Blown to Bits Notes
The passage is discussing the use of facial recognition technology in
a concert by Taylor Swift and the implications of this technology on
privacy. The text highlights how facial recognition scanners were
used in the concert and how the public is often unaware of the
existence and usage policies of such technologies. The text also
mentions how the current state of surveillance in the digital world
goes beyond what George Orwell had imagined in his book and how
the advancement in technology has led to a loss of privacy. It also
mentions that people have accepted this loss in exchange for
convenience and discounts.
Edward Snowden, a systems administrator for the government, met
with journalists in Hong Kong and provided them with classified
documents and PowerPoint presentations that revealed the massive
U.S. government communications surveillance program. This
included collecting data on lAmerican citizens through popular
services such as Yahoo! Mail and Google Search. The revelations
showed that the NSA was pushing the limits of the new authorities
given to them after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and
was exploiting the popularity of centralized services and the global
nature of the internet to conduct surveillance.
The Supreme Court and other parts of the government have dealt
with the tension between technological change and privacy before,
specifically with telephone wiretapping. In 1928, the court ruled
that the wiretapping of telephone lines by law enforcement did not
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constitute a 4th amendment violation and therefore did not
require a warrant. However, this ruling was met with public
backlash and states and Congress passed laws to protect privacy
through wiretap
The author argues that society is struggling to deal with the
consequences of the digital explosion and the rapid changes in
technology. They use the example of the Massachusetts employers
who purchased health insurance for state employees and requested
detailed information on every patient encounter to understand
how taxpayer money was being spent. The GIC data was
"deidentified" meaning it had no names, addresses or unique
identifiers, and was sold to businesses. However, the researcher
Latanya Sweeney was able to re-identify individuals by using
publicly available voter lists and it was a breach of privacy.
On October 21, 2016, a massive internet outage occurred on the US
East Coast due to a attack. The attack was launched by an army
ofhome devices, such as baby monitors, light bulbs, and routers,
that were infected by malicious software called Mirai. The
malware exploited common security flaws, such as default
administrative passwords that had not been changed and
unpatched software, to infect one device and then copy itself to
other devices.
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The malware then turned each device into a "bot" that listened for
commands, and on October 21, the controller directed the devices
to send a rapid stream of requests for domain names, which caused
a burst of traffic to publicly accessible nameservers, overwhelming
the servers and leaving them unable to respond to legitimate
lookups.
Technology through the course of advancement becomes riskier
and more difficult to keep up with.
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