IS PRIVACY AN OBSOLETE WORD?

One of the biggest news stories this month was the “outing” of the PRISM electronic surveillance program run by the National Security Agency in the U.S., which monitors phone, email, and every other electronic means of communication that American citizens use, without the requirement of a court-issued warrant. As with every other unethical action of government these days, PRISM is carried out in the name of the fight against terrorism. The news story broke after it was revealed that Verizon was turning over logs of its customers’ daily calls to the NSA. All of its customers. We’ve since learned that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple and others have been cooperating with PRISM. Company spokespersons have issued various denials, but then the legislation allowing PRISM forbids companies from revealing their participation. So what else are they supposed to say?

And don’t feel complacent if you live in Canada or another country—the whole point of PRISM is to monitor non-U.S. citizens’ interactions with Americans. The moment the data is directed through an Internet server on American soil (and the lion’s share of ’net infrastructure is in the U.S.) it becomes accessible.

Yet, I don’t think PRISM itself was the story—the bigger story is that most Americans aren’t upset about it.

And maybe they shouldn’t be. Maybe privacy as we’ve known it is a concept whose time has passed. Because it’s no longer possible.

Government surveillance of citizens has been a trope in a lot of science fiction. The book most often referenced is George Orwell’s 1984. Have we reached the era of Big Brother watching our every move? Well, Yes, as long as we understand that today’s Big Brother includes more than just government. Every time you use a new app or computer program you commit to an agreement that includes the app owner’s so-called “privacy policy” (What? You don’t read those 25 pages of legalese fine print?) Typically, it says they will only disclose your private information for reasons that will improve your use of their product. Who decides what uses fit that description? They do.

I’m always amused by the term “security camera”. Some modern cities are blanketed by them. Do they make you more secure? Not really. Crime hasn’t ground to a halt. I’ll accept that they help police solve some crimes, but that’s mainly because criminals are often really stupid. In the meantime those cameras capture dozens of images of each non-criminal citizen every day as they go about their lives.

Companies track all of your credit card and debit purchases, of course. And unless you’ve disabled the “location services” feature on your smartphone Google, Apple, and who knows who else can know exactly where you are at any given time.

The key to the Big Brother era is the computing power to bring all of those various bits of data together and correlate it into meaningful information. A few years ago, Target stores famously identified pregnant women because of the vitamin supplements, hand sanitizer, cocoa butter (for stretch marks) and other items they bought. I’m sure they’ve become much better at it since then. With all of the data sources, and the ability to put puzzle pieces together, it’s fair to assume that if you have a secret worth hiding from potential blackmailers, somebody already knows it. Would you rather have it in the hands of organized crime, big multinational corporations, or the government? Tough choice, huh? But if you insist on trying to protect your information, here’s a good article from PC World.

My wife says we need to go live on an island. I’ve tried to tell her about satellite cameras that can read a cigarette package from space, but….

THE CASE FOR SPACE

Years ago I read a book called The Millennial Project by Marshall T. Savage. It was a brilliant, creative, and comprehensive step-by-step plan to colonize space. I’d still recommend it to our elected governments, private interests, and anyone else interested in preserving Life by seeding it beyond the confines of Earth. The book’s offspring, the Millennial Foundation, is still around (although renamed the Living Universe Foundation) but its progress has not been newsworthy and Savage is not even active with it anymore. Nonetheless, the core reasons for colonizing space and other planets remain: 1) The human population is too high—the planet can’t sustain us. 2) Human life, and all earthly life, is just too vulnerable on this single planet. Depending on which scientists you talk to, there have been anywhere from a handful to more than twenty “mass extinction events” in the history of life on Earth. The asteroid QE2 passed within six million kilometers of the Earth last Friday—not especially close, but it was as large as the asteroid that’s thought to have killed the dinosaurs. They’re out there. We should be too, before one of them strikes.

Even though I’m a big Star Trek fan, it’s a near certainty that we won’t to be able to colonize other solar systems in the foreseeable future. We night be able to make Mars more Earth-like and livable, but it will take a century or two (if you’re interested in the idea, you can’t do better than to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars books). We could also make human colonies in large bubbles orbiting the Earth, in hollowed out asteroids (after we’ve mined out their metals), or in domed cities on the Moon. Rather confining, perhaps, but then how many people now live out their lives without ever leaving a city? Maybe the “upside” of urbanization is that we’re creating a generation of potential colonists. Would people be interested in going somewhere untamed and unpredictable to live? Immigrants have been doing it for centuries.

I was really pleased to follow the exploits of Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield aboard the International Space Station recently who, through the clever use of Twitter along with impressive photography skills, musicianship, and pure personality, has done more than any man since Neil Armstrong to make space exploration “cool” again. Maybe it’s time for another big push to get people interested in the idea of living somewhere “out there”. If nothing else, mining the Moon and the asteroids and moving as many people as possible to somewhere else might give our planet its one best chance to heal. And the more people go into space, the more they’ll want to go.

At the very least, they’ll gain a gift that existing astronauts always bring home with them: a unique appreciation of the jewel that is Planet Earth.