Scroogled
posted by Frank Pasquale
If you want to know why co-blogger Dan Solove’s most recent article on privacy is the third most-downloaded paper of all time on SSRN, look no further than Cory Doctorow’s fiction piece Scroogled in this month’s Radar Magazine. Extrapolating from contemporary trends, Doctorow imagines a Google tightly integrated with DHS and quite willing to use its control of personal information to influence politics (just like the National Association of Broadcasters has struck fear into the hearts of members of Congress).
Doctorow offers some explosive comparisons, such as “The Stasi put everything about you in a file. Whether they meant to or not, what Google did is no different.” I’m sure all manner of corporate and government officials would strongly deny such a claim, and right now I’m pretty sure they’re right. But the real question for the future is whether we have a method of “watching the watchers” that tests the validity of such assurances. As Ronald Reagan said: “Trust, but verify.”
Doctorow’s dark vision reminds me of James Boyle’s classic work on the politics of IP:
Sadly for academics, the best social theorists of the information age are still science fiction writers and, in particular, cyberpunks — the originators of the phrase “cyberspace” and the premier fantasists of the Net. If one wants to understand the information age, this is a good place to start.
The theme of cyberpunk is that the information age means the homologisation of all forms of information. . . . The more one moves to a world in which the message, rather than the medium, is the focus of conceptual and economic interest, the more central does intellectual property become. Intellectual property is the legal form of the information age.
To bring this back to Doctorow: one key question for IP policy is whether we will permit Google to assert trade secrecy (and state secrets) to the point that we cannot determine whether a scenario like the one envisioned by Doctorow has come to pass.
Photo Credit: Subcircle.
September 16, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Posted in: Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security)
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