Big Brother & Big Data

[alice wellintown]

Big article, but worth it, I say.


On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 9:19 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Big Data and the Deep Web? Bleeding Edge foretelling?
>
>   *From:* alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2013 7:40 AM
> *Subject:* Big Brother & Big Data
>
>  BIG DATA OR BIG BROTHER?
> States will need to help protect their citizens and their markets from new
> vulnerabilities caused by big data. But there is another potential dark
> side: big data could become Big Brother. In all countries, but particularly
> in nondemocratic ones, big data exacerbates the existing asymmetry of power
> between the state and the people.
> The asymmetry could well become so great that it leads to big-data
> authoritarianism, a possibility vividly imagined in science-fiction movies
> such as *Minority Report*. That 2002 film took place in a near-future
> dystopia in which the character played by Tom Cruise headed a “Precrime”
> police unit that relied on clairvoyants whose visions identified people who
> were about to commit crimes. The plot revolves around the system’s obvious
> potential for error and, worse yet, its denial of free will.
> Although the idea of identifying potential wrongdoers before they have
> committed a crime seems fanciful, big data has allowed some authorities to
> take it seriously. In 2007, the Department of Homeland Security launched a
> research project called FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology), aimed
> at identifying potential terrorists by analyzing data about individuals’
> vital signs, body language, and other physiological patterns. Police forces
> in many cities, including Los Angeles, Memphis, Richmond, and Santa Cruz,
> have adopted “predictive policing” software, which analyzes data on
> previous crimes to identify where and when the next ones might be committed.
> For the moment, these systems do not identify specific individuals as
> suspects. But that is the direction in which things seem to be heading.
> Perhaps such systems would identify which young people are most likely to
> shoplift.
>
> http://www.foreignaffairs.com/
>
>
>
>
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