The Age of Technological Transparency 173
endychavez writes "Executives and politicians may be starting to realize that privacy is dead and secrets can no longer be kept in the information age. There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive. Just ask Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley. In a piece at eWeek, Ed Cone from CIO Insight talks about the specific technologies that brought them down." From the article: "Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival. We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun's blogging CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak more directly to stakeholders. But transparency needs to be understood as more than a slogan or a strategy. It's a reality. It can be imposed on you by the Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not."
Privacy is a myth (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Privacy is a myth (Score:4, Informative)
The Bill of Rights is explicitly written to define government invasions of privacy illegal (mainly in the Fourth Amendment).
It says nothing about being "used against you in court." This is merely the means courts employ to limit, in practice, the abuse of such illegally collected information. Nonetheless, it is the unreasonable search and seizure itself which is Constitutionally forbidden.
I believe it is more complicated than you make it. (Score:5, Informative)
It starts off:
"The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information. In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain rights" in the Bill of Rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." The meaning of......"
Re:Privacy is a myth (Score:3, Informative)
And no one is concerned? (Score:3, Informative)
You ever piss off a pscyhopathic computer geek and you're screwed.
You'll turn on your computer one day to find illicit files all over the hard drive with timestamps ranging back through history. It'll look like you've been collecting whatever it is for months.
Or hell, someone doesn't like you, they forge their log files on their computer and claim you were sending nasty IM stuff, when the authorities don't see the matching logs on your computer, they will just assume that you cleared them out to protect yourself.
Yup, those timestamps are obviously immutable written in stone and never lie.
Re:Privacy is a myth (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, that's been rendered effectively null by a vigorous reading of the Commerce Clause, "The Congress shall have Power
Just about everything has been crammed into that. The original civil rights laws were justified on the idea that merchants have to sell you stuff no matter what your race because you might be from out of state (Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States et al. (1964)). California's in-state medical marijuana laws were overturned because legal marijuana, even in-state, affects the flow of marijuana elsewhere (marijuana being a fungible commodity).
So you can pretty much stick a fork in the idea that the 10th Amendment reserves you any rights that Congress can't take away. There are other places where you might derive a right to privacy (say, Amendment IV, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"), but Amendment X won't help.
Re:Privacy is a myth (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly, it was proved once again when Military Commissions Act 2006 [zmag.org] was passed: rollback habeas corpus, use torture, and provide immunity for US officials from torture prosecution.
Recommendation: Deniable Encryption (Score:5, Informative)