receive an international call or deal with someone from another country. The fear of the Democrats is being attacked as weak on terror if they take away investigative (read invasive) power from the state. I am sure the White House would accuse them of being soft of terror so it is a genuine fear. The thing that disappoints me is that they are not scared of being labelled soft on privacy, freedom, or extremist by their public. I do not think we do enough to protect our way of life and our personal freedoms.

The second issue I had with the article was this short paragraph

A competing proposal in the Senate... may be even closer in line with the administration’s demands, with the possibility of including retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that took part in the N.S.A.’s once-secret program to wiretap without court warrants.

What the fuck? I had never heard about this before and that in itself is wrong. If a goverment has been illegally snooping on it's own residents why is it no big deal? Why is nothing done? It makes it sound like the Protect America Act and the Democrats approval or rejection are absolutely meaningless. The snooping on US citizens has been happening illegally anyway. This is just a way to put a legit face on yet another facade of the police state that is forming.

The general issue reminds me of an article written by Henry Porter, he has a weekly article and he usually uses it to blast Governments for slowly taking over our personal freedoms and he blasts the people for letting it happen. His article used the English DNA database that is growing rapidly as its basis but we are talking about the same issue (Porter article).

We are all fucked. Most Germans thought Hitler was a funny little man who would come and go quickly but when they realised what they were dealing with they had sat back and let enough of their personal freedoms be taken off them so that they were all helpless. We are all fucked.

I have been watching all this talk of digital litter and the developing issue of digital snooping quite closely. I am quite well spread out over the internet and have no problem with friends and strangers viewing my profile, my pictures or my blog (my blog on myspace - no one I know knows about this lj, I dont think - but that is the point). The problem I have is being snooped on by employers or recruitment agencies or receiving targeted spam. About a month ago I read an interview with a recruitment consultant who said he regularly viewed peoples facebook profile to see what they were 'really' like. This threw me a bit because it means that either this consultant has asked and been accepted as the potential employees friend, or the potential employee has allowed open access to people in the same network/s as them, or the recruiter has some kind of backdoor access to peoples facebook profile.

It is that last option that worries me. If everyone played by the rules then I would have complete faith that I could control my own publicly accessible profile using the privacy settings of each technology, but they often don't. I do not allow people from my network to see my profile, I do not allow strangers see my myspace profile either but does that really count for much?

I am worried that someone is going to develop a tool that will exploit any or all of these networking sites. They are a veritable gold mine for marketers and fraudsters (not that the two are any different) and being able to data mine the information would be priceless as it is constantly getting more and more popular and more and more specific. In the end, if someone were to create a backdoor on these technologies so your information posted to myspace/facebook/ljournal/flikr/amazon/wherever could be correlated and sold I would feel extremely exploited and it gives me an uneasiness using these products now, even though they may never be broken. It is like writing a diary with photograph evidence that you think your grandmother is going to read.

Another reason for concern is how little we know about the internet. What will happen to our defunct facebook profiles when we stop using the sites. Will they really be wiped? I doubt it, there is no need to wipe anything anymore. We will never run out of space and the data is worth something to someone. Does a privacy policy mean anything for a company that has stopped trading? Are pictures of me pilled off my nut going to be indexed on the web somewhere when I am 10years older? Murdoch owns myspace for fucks sake, that is reason enough to cancel my account.

Here is the article that got me thinking about this today - http://news.com.com/At+Rapleaf%2C+your+personals+are+public/2100-1038_3-6205716.html?tag=news.2