Failure of the Watchers?

When personal information continues to aggregate at blinding speeds in the hands of our government, sentient people ask, what is privacy and why should it be valued? Transparency is the manifesto for those on the cluetrain, and many are espousing that privacy is only for criminals. Truly valuable men and women have nothing to hide and therefore freely give away privacy to anyone?

This is fine if you trust the content holders. Google with it's massive usership continues to uphold high whuffie ratings and is considered "trusted" at this point. Microsoft is not. Apple is for now.

This news item about corruption and mismanagement of information technology reminds me of the intrinsic weakness of government systems: all are weak.

"..the District may be unable to reliably answer the most important security questions: which servers were found, how many laptops were connected to them, what was the chain of custody and who had access to them."

Healthy information boundaries should be well thought out, tested, implemented, and reconfigured in today's citizen governemnt democracies.

"My Own Kind of Freedom" Fanfiction

The Future of Color

Soon metal may never require paint. Researchers are now testing high output laser abrasions that refract light to a controllable color. Black or blue gold, aluminum, even multi color. The article suggests one could have their family laser etched on to the hood of the car at the factory. Never requiring paint, polish, or maintenance.

This is good for our environment. While the power requirements are likely energy intensive, diminishing all those toxic paint chemicals would be nice. full story

via shawnblog

Manned Cloud

Manned Cloud is a flying hotel proposed by French designer Jean-Marie Massaud

via Futurismic

FBI Criminal Fingerprint Database Merges with Biometric Public Database?

"This had started out being a program to track or identify criminals," he said. "Now we're talking about large swaths of the population -- workers, volunteers in youth programs. Eventually, it's going to be everybody."

Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project

Obviously updating our technology is an imperative. However the power of that new technology questions: are lawful citizens safe, afforded their rights, and have reasonable privacy? Who pays when "mistakes are made"?

Who watches the watchers?

Also, what type of unfair advantages or imbalance of power would be created if democratic nations where far more sensitive to individual rights resulting in more privacy for citizens and extreme aggregation of information in their repressive government counter parts?