I've meant to make this post for awhile now - maybe I already did but I don't remember it.
Earlier this month there was all sorts of breathless coverage intimating that the NSA were "listening to our phone calls" or the like. Without meaning completely to excuse what they actually did, it bugs me that people either don't understand or choose to gloss over the difference between "Person A talked to Person B from 4:43 p.m. to 4:52 p.m." and the actual conversation. The latter is a whole lot of content -- for gumshoe work really just a whole lot of noise -- rightly privileged and difficult to use effectively anyway. Complete aggregate data for the former is extremely useful, at a very small (admittedly non-zero) price of privacy.
Anyhow, it strikes me that there's a lot of technophobic hand-wringing about privacy issues that have zero effect on either how you live your life or how other people see you, with comparatively little public outcry about little things like false imprisonment, corrupt cops, etc.
In a better world, allegations that some police officers would routinely plant drugs on suspects to frame innocent people would get at least the level of national coverage and national hype as given to allegations that a row in an NSA database knows which phone number I dialed once.
Posted by Matt Bruce at May 19, 2006 02:07 PM