Getting the public to accept "Intelligence Creep" is just a matter of getting the public to accept it in worst case and best case scenarios and then expanding application toward everything in between. Wow! That is a great bottom line that finally gets to the idea that drove this blog entry this morning and caused me to spend the time to get to it because I knew there was a pony somewhere under the pile. Therefore I am going to copy this last paragraph and move it to be the first entry in the blog post.
Karl Denninger is an independent thinker that sometimes hits the obvious nail right on the head with some hard hitting opinion. His opinions however are generally slanted by his view of the world that is just as often driven by his subjective opinions and belief rather than independently forming his observations and conclusions objectively.
His blog is a regular morning stop on my rounds of the web that is made worthwhile by the occasional observation opinions he expresses that does highlight an issue with some revealing light. What is revealed however is not necessarily the specific thing he writes an opinion about and the facts that support it. It is often food for thought.
Karl's comments on Google today are food for thought. First, Google's unrestricted use of everything submitted to Google. That meaning unrestricted data mining of all submitted content. In the case cited by Karl it is child porn. He said that in his prior data business if he happened to run across it in a customer account he would report it. He would not however design a program to find it. That is what Google did. Google can data mine anything and write methods to target whatever it desires.
Child trafficking and porn are two good targets. Like terrorism, the end justifies the means and everyone agrees they are sufficiently abhorrent to justify extreme measures like torture. Any method to identify terrorists or those that deal in child trafficking and porn are fair and acceptable. That level of public agreement to surveillance methods to detect them begs the question: What are the limits of acceptable use of such methods as a rule, where do they become methods that are not the rule but based on exception? In accordance with what Google can data mine the controlling language is so broad that the answer is there are no exceptions.
Managing public opinion to accept surveillance is easy when abhorrent targets are chosen or targets of great common good, like easing traffic congestion on the way to work to find the fastest route by monitoring person cell phone time and place movement are chosen. "Enhancing the customer shopping experience" is also another good reason.
Worst case scenario application of government surveillance techniques establish means and methods that can be applied to any situation and in mild non criminal targets become matters of "Business Intelligence". Business Intelligence becomes of concern to government when in the course of Business Intelligence that sifts and sorts data of any nature identifies information that involves criminal activity. Activity that may in fact be required to be reported by law not only by virtue that it exists in a business data base record and found by "accident" in the course of normal business and reported as Karl would have done in his business but required to be looked for and reported by law.
"Intelligence Creep" might be a good term for the expansion of intelligence as an organic entity that is always looking for greater application like "Military Mission Creep" The military obviously is the only one that can practice that kind of creep until more recent times when the division between other government agencies as well as the businesses that are directly involved in the government military/industrial complex are less clear than the difference between who wears a uniform and who does not. In the business world it is not called "Intelligence Creep" it is called "Project Creep" and when the project is "Business Intelligence" which is big business, then private enterprise is going down the same road of expanding surveillance as government application. The intent to "know your market" is the same. Know everything about your market all the time. It is a simply step to make "Knowing" certain things in private enterprise mandatory when the knowledge is of criminal activity that must be actively sought and reported to the government.
A broader term "Techno Creep" enables "Intelligence Creep" and encompasses both devices as well as the data they gather analogous to the Internet of things and the World Wide Web of information that the device system enables. I discussed that in a recent prior blog entry. We "Enter the Age of Creep". The age of Industrial Creep was obvious in the last century when advancement in cars planes and all the wonders of technology were generally apparent in the things that they produced. Technology now produces things that are conceptual information objects not easily seen nor self proclaiming there visual advancement like cars and planes. Relatively, information objects are changing much faster than the major physical objects of our society changed in the last century. We just do not see it. We have to comprehend it by knowing it. Knowing is not as easy as seeing. What we don't know can hurt us. Intelligence Information asymmetry is going to hurt us greatly and benefit greatly the 1% that know and understand it and use it to their self serving advantage. It is a new 1%. Not those that have money but those that have information. Money and information go hand in hand.
Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy,
No comments:
Post a Comment