Farmer and Mann's Surveillance Nation from an MIT Technology Review May 2003

The two-part Surveillance Nation by Dan Farmer and Charles Mann was an interesting look at the new and budding technology that is beginning to come into fruition and threaten our personal privacy. Granted the article was written in 2003 and the technology in the last five years has probably advanced even farther it was fun to read about some of the things that I already did not know about. The article starts out speaking about the traffic cameras and other technology that analyzes car data while driving. They transition into RFIDS, databases, GPS, and surveillance cameras. The constant theme they speak upon is where this data goes and who is actually watching and recording it. Farmer and Mann speak mostly about how the government and big business are the ones using these technologies, but part two starts about speaking about how personal surveillance systems for homes has increased by a factor of ten over the last couple years. This means more and more people in their home environment are protecting themselves with cameras. The article ends speaking about how both surveillance technologies can do both a lot of good and harm depending on whose using it and for what.

Part two of the article spoke about the new Malaysian smart card chips that contained all your personal information on a chip on your ID. I thought this was a very smart and easy way to keep all your personal information together, but there are some risks to it. If your ID is taken criminals can now know all your personal information including credit card information as well as heath records. A person’s entire life can essentially be read from this chip. It does come in handy though having all personal information in one spot, but the security risk does not make it practical. Technology is forever changing and new and safer ways to share information is constantly evolving.

I’ve said it before but there is no right to privacy specifically stated in the Constitution, it is just a combination of a couple of amendments that the courts have read as a “zone of privacy.” With technology constantly evolving and privacy slowly being invaded by cameras and other things, it will be interesting to see how the government or courts interpret what is invasion of privacy in the future.