[governance] Social Media Surveillance OK'd by DHS 'Privacy Office'

Suresh Ramasubramanian suresh at hserus.net
Mon Nov 19 02:10:05 EST 2012


The right to be forgotten is as utopian a right as it gets. I understand
the historical context, but just because we had one adolf hitler in the
past who used state census data to target "non aryan races" doesn't mean
various other checks and balances don't exist now.

You do have various "privacy activist" types circulating boilerplate
letters demanding that their ISP not log anything at all about their online
activity except for billing purposes .. and then they (and various others)
get infected with a virus, which ddoses some poor guy in, say, a pacific
island where connectivity is expensive and via satellite.

If he complains to the ISP they're then glad to give him boilerplate that
says "we don't track what our users do, because of european privacy laws.
please have your national law enforcement contact our police, and our
police will contact us, and we'll then start looking for where the problem
is".

By that time, the poor guy's network is probably long forced off the
internet, it being that or he winds up paying an astronomical bill for
bandwidth, ddos mitigation gear, higher server capacity etc etc.

Anyway, the point they are making might - or might not - be valid. It
certainly does not assume goodwill, and seems to suffer from a siege
mentality of sorts.

	srs

Riaz K Tayob [19/11/12 07:37 +0200]:
>Except for the hullabaloo that follows developing countries 
>'censorship' and 'abuse of the internet', I would be inclined to 
>unequivocally agree with you...
>
>And it is rather trite to argue that 'stoking fears' is sufficient to 
>dismiss the point of the article. The point is how are public 
>resources used in the 'marketplace of ideas' (to use Justice Black's 
>parlance), in the face of rising use of foodstamps, fiscal cliffs, 
>unemployment etc... makes the European idea of the 'right to be 
>forgotten' look rather appealing methinks...
>
>
>On 2012/11/19 04:01 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
>>I love the rhetoric (predictable) and the (over)use of 1984 imagery
>>
>>Anyway, have you considered that "search" is enough to find public 
>>posts on
>>social media, without "friending and following"?
>>
>>"stoking fears that" is precisely what this article sets out to do,
>>unfortunately
>>
>>Which might be a useful goal elsewhere, but not, definitly not, when a
>>forum has even some pretensions towards being multistakeholder in nature.
>>
>

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