Re: For Tex, (Listening & Watching)
- From: "TX Max King" <noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 00:39:10 GMT
Hey Randy,
Thanks for the info, I've checked the web site and I'm going
to dig into it a little more and read the article here when
I get a few minutes of downtime tomorrow.
Hey and don't let the proofreaders here get to you.
They have a tendency to insult typos and grammatical errors
but aren't worth a damn as actual proofreaders. I myself
have always considered the message more important than the medium,
but some of these bozos don't have any significant message to offer
so they prefer to sling insults at the medium.
There was a time when I would post my poetry here
consistently, but the worms kept crawling from their holes.
So lately I stick to political essays. They are not as much fun
but they usually create a stir anyway (as I am prone to do).
And don't worry, neither Peewee nor Goober has posted a poem
here in years. So don't expect anything creative from them,
it won't happen. Jinn/Tom is a somewhat harmless puppy
as long as you ignore him. If he approaches you with a civil
tongue then it might be different. Time is the judge.
Have fun and write on!
max
"Randy Scop" <rscop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43EE1A9F.76DC332F@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tex,
the book I was talking about is:
NO PLACE TO HIDE
by Robert O'Harrow
He's no slouch writer. He was a Pulitzer prize finalist. OK, he didn't
win. But his book is getting good reviews from diverse points of view
and political persuasions. Here's the one by William Safire, a political
conservative with a massive intellect, and not at all the type to
buy-into unfounded conspiracy theories:
"No Place to Hide might just do for privacy protection what Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring did for environmental protection. [O'Harrow's] is
the work of a careful, thorough, enterprising reporter."
-- William Safire, The New York Times Book Review
Randy---high praise indeed.
----------
The rest of this message contains the editorial comments on O'Harrow's
book that I copied from amazon.com---and that's all. I only posted them
to save people from having to go to amazon if they wanted to read them.
----------
From Publishers Weekly
The amount of personal data collected on ordinary citizens has grown
steadily over the decades, and after 9/11, corporations that had been
amassing this information largely for marketing purposes saw an
opportunity to strengthen their ties with the government. But what do we
really know about these data collectors, and are they trustworthy?
O'Harrow, a Pulitzer finalist who covers privacy and technology issues
for the Washington Post, tracks the explosive growth of this
surveillance industry, with keen attention to the problems that
"inevitable mistakes" along the way have created in mainstream society,
from victims of identity theft who have been placed in financial
jeopardy to travelers detained at the airport because of the similarity
of their names to those of criminal suspects. O'Harrow gives the
government's push for increased surveillance heavy play, but he
effectively presents the story's many sides, as when he juxtaposes the
perspectives of a Justice Department attorney, a civil liberties
activist and Senator Patrick Leahy in the first chapter. His evenhanded
account underscores the caveats of surveillance, as well-intentioned
people can deploy technologies for all the right reasons only to see
their apparatuses misused later on. This is a thought-provoking,
comprehensive account that strikes the right balance between dismissive
and alarmist.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
We live in an ever more convenient society. We use credit cards, buy
books on Amazon, reserve plane tickets on Expedia, bid for antiques on
eBay, get cash at ATMs and find jobs on Monster. We use key cards to
open hotel rooms, EZ-Pass to pay tolls and GPS to get directions. We
send e-mail, fill prescriptions and sexual needs on the Internet, and
pay bills electronically.
These conveniences generate data. In the "old" days, we did not leave
behind a readily accessible, electronic trail of our purchases,
conversations, whereabouts and transactions. We took for granted the
anonymity and privacy of our ordinary, day-to-day lives. No more. Today,
we are constantly tagged, monitored, studied, sorted and tracked by a
vast array of institutions and organizations -- private and public. As
Robert O'Harrow Jr. details in No Place to Hide, it is worse than we
could ever have imagined. In this revealing book, O'Harrow makes clear
that Americans need to think seriously about these issues now -- before
it is too late for us to decide that we care.
O'Harrow unveils a modern world riddled with seemingly innocuous private
businesses, government agencies and software programs with such obscure
names as ChoicePoint, Acxiom, Matrix, DARPA, Seisint, HOLe and NORA.
Unbeknownst to most of us, these institutions and technologies are
relentlessly compiling information about our names, addresses, license
plates, Social Security numbers, religions, incomes, family members,
sexual orientations, friends, purchases, mortgages, bank accounts,
credit card transactions, credit standing, parking tickets, criminal
arrests and convictions, Web browsing, e-mail correspondence, newspaper
and magazine preferences, cell phone activity, vacations, fingerprints,
insurance coverage, facial images, DNA, drug prescriptions and beer of
choice. Computers have made possible what was barely science fiction 20
years ago.
How do they get this information? For the most part, we give it to them,
though usually unwittingly, with almost every step we take. Over the
past several years, with the help of increasingly sophisticated
computing systems and advances in artificial intelligence, these
institutions and organizations have accumulated billions of data points
about American citizens, which they then share with or sell to one
another and to the government. As O'Harrow notes, "personal data has
become a commodity that is bought and sold essentially like sow
bellies."
