Glenn Greenwald's clear warning this morning about the infrastructure of a surveillance society ...

The Bush administration has created vast and permanent data bases to collect and store evidence revealing the private activities of millions of American citizens. When the FBI obtains information essentially in secret -- with no judicial oversight -- that information is stored in those data bases. This is all being done by the executive branch with no safeguards and no oversight, and the little oversight that Congress has required has been defiantly and publicly brushed aside by the President, who sees legal requirements as nothing more than suggestions or options which he will recognize only if he chooses to.

That is the constitutional crisis that we have endured under virtually the entire Bush presidency -- the crisis which, for the most part, our mainstream political and media elite have collectively decided not to acknowledge.

... comes on the heels of last night's Leonardo Institute's annual Leonardo Lecture, delivered by Boing-boing co-founder, cyberactivist and sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow.  He delivered a bright and snappy talk (he's good .. clear, down-to-earth, understatedly yet pointedly funny and sarcastic (in an unique Canadian way , I'd say) ... he happens to be Canadian and so carries, I believe, a Canadian-ish perspective on culture in North America and the world kind of mien, if you know what I mean.

The audio recording is here ... it's worth a listen.

He drew a nicely synthesized and coherent verbal time line about the evolution of the Web, the cognitive processes we've been undergoing as we read, watch, think, write, publish, click and exchange through the Web, where ideas, concepts and creative works come from and why a fundamental revamping of copyright and digital rights issues is necessary and hasn't happened yet, and the dangers of a surveillance society ... all key aspects within or related to what I call wirearchy - organization and governance stemming from being wired and interconnected in pervasive ways in the course of many basic human activities.

Cory related an interesting story that for me distills much of the mental and cultural shaping we are undergoing / living in a world in which we are penetrated and surrounded by integrated and interconnected information technology. The well-known aphorism "First we shape our structures, then our structures shape us" also comes to mind.

He started with his love-hate relationship with Disney's Magic Kingdom (saying it was only natural that his first novel was titled Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom), and how the entry to Magic Kingdom now requires fingerprinting (though Disney takes pains to emphasize that they are only taking "an imprint of the unique characteristics of the shape of your finger" (not sure I have that as verbatim from Cory), but the point was they are not recording these characteristics for the purposes of fingerprinting.  But once captured on a mass basis, these would or could be available to the users of the Total Information Awareness data bases, for example.

However, if you don't want to be fingerprinted but still go visit the Magic Kingdom, you can go and present additional identification .. in other words, be shunted over  to another passport line where you are checked out a bit more.  So he says he and his friends do that when they go.  One time when they went, he and his friends were declining to be fingersussed, slowing down the entry line when a 10-year old kid behind them piped up something like (no verbatim) ... "Come on, it's how you get in".  Cory's story made the point of how if we are not careful, if we do not watch the watchers and use our fundamental right to not agree, it all too easily becomes just part  of what we do .. and it feeds the databases.

Anyway, a good talk though the issues are familiar to me.  Cory knows his stuff.  It's also always interesting to be in public places and listen and watch as more and more people are connecting more and more of the dots about the Intertubes and its sociological implications.

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