Authors: Thomas P. Keenan
Imagine, for one second, theÂ
ultimate
 bliss. Ecstasy + that first kiss + the climax of your favorite song + winning the lottery + your best orgasm ever  * 1,000,000,000. Pleasure so fantastic that is almost hurts. What if you could experience that 24/7 and never get bored with it?
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If the brain can be stimulated to heights of pleasure, can the reverse also happen? Since there is a dark side to every technology, interfering with the brain could be used for many nefarious purposes by torturers and other evil-doers.
In fact, government-sanctioned use of this type of brain manipulation is being discussed as a way to make those who commit particularly heinous crimes suffer for longer than is currently possible.
Writing on her blog, French philosopher Rebecca Roche mused that there are drugs that are known to alter our perception of the passing of time. Perhaps one could be used to trick the mind of a prisoner into thinking that he was serving, say, a 1,000-year sentence. The same technology could be used by repressive regimes as a form of hideous torture.
Roche even suggests that the day may come when we can upload a prisoner's mind into a computer, and alter the mental cycle rate. “Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals' lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.” She goes on to suggest that “the eight-and-a-half hour 1,000-year sentence could be followed by a few hours (or, from the point of view of the criminal, several hundred years) of treatment and rehabilitation.”
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So that vicious serial killer or hardened terrorist could be home in time for supper.
Time, it appears, is truly in the mind of the beholder.
About a decade ago, I first heard the term “beware of time traveling robots from the future” from privacy advocate Brad Templeton, who's done great work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Singularity University. At the time, I didn't appreciate just how truly prescient it was.
As the cost of data storage has plummeted, it is cheaper and more convenient for most companies, and even individuals, to simply keep data around. Think about the last time you got a new computer. Chances are you “migrated” much if not all of the hard disk contents to a new, larger device, “just in case.” It was easier than having to think about what to keep and what to throw away.
It is true that many companies have data retention polices and discard certain physical and electronic records on a scheduled basis. This certainly applies to financial files which have a retention period defined by tax authorities. The controversial “telephone metadata” files amassed by the NSA are supposed to be destroyed after five years, though the agency tried to fight that in court.
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In some businesses, such as the brokerage industry, there are also rules on the retention of emails and chat logs to allow for investigation of possible insider trading.
Companies can also set voluntary data retention policies, and the good ones will share them with you. Google, for example, keeps your Web History indefinitely unless you have that feature disabled, in which case they are partially anonymized after 18 months. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, “Note that disabling Web History in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. It also does not change the fact that any information gathered and stored by Google could be sought by law enforcement.”
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Most data falls into a gray area when it comes to retention. Your Word documents, your PowerPoint presentations, your blog postings, and those emails that you wrote and decided not to send fall outside of any formal policy.
When it comes to cloud storage, data is often automatically backed up on remote computers, possibly even in another country. Because of the far-reaching powers of the USA PATRIOT Act, there are Canadian organizations, including the Government of British Columbia, that forbid the storage of certain records outside of the province.
Sometimes, people are very glad that records are kept around. A Hamilton, Ontario resident lost a winning lottery ticket and was tracked down by officials of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Commission (OLG) who handed her the $50 million prize
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How did they find her? It turns out the OLG used a combination of credit card records and video surveillance footage from the drug store where she made the purchase.
OLG officials were reluctant to share their exact methodology with me for validating claims. They did, after all, receive 435 “inquiries” from people who were sure they had this winning ticket but lost it in the washing machine or in their dog's belly.
The OLG did tell me this much: it helped that there was only a single winning ticket, and they knew it was sold Cambridge, Ontario on November 30, 2012. In addition to credit card records, they used interviews and video footage. They would not comment on how long stores like Shoppers Drug Mart retain their surveillance videos, but, given the timing in this case, it seems pretty likely that it's for a lot longer than thirty days.
In fact, with storage media becoming so inexpensive, it may well cost more in effort to delete digital videos than to leave them around indefinitely. In a 2007 report, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, recommended that video surveillance images in public places such as parks that have not been requested by law enforcement should be “routinely erased according to a standard schedule (normally between 48 and 72 hours).”
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The Internet's omnivorous storage capacity has made it a place where time can stand still, and even run backwards.
It's hard to imagine people getting nostalgic about the “olden days” of a technology such as the Internet that has only been around for a few decades. Yet people do wax poetic about “the classic Facebook” and even chat rooms like California's famous “Whole Earth âLectronic Link” (THE WELL) which began in the 1980s as a dial-up bulletin board system.
On the WELL, people freely discussed hacking, The Grateful Dead, drugs, and virtual communities. It was co-founded by Stewart Brand whose “Whole Earth” catalogs kept city-bound 1960s hippies dreaming of becoming sheep farmers in New Zealand.
Anyone with Internet nostalgia can satisfy their longing by using the Wayback Machine (
www.archive.org
) to see what things were really like back then. You are likely to find your own or your employer's website from the 1990s and will probably grimace at what you see.
