Whatever your nationality or partisan leanings, there are several groups of highly important IT-related issues that your technologically challenged political leaders are at risk of botching. Those issues include the following:
-- Privacy and liberty, especially in developed countries, but even more so in certain less-developed nations.
-- Economic development, especially in developing countries.
-- Education, in developed and developing countries alike.
Space permits me to address only the first of these issues in this column.
There's been a lot of news coverage recently about the Chinese government's efforts to censor the Internet and U.S. companies' collaboration in these efforts. And China isn't the only such country; for example, several Arab countries have long had national Web censorware. Indeed, rulers know that few things undermine repressive governments as much as access to outside media. Western TV famously showed Eastern Europeans that their governments' propaganda was false. A few years earlier, smuggled cassette tapes of the Ayatollah Khomeini's speeches helped foment revolution against the Shah of Iran.
And so the Chinese government's massive effort to control public access to the Internet can be rather straightforwardly understood.
In the West, however, it appears that the mechanisms of repression are falling into place almost by accident. There are few cases yet of technology being deployed to actually curb anyone's freedoms, and there is perhaps no single country where the laws are a major threat -- yet. But if you connect the dots on the scariest bits of legislation and public practice in each of several countries, a worrisome picture emerges.
In the U.S., for example, the government asserts that it can data-mine almost whatever it wants looking for patterns. It doesn't matter if an individual police officer can't tap one phone call; what's forbidden case by case is supposedly allowed in the aggregate.
Meanwhile, for security reasons in the U.S. and antipiracy reasons in Europe, there are a variety of rules requiring service providers to keep records of Internet and other telecommunications activity.
In Europe, antipiracy legislation is even trying to make it illegal to disguise the IP address that you're logging on from. And the use of this kind of information is more than theory -- in the U.S., the Web-searching activity of people accused of crimes has been submitted to courts as proof of criminal intent.
And it's not just communications themselves; transactional activity is tracked even more heavily. Consumer credit bureaus record and sell 1,000 columns or so of data on individuals. Almost all of your purchases (i.e., the ones made online and/or by credit card) are matters of record. Even automobile movements are traced in more and more locales, photographically and/or via electronic toll payments.
The rise of two-factor authentication will make this trend even more pronounced, as identification documents take on electronic characteristics. National ID cards are being suggested in many countries, for health care if nothing else. Passports are also being equipped with RFID and/or biometric technologies.
In short, almost every detail of your life can, at least in theory, be technologically captured by the government, if not now, then in the near future. And that's even after we account for the normal snafus of technological progress.
What, then, are the public policy choices? Here are a few:
-- Do nothing.
-- Maintain sharp limitations on government acquisition and retention of information.
-- Mandate that the government keep its information in separate silos.
-- Create strong rules about how governments can use information after it is acquired.
-- Hamstring corporate acquisition, retention or use of information. (Much of the government's potential data comes through private channels.)
-- Various combinations of the above.
I have developed my own views on these points, and you can find them, along with a lot of links to related news, at www.monashreport.com/category/public-policy-and-privacy/.
You are also heartily invited to comment and debate there. But even more important, I encourage you to develop your own views on these issues and then share them widely. These matters are too important to be left to the technologically clueless.
Curt A. Monash is a consultant in Acton, Mass. You can reach him at curtmonash@monash.com.