See-Through Society :: essays research papers

IntroductionGovernments like to think theyre in control. Especially in times of crisis, they try hard to portray an fig of being one step ahead of their enemies, wanting us to think they are able to take decisive action that will solve problems one time and for all. Since 9/11 in bumpicular, western governments have reasserted their commitment to monitoring the movements, conversations and keystrokes of anyone they suspect of posing a threat to national security. One of the most lavishly profile examples of this has been the US Governments proposed Total (later renamed Terrorism) Information Awareness (TIA) scheme caused by DARPA . Ambitious in scope, one of projects stated aims is to create a counter-terrorism information system that increases information coverage by an order of magnitude.The TIA project quickly sparked controversy and it didnt take long for a response to the idea. Government Information Awareness (GIA) is a website that allows anyone to post and retrieve info rmation about members of the executive, legislature, judiciary and senior executives from US companies . Set up by a group at MITs Media Lab, it plays the numbers game, believing that millions of eyes can outperform the efforts and resources of a few thousand experts. Their stated goal is to, civilise a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government.This short paper argues that GIA is part of a wider dynamic, towards enforced transparency of institutions that have traditionally held positions of control. It focuses not so much on the information gathering activities of traditional institutions such as governments, jurisprudence enforcement agencies or multinational companies but instead on the activities of non-institutional actors such as NGOs, activist networks and individual members of the public. It doesnt focus on privacy (that important depicted object is left to other c ontributors to the Foresight exercise), but instead on openness.Back to the hackersTo look forward, it is often useful to look back and when it comes to thinking about the next of the internet it is especially instructive to look back to its origins. Despite its military funding and early applications, the internet wasnt really created with military objectives in mind. kinda it was created by hackers not the stereotyped teenagers bringing down the Pentagons computer system from their darkened bedrooms, but clever programmers for whom a hack is just a neat programming trick.