See-Through Society :: essays research papers

IntroductionGovernments like to conceptualise theyre in control. Especially in times of crisis, they try hard to portray an moving-picture show of being one step ahead of their enemies, wanting us to think they are able to take decisive action that will shape problems once and for all. Since 9/11 in pickicular, western governments have reasserted their commission to monitoring the movements, conversations and keystrokes of anyone they suspect of posing a threat to national security. peerless of the most high profile examples of this has been the US Governments proposed do (later renamed Terrorism) learning Awareness (TIA) scheme created by DARPA . Ambitious in scope, one of projects stated aims is to create a counter-terrorism learning system that increases information coverage by an order of magnitude.The TIA project quickly sparked enmity 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 information about members of the executive, legislature, judicial system and senior executives from US companies . Set up by a theme at MITs Media Lab, it plays the numbers game, believing that millions of eyes can transcend the efforts and resources of a few thousand experts. Their stated goal is to, develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency gathering, sorting, and performing 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(prenominal) as governments, law enforcement agencies or multinational companies entirely kinda 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 topic is left to other contributors to the Foresight exercise), but instead on openness.Back to the hackersTo visit forward, it is often useful to look plunk for and when it comes to thinking about the future 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. Instead it was created by hackers not the class teenagers bringing down the Pentagons computer system from their darkened bedrooms, but clever programmers for whom a hack is just a neat schedule trick.