Smile, you're on video camera...Super-futurist Virginia Postrel offers an interesting thought experiment about the future spread of cameras and omni-veillance in our lives.  The upside potential is vast... providing we remain calmly reasonable about negotiating carve-outs and exceptions. And - above all - if we demand that the light spread "upward" - at least as much as downward.

On the other had... have you ever seen a techno trend that didn't have a deeply lowbrow-crummy side?  Creepy website streaming from thousands of private cameras: Insecam has access to more than 73,000 cameras all around the globe which includes more than 11,000 cameras in the United States, 6500 in Republic of Korea and almost 5000 in China. By streaming the footage… without permission of the owners, Insecam claims it is teaching a simple lesson for folks to change their passwords and do minimal security.  Sure, good advice.  Meanwhile… um… you benefit from advertizing to the voyeurs who flood to your site because other fools tell the world about… oh… oops.  (Send me my cut, by the usual dropbox.)

“After six years and over one billion dollars in development, the FBI has just announced that its new biometric facial recognition software system is finally complete. Meaning that, starting soon, photos of tens of millions of U.S. citizen's faces will be captured by the national system on a daily basis.”  Sound terrifying?  Then chill.  Breathe.  Inhale and exhale. As usual I must point out that there is absolutely nothing you or anyone else will accomplish by whining and railing against this.  If we panic and ban the databases, they will simply go underground. As happened when TIA (Total Information Awareness) fled to the NSA.



 Elites will have them. Elites will see us. Name a counter example across all of the annals of time. But that does not automatically mean Big Brother.

The one and only way to keep this from becoming an Orwellian nightmare is to insist — with ferocious militancy — on our ability to look back at elites.  That is not only possible, it is exactly what gave us the freedom we already have.



A woman in Monterey Calif. is alleged to have intercepted communications, including sensitive law enforcement communications, by means that included “spy software” that the defendant secretly installed on the mobile phone of a police officer. The information also alleges that during the same period she illegally possessed interception devices, namely spy software including Mobistealth, StealthGenie, and mSpy, knowing that the design of those products renders them primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of wire, oral, and electronic communications.  Clearly this is not the same thing as 2013’s milestone civil rights breakthrough declaring an absolute right of citizens to visually record their interactions with police.  I am one of the biggest and earliest proponents of “sousveillance” to look back at authority for purposes of accountability.  But do you think this is within the bounds of reasonable?  Perhaps in that cooked county of movie lore.

On Anonymity, Trolls and Sock Puppets

Privacy/transparency issues involved in GamerGate? It is a horrid thing, with trolls and nasty-boys going after women gamers, protected by encrypted anonymity. 

Will Wheaton comments about the need for methods to strip anonymity from online trolls:  “Anonymous trolls have made the gaming community toxic — especially for women — and upended the industry at a time when the games we play are finally being recognized as the incredible works of art that they can be. While I don’t believe bad actors represent gaming culture’s mainstream, I feel sure they wouldn’t issue rape and death threats, or harass other gamers, if they would be held accountable for their actions.”

Again, my point about The Transparent Society.  It is only pure-anonymity that lets bastards like this operate. (There are versions of pseudonymity that would be win-wins, letting us have all the good-liberating aspects of anonymity, while eliminating the worst; a huge business opportunity, for the right innovators.)

The imbalance of power between trolls/stalkers and their victims is increasingly a topic of concerned discussion.  Again and again, the talk turns to finding ways to shield the IDs of victims… which never works… rather than outing the harrassers, which will inherently work, but  is presently difficult to achieve. See: YouTube and Patreon have allowed harassers to turn their abuse into a paid profession.

​Again.  Accountability is the light that sears most kinds of bad guys, whether they operate in criminality or in high places.