Why do these companies and agencies do this? For you, of course. By
gathering and sharing such data, they protect you from identify theft
and credit card fraud, enable marketers to offer you precisely the right
products to satisfy your tastes and needs, ensure that your fellow
passengers are not terrorists, locate missing children and deadbeat
dads, help police catch smugglers and murderers, and generally provide a
safer society. And, in fact, they really do these things.
So what's the problem? Should we care that there's no place to hide?
What dangers are posed by this more convenient, more secure society? In
this chilling narrative, O'Harrow identifies the risks and vividly
illustrates them with powerful real-life stories.
First, there is the simple risk of mistake. The data in these systems,
according to Ole Poulsen, one of HOLe's creators, are "full of errors
and noise and wrong information." As a result, individuals are denied
insurance, credit, employment, the right to board an airplane, and even
the right to vote when the system spins out inaccurate information. And,
as O'Harrow persuasively demonstrates, correcting the record can be a
nightmare.
Second, there is the risk of public disclosure. We regard much of this
information as private. But hackers can all too easily capture it and
use it to humiliate, blackmail and impersonate us. The Federal Trade
Commission reports that in a typical year, 10 million Americans were the
victims of identity theft, resulting in bounced checks, loan denials,
harassment from debt collectors, cancelled insurance and false
accusations of criminal conduct.
Third, there is the risk that government will use this information not
only to ferret out terrorists, but also to suppress dissent and impose
conformity. In the 1990s, this technology was developed primarily by
private companies to enable marketers to target and profile consumers.
After Sept. 11, however, the FBI, CIA, NSA, Justice Department and
Department of Homeland Security aggressively sought access to these
business databases, creating a vast private-public partnership in the
exchange of such information. Moreover, the USA Patriot Act took full
advantage of the post-9/11 crisis mentality and authorized a wide range
of previously restricted government surveillance and data-gathering
activities. Although the stated goal of these activities is to ensure
our security, history teaches that once government has such information,
it will inevitably use it to harass and silence those who question its
policies.
Finally, O'Harrow warns that such massive invasion of privacy and
intrusion into our ordinary anonymity may well alter the very fabric of
our society. Once we understand that our every move is being tracked,
monitored, recorded and collated, will we retain our essential sense of
individual autonomy and personal dignity? Can freedom flourish in such a
society? Is this the long awaited coming of 1984, the Brave New World of
the 21st century, or will we somehow continue business, and life, as
usual?
Reviewed by Geoffrey R. Stone
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text
refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
In this era obsessed with terrorism, an explosion in surveillance and
related activities has resulted in the creation of a security industrial
complex. O'Harrow outlines changes in data collection as a result of
evolving technology originally designed for marketing that has now been
adopted by our government for homeland security and the war on
terrorism. O'Harrow critiques the merger between public and private
interest in high-tech intelligence systems in ways that trample our
traditional values of privacy and civil liberties. He implicates all of
us--not just the usual suspects--in the erosion of privacy when we use
cell phones and cars that allow our locations to be tracked or when we
use credit cards and produce profiles that can be linked and made widely
available. The result is vulnerability to identity theft or invasion of
privacy on a level of which most citizens are unaware. O'Harrow argues
for greater balance between--and awareness of--our national security
needs and the greatest risks to our privacy as citizens. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This
text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Mr. O'Harrow provides in these pages an authoritative and vivid account
of the emergence of a 'security-industrial complex' and the far-reaching
consequences for ordinary Americans...an alarming vision of the future
uncannily reminiscent of the world imagined by Orwell in 1984."
-- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Today, we are constantly tagged, monitored, studied, sorted and tracked
by a vast array of institutions and organizations -- private and public.
As Robert O'Harrow, Jr., details in No Place to Hide, it is worse than
we could ever have imagined. In this revealing book, O'Harrow makes
clear that Americans need to think seriously about these issues now --
before it is too late for us to decide that we care."
-- The Washington Post
"No Place to Hide might just do for privacy protection what Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring did for environmental protection. [O'Harrow's] is
the work of a careful, thorough, enterprising reporter."
-- William Safire, The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
From Starbucks to the subway to the sidewalk, you are being
watched....O'Harrow voices a clear concern over the ethics of such
snooping...persuasively delineating how that information is abused and
how unavoidable mistakes have profound consequences. A skillful chart of
a surveillance society out of control.
Book Description
In No Place to Hide, award-winning Washington Post reporter Robert
O'Harrow, Jr., pulls back the curtain on an unsettling trend: the
emergence of a data-driven surveillance society intent on giving us the
conveniences and services we crave, like cell phones, discount cards,
and electronic toll passes, while watching us more closely than ever
before. He shows that since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the
information industry giants have been enlisted as private intelligence
services for homeland security. And at a time when companies routinely
collect billions of details about nearly every American adult, No Place
to Hide shines a bright light on the sorry state of information
security, revealing how people can lose control of their privacy and
identities at any moment.
Now with a new afterword that details the latest security breaches and
the government's failing efforts to stop them, O'Harrow shows us that,
in this new world of high-tech domestic intelligence, there is literally
no place to hide.
As O'Harrow writes, "This book is all about you and your personal
information -- and the story isn't pretty."
.
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