Welcome to the Future—It’s Just Starting Now

Like many of you, I have had a queasy feeling about the loss of privacy in the digital era.  Every online transaction and communication is out there for monitoring, profiling, packaging and retailing, and no promise by a company or government is going to change this.  The commercial implications are troubling enough, but what about the future?  What happens when a really bad government comes along and uses this information for outright repression?

Well, the future is now.  Read this chilling report on the use of new surveillance technologies to control what you can read about such matters as state-sponsored torture (the Kiriakou case) and corrupt insider contracts in the “war on terror” (Sterling).

If it had been Obama and not Google that campaigned on the slogan “Don’t be evil”, we could accuse him of breaking a promise.