In a search to find some of the oldest discussion group posts, I trawled through USENET postings, an early platform used around the world. Consider this commentary from 1981 about the movie
Clash of the Titans
from the science fiction fan board.
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Date: 17 Jun 1981 10:40:32-EDT
From: cjh at CCA-UNIX (Chip Hitchcock)
Subject: bad actors in CotT (CLoT?)
I'm curious about your statement that the actress(?) playing Andromeda was so bad they had to hire a stand-in for the bath scene.
Certainly her proportions were extreme enough to satisfy most people; was it that she refused to do a nude scene (which I find thoroughly unlikely for an unknown in present-day filmmaking)? And do you think that one mark of a good actress is willingness to “strip for the camera?”
Chip's ancient remark, thought it now seems rather sexist, shouldn't be too embarrassing to him. It certainly pales in front of some of the things public figures have said and done online. Hardly a week goes by without some politician having to apologize for a hasty tweet or ill-considered email. The smart ones are now letting their assistants run their accounts.
More and more conversations are being archived, whether you know it or not. Google's “chat” feature can easily be set up to capture both sides of your conversation and send it to Gmail. Any informal online exchange you had with somebody might be hauled out a few years from now to your detriment. Even taking your chat “off the record” is not enough, warns Google, since “if you're talking to someone who is connected to the network with a desktop chat client, it's possible that his or her software is keeping a separate copy of the chat history.”
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Believe it or not, there was a time when you could take back an ill-considered email. In the 1980s, on internal corporate email systems like IBM's PROFs, messages sat on a computer disk until a recipient accessed it. If the mail was sent, but had not yet been read by the recipient, you could hit an “unsend” button and it was simply deleted from their inbox.
Many careers and relationships were probably saved by this feature.
Lt. Col. Oliver North and President Ronald Reagan probably wished they had an “unsend” button for some of their emails from the 1980s. Their exchanges came back to haunt them in the Iran-Contra Affair. Bill Gates also suffered from pesky email persistence. A January 5, 1996 electronic memo from him was introduced as Âevidence in Microsoft's antitrust trial.
Now, of course, your email instantly travels out of your control to various places on the Internet. The closest we have to an unsend button is the optional Google Labs “Undo Send” feature that gives you a precious few seconds of leeway to reconsider.
As a result of the revelations from Chelsea Manning in 2010 and Edward Snowden in 2013, we now also have incontrovertible evidence that we are indeed being watched electronically by our governments.
Despite NSA Director Keith Alexander's flag waving denials, which I witnessed firsthand at the Black Hat 2013 conference in Las Vegas, the evidence for abuses keeps getting more damning.
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If the U.S. government wants information on you in digital form, they can almost certainly get it.
There's a real danger that the Manning and Snowden revelations may lead to the worst of two evilsâa diminution in our national security coupled with the further erosion of our privacy as the people behind these programs find even sneakier ways to extract information.
In a 2013 policy paper I did for the Ottawa-based Strategic Studies Working Group, I carried out a fuller analysis of this challenge and made some recommendations for improving our information security landscape.
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They included:
None of these can address the fundamental question of just how much, if at all, our governments should be spying on us. That is a political and social question that has to be answered outside this domain. However, once we have some social consensus on that fundamental issue, these recommendations can help in their effective implementation and possibly improve transparency.
Still, “I'm from the government and I'm here to help you” strikes fear into many hearts. Governments have special rights to collect data on many aspects of our lives. Now, it turns out, they are falling over each other to sell this data or even give it away to anyone who's interested.
Governments around the world, including the US, the UK, Canada, India, and even little Slovenia are all urging citizens to do their business with their government in an online fashion. Advantages may Âinclude faster turnaround, greater accuracy, and freeing up government workers for the cases that truly need human attention, while others are handled by technology. In the course of doing this, governments automatically acquire a great deal of data.
In a
New York Times
piece, Brett Goldstein, former chief data and information officer for the city of Chicago, lays out a host of advantages to opening up government data vaults.
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He notes that in San Francisco, sensors detect vacant parking spots and direct you to them, while adjusting parking rates in real time based on demand. Goldstein also describes how “speed limits can be algorithmically adjusted based on current road and traffic conditions to optimize for safe and efficient travel.”
At an Open Data Summit in Montpelier, VT, “an employee from the (State) Agency of Agriculture alluded to the âpolitical cost' of pursuing open data, noting, for example, that some Vermonters balk at the idea of farm information being posted online.”
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It's always been poor form to ask a farmer how many acres he owns or a rancher how many head of cattle he runs, but now the curious may be able to make such queries electronically and anonymously.
New York City was a pioneer in the Open Data arena. In October 2009, with considerable fanfare, they released a number of municipal data sets. The next day, they had to take one down because it contained private email addresses as well as secret questions and Âanswers. Despite their fast corrective action, once a dataset is exposed, even for a day, it is impossible to get it back. In the absence of specific logging and tracking procedures, it is often impossible to know precisely who has accessed or copied the information.
Government databases that contain personal information are particularly sensitive. One of the most interesting is the one containing the legally-required disclosure of political campaign contributions.