Blog for One

The following is the poll currently on cfcf.ca

Are you in favour of increased surveillance measures to protect against terrorism? (emphasis mine)

Current results:
yes 88.27%
no 11.73%

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This is a great example of media manipulation. I think the results would have skewed very differently if the question was simply “Are you in favour of increased surveillance measures?”

Nowhere in the news piece were we told exactly how this would make us safer. In fact, by its very nature surveillance is a passive activity. Great for recontructing things after the fact. Even in London, cameras were very useful in identifiying the terrorists and yet completely useless in stopping them.

This is not security, this is a warm blanket of illusion so people feel safer and gladly give up essential liberties.

With the technology available today, it is conceivable that everything gets recorded and digitized. And stored.

Once it gets stored, it’s not going away. Ever.

Eventually, technology will evolve to the point where the video streams will be scanned, and every person in the video stream is recognized and identified by computer. With storage getting cheaper and processors getting faster and cheaper, it is only a matter of time before the software catches up. Once it does, the enormous body of stored data can be rescanned and sifted for information. Add to this the ability to track people via their cell-phones and you get a very complete record of someone’s life.

How will we get there? One law at a time.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

A thought provoking article by Paul Graham on how things get into the newspapers.

“Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he’s writing about this subject at all.”

A must read.

According to this article on ZDNET

(http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/0,2000061791,39187965,00.htm)

Of course, these are well informed opinions, as we can see from the article…

“…However, more than one-third of respondents had never heard of blogs before participating in the survey, and only around 30 percent of participants had actually visited a blog themselves.”

What do you think?