skzbrust

When Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman both say to sign it, I’m inclined to sign it, so I did.

Originally published at Words Words Words. Please leave any comments there.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/my_reaction_to.html

Schmidt said:

I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

This, from 2006, is my response:

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

[...]

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

[...]

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

robin_d_laws

Whenever you find yourself lf stuck in a place running a continual news-loop with inescapably loud audio, the Esoterrorists put it it there, as an emitter of low-grade cognitive dissonance. They particularly target airports, where their installations play to a captive audience of the already anxious. Their client entities derive particular nourishment from those involuntarily exposed to the stock market segment. The mix of fear—of lost opportunities, of nosediving portfolios—combined with greed is greasy with psychic resonance. Since the economic downturn the yields have grown even stronger. Even those most knowledgeable about the financial world, once inured to this material by familiarity, are now prone to radiate rich waves of subconscious distress.

Airports in general provide a wider a playground for certain discreet entities of the Outer Dark. Old fashioned fear of flying admixes with new-century terrorism dread. Though not as strong as it was earlier in the decade, the latter still exerts a nourishing pull. Xenophobia provides its own heady psychic outflow. In airports people are forced to travel with others whose clothing, speech and appearance marks them as other.

Disguised Outer Dark Entities sometimes board planes, but the limited range of action while on an airliner proves isn't always an ultrademon's cup of tea. They prefer to lurk in the terminals themselves. Some of them mill about as eternal travelers who never depart. Others assume the forms of ticket agents, baggage handlers, and duty-free clerks. Where most airport employees adopt the glassy-eyed affect of the travel-weary patrons they service, ODEs can be recognized by the hunger in their eyes.

They must act with caution, as the Ordo Veritatis uses the international air system to shuttle its agents from case to case. The loosely affiliated bands of supernatural predators haunting the world's airports attend to the security flags that precede the arrival of OV agents. They spread the word, and know where to hide.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/emotional_epide.html

This, from The New England Journal of Medicine, sounds familiar:

This is the story line for most headline-grabbing illnesses — HIV, Ebola virus, SARS, typhoid. These diseases capture our imagination and ignite our fears in ways that more prosaic illnesses do not. These dramatic stakes lend themselves quite naturally to thriller books and movies; Dustin Hoffman hasn't starred in any blockbusters about emphysema or dysentery.

When the inoculum of dramatic illness is first introduced into society, the public psyche rapidly becomes infected. Almost like an IgE-mediated histamine release, there is an immediate flooding of fear, even if the illness — like Ebola — is infinitely less likely to cause death than, say, a run-in with the Second Avenue bus. This immediate fear of the unknown was what had all my patients demanding the as-yet-unproduced H1N1 vaccine last spring.

As the novel disease establishes itself within society, a certain amount of emotional tolerance is created. H1N1 infection waxed and waned over the summer, and my patients grew less anxious. There was, of course, no medical basis for this decreased vigilance. Unusual risk groups and atypical seasonality should, in fact, have raised concern. By late summer, the perceived mysteriousness of H1N1 had receded, and the number of messages on my clinic phone followed suit.

But emotional epidemiology does not remain static. As autumn rolled around, I sensed a peeved expectation from my patients that this swine flu problem should have been solved already. The fact that it wasn't "solved," that the medical profession seemed somehow to be dithering, created an uneasy void. Not knowing whether to succumb to panic or to indifference, patients instead grew suspicious.

princeofcairo

As an example, [Senator Stuart] Symington once formally requested a report from military sources regarding the possible existence of subterranean superhumans, which one of his constituents had become concerned about after reading a fiction book and mistaking it for non-fiction. [Or so THEY say. -- kah] This and Symington's other senatorial correspondence and papers were donated to the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection (on the University of Missouri campus) in 2002 and are now available to the general public.

But Forrestal, not Truman, was the doomed man. His relationship with Symington went from bad to worse. For reasons still unclear, Symington embarked, in the words of one author, "upon a kind of personal guerilla warfare" against the Secretary of Defense. ... Friends commented on [Forrestal's] growing paranoia. He was convinced that "foreign-looking men" were following him, and that Symington was spying on him. ... Forrestal finally left office in a formal ceremony on March 28th, his last public appearance.

What followed after the ceremony remains mysterious. "There is something I would like to talk to you about," Symington told Forrestal, and accompanied him privately during the ride back to the Pentagon. What Symington said is not known, but Forrestal emerged from the ride deeply upset, even traumatized, upon arrival at his office. Friends of Forrestal implied that Symington said something that "shattered Forrestal’s last remaining defenses." When someone entered Forrestal’s office several hours later, the former Secretary of Defense did not notice. Instead, he sat rigidly at his desk, staring at the bare wall, incoherent, repeating the sentence, "you are a loyal fellow," for several hours.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/forbeckcom/~3/hTti2jL8MeA/

http://www.forbeck.com/2009/12/08/twitter-updates-for-2009-12-08/

• Everyone made it off to school and work today! It's the first time I've had the house to myself in two weeks. Time to work! #


• Twittered too soon. Pat threw up in the lunch room, then twice more on the car ride home. Got home and had to turn back to get Ken too. #


• Those who say a computer game can't make you cry haven't seen a kid lose a puffle in Club Penguin. #

muppetaphrodite

• 10:41 Someone should make traditional headphones that work well with glasses. Earbuds are too big for my ears, but over-ear phones hurt. Blerg.
• 11:04 There are two places I can store files & work. 1) File share -- out of space. 2) Sharepoint -- down. I try to get work done, I really do...
• 13:14 Dear TweetDeck: Don't change my account selections without telling me when I select the RT action, k? *grumble* #crappyUX
• 16:13 I think that I've either updated or designed from scratch at least 100 screens in the past 2 days, and looked at others too. *head asplode*
• 17:50 Being at Papa John's this evening in the Seattle area is not unlike being at Mission Control, I think. They are snowed under with orders!
• 17:51 The dough guy here in Redmond's Papa John's says it hasn't let up since 9:30, and at lunch people waited up to 3 hours!!