Wednesday, May 21, 2014

WiredUK: Espionage in a post-privacy society

"We will soon have to live in a world with no such thing as privacy and no such thing as secrecy, says Richard Aldrich, speaking at PINC 15 in Amsterdam. "We will be living in a transparent society, it will be a bit like living in a nudist colony."
We're used to the idea that secret intelligence agencies spy on us, but over the last ten years the big intelligence gatherers have become airlines, banks, internet providers and Tesco -- all of which have more information about us than GCHQ and the NSA put together.

"These organisations are becoming cleverer and cleverer. Cleverer than the CIA; cleverer than the KGB."...

Citizens too though are increasingly becoming intelligence gatherers. By studying the reaction of the blogosphere to the Boston Marathon bombings -- which led to a mob forming outside the house of someone wrongly identified as the bomber from crowdsourced photos posted on Reddit-- we can understand how dangerous this can be. "Espionage is even scarier when it's controlled by you guys," Aldrich tells the audience. (read more)

5 comments:

Shouting Thomas said...

That pic is kinda dirty, if you get my drift.

I'm a retired Old Dawg. If you spy on me, you will probably catch me taking a nap.

Used to have to go sit on the toilet to take a nap when I worked in an office. Very uncomfortable.

Now, I just go to the couch or my bed.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

This will be a good test of the theory that our brains are the brains of hunter/gatherers who lived in bands of 20 to 100 individuals.

My guess is there wasn't a whole lot of privacy going on in those days, either.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The war on the one percent breeds less privacy also.

Known Unknown said...

This blog would probably do better if it had some sort of semblance of design. Fonts and type sizes are all over the place. Makes it difficult to read.

edutcher said...

A lot of the "intelligence gathering" is done by people answering questionnaires or filling out feedback forms, often in search of a freebie.

Not necessarily the same thing