Technology may be challenging everything we know about information, safety, and privacy. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not necessarily a good thing. We must remember, technology is never unhinged from the society from which it emerges.
The TSA has implemented full-body scanners at airport security. The new devices give the TSA the ability to see whether or not you're carrying a weapon (and/or you're uncircumcised -- the latter clearly being one of the signs that you may, in fact, be a terrorist.) Should you decide to opt out of the scanners -- from a fear of radiation, from your own modesty, from a general refusal to comply -- you are subjected instead to a full-body pat-down. Horror stories from cancer survivors, menstruating women, distraught toddlers litter the Web.
Homeland Security seized almost 80 websites this past week. TorrentFreak has the story and the full list of targeted sites. While the domain-names of many of these sites seem to indicate they were involved with blatant trademark and copyright infringement, not all were. And none of these sites were found guilty in a court of law. Some of them, including RapGodfathers.com (now available at RapGodfathers.info), say they never hosted files but rather linked to places where rap music and mix-tapes were available. RapGodfathers says that the site always complied with DMCA takedown requests, and had had no indication that it was ever in danger of being shuttered by the Feds.
The Senate Judiciary Committee recently passed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act unanimously -- a piece of legislation that would give the government the right to shut down any website where it deemed a copyright "crime" had occurred. Dropbox? YouTube? Google? Gawker? RapGodfathers? Your blog? Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has since said he'll block the bill from reaching the Senate floor. And while he's being touted as the savior of the Internet for moving to prevent this sort of governmental censorship, it sure appears as though seizure without due process is happening anyway.
On Friday, the Swedish Appeals Court upheld the conviction of three of the BitTorrent tracking site Pirate Bay's founders. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström were sentenced to between 4 to 10 months in prison and will also have to split a 46 million kroner fine.
The website remains online. But one of the entertainment industry lawyers, Monique Wadsted, is quoted in the New York Times as saying "My assessment is that in two years this type of piracy activity will be completely dead."
News broke over the weekend that the FBI had thwarted a bomb plot in Oregon. A 19-year-old Somali-born kid thought he was planning a bomb attack on a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland. He was arrested when he dialed the number on his cellphone that would allegedly detonate a car bomb in the midst of the crowd of 10,000 that had gathered in Pioneer Square. "No one would expect a terrorist attack in Oregon" was the way in which his plan was described in initial accounts. (As someone in Oregon, this is incredibly scary.) Apparently back in August 2009, the teen had sent an email to a group in Pakistan, expressing his interest in traveling to the country to help participate in violent jihad. The group never responded. But the FBI, intercepting the email, did and posing as someone from the terrorist network, monitored -- and guided -- him down the path to yesterday's non-attack, going so far as to build the non-bomb. Thankfully, the FBI was able to rush in, in the nick of time, saving us all from the non-attack, moments before it didn't happen.
The rogue media organization Wikileaks released over 250,000 secret diplomatic documents today. The cables (yes, cables) represent include some of the day-to-day correspondences between the U.S State Department and over 270 of its embassies and consulates. Part political intrigue and part political gossip, the leaked documents give insight into some secret (and some unfavorable and some quite mundane and off-the-cuff) assessments by U.S. government personnel. But some of the cables (um, like telegrams?) lay out plans to spy on UN officials, detail Arab governments' thoughts on Iran (the U.S. should attack), and reveal relationships, assessments and schemes of State Department officials.
Access to the documents by the whistleblower (allegedly Bradley Manning) was made possible by the State Department's intranet, "secure" with access limited to only 2.5 million people so.
I don't mean to conflate these occurrences. Well, only sorta. But as these events have unfolded over the last week or so, I've been struck by all of our struggles -- not just the government's -- to navigate power, technology, surveillance, transparency, and trust.