“For Those Who Don’t Want To Believe”

I feel uncomfortably like a prophet. In January, and again last week, I wrote about the prospect of UAVs used as weapons by terrorists; yesterday a man was arrested who "planned to attack the Pentagon using 'small drone airplanes' filled with explosives and guided by GPS." In August I wrote about omnipresent mobile phones turning the world into a panopticon; today's NYT has an article about ordinary Koreans paid by the government to snitch on scofflaws with photo evidence. Last year I wrote a piece for The Walrus about the crucial importance of online pseudonymity for bloggers reporting on the Mexican drug war, now that the traditional media there has been terrified into utter silence; yesterday the headless corpse of one such journalist, a woman named Marisol Macias Castaneda, was found next to a scrawled message warning people not to write about the drug cartels on social media sites.These are not three separate subjects. Cheap and/or ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition make surveillance ever more omnipresent; the dangers and uncertainties of other new technologies, like hobbyist UAVs, lead to calls for even greater scrutiny; and eventually online anonymity/pseudonymity will be the only kind there is. That isn't entirely a bad thing. It's because of crowdsourced surveillance that New York police lieutenant Anthony Bologna faces two investigations after apparently gratuitously pepper-spraying protestors. But it means the ability to remain pseudonymous online will only become more and more important in the years to come.Do the services that connect people online seem to realize this? Sadly, the answer mostly ranges between "No" and "Hell, no."]]>

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