The Inevitability of Transparency
March 11 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Government Year: General Rating: 7
The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported that that NSA’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program has been collecting “huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records.” This data is then crunched by “sophisticated software programs [that] analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns.”
Does this come as a surprise to you? It probably shouldn’t.
While such surveillance and analysis may sound a bit creepy, it’s also rather inevitable. After all, many of today’s most useful web services and portals (Google Search, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Google Apps) already aggregate and structure information in a similar, increasingly sophisticated manner, creating little Total Personal Information Awareness (TPIA) systems for individual humans.
If I want to know what a former HS classmate of mine is up to, it’s likely that I can pull up a dossier of information in under 5 minutes just by google searching, checking MySpace and then surfing some links. And if I can do it, anyone else asking the right questions, or with sufficiently advanced semantic & search programs and access to massive computing, can do it too. Which, in turn, means that private companies, large governments and our own security organizations can do it too. And if any one of them decides to go forth and quantify, whether it’s for strategic business or defense purposes, the others are forced to do the same, lest they become vulnerable to player who knows exactly what cards everyone else is holding—this is especially true in market economics.
These seem to be the game rules governing human behavior as related to information.
Terrorism may be cited as the reason for a system like TIA, but it seems more a subset of a macro-dynamic in which the broader system is pushing humans to quantify anything and everything: words (wikipedia), human DNA (national genographic project), all biological structures (drug companies looking for cures), insect behavior (coordination sciences), pictures (Facebook and Flickr), work skills (Linked In), general information (Google), writing styles and thought patterns (blogs, google apps), geographic terrain (Google maps, Google Earth), etc.
So long as individuals can benefit from these systems and continue to do so, all these little bubbles of quantification will overlap and inevitably lead to something like a Total System Information Awareness (TSIA), which incidentally seems to be a core part of Google’s business model. :) It’s very similar to the argument that technological development can’t be stopped if someone somewhere is willing to continue developing technology.
To sum up: the way I see it is that local Total Personal Info Awareness (TPIA) leads to national Total Information Awareness (TIA), and both contribute to a global Total System Info Awareness (TSIA).
What can we do about it? Barring super-effective new information barriers, which would fly in the face of the value generated through network effects, we can either 1) fight against it, 2) purely react to it or 3) seek to craft a balanced flow of information. If the tendency to TSIA is unstoppable, then it may serve us better to increase our TPIA to balance the equation, much as Jamais Cascio argues when referring to the Participatory Panopticon, and thus cancel out Big Brother(s) with a bottom-up Little Brother.
However we decide to go about it, Earth’s information is a force to be reckoned with. Soon we might all be playing with a more or less transparent deck.
