“National security” is a phrase as malleable as it is powerful, capable of justifying virtually any domestic repression. The future of the Internet is now staked on the pyre of national security, just waiting for a torch to be thrown. The U.S. and Chinese governments are only too eager to oblige.
The crackdown by the U.S. Congress on American-based Internet companies doing business in China, for allegedly abetting the arrest of Chinese dissidents, contrasts strikingly with the same Congress' supine acquiesence to the U.S. Bush Administration's recent request for search-engine records from the very same companies. The two positions are absolutely contradictory.
Eager to breach their citizens' personal privacy online, both governments -- the Chinese and our own -- are demanding, with force of law, all significant online vendors to surrender their users' search records. (What happened to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act? Obsolete?) It's really no surprise that American corporations -- supposed paragons of the “new libertarianism,” like Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft -- are disposed to do so. (Google hoovers in ambiguity.) They're used to gathering and sharing personal information, often without their customers' knowledge. It's part of their business models. In fact, this is true of most ecommerce companies.
But now it's all out there, for everyone to see. For anyone who's been the subject of covert surveillance (as I have in a bogus, Ed Meese-engineered sting conducted purely for political purposes), the prospect of the all-pervasive Internet transformed into a machine for spying is chilling. Especially because so many individuals naively believe the corporations' "do your own thing" propaganda, neglecting the fact that, as Pierre de Vries reminds us (see Feb. 4 entry), their records endure forever.
The future of the Internet experience, despite the good efforts of groups like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, looks like it's going to be straight out of George Orwell's 1984. The designers of this online spookiness, public and private alike, have a lot to answer for. Of course, there is no accountability for their systematic perversion of the Internet as an engine of liberty. By the time we're all feeling icky-sticky with suspicion, knowledgeable that we're being looked in on, all the time, the game will be over. It would be poetic justice for Internet use to decline as people feel more and more invaded and manipulated.
BTW: Congress is ready to pass the Patriot Act into perpetuity. I'm sure there's a Chinese version.
BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
