InfoTech and Public Policy

The stability and future trajectory of a society is heavily dependent on the level of protection and robustness that it has. In other words, it is in a society’s best interest to be able to defend itself and create mechanisms that would quickly and efficiently absorb any destabilizing fluctuations. And of course, defense shouldn’t only be confined to a reflexive response to environmental events, but should encompass preemptive actions guided by accurate predictions of future events and phenomena. And here is where communication monitoring comes into play, since in order to be able to predict the future you need to have a good perception of the current dynamic environment around you. Along these lines, it is not only a right but also an obligation for governments – and any other entity of a similar protective role for that matter – to fully exploit technology and resources for the social good.

Naturally, regulatory mechanisms should be in place in order for governments and their agencies not to overstep their authority, misinterpret and misuse this social mandate: it should be absolutely clear who can do what, and in what circumstances. There is a plethora of cases where these lines are blurring. For example, should a school camera installed to catch trespassers, fights and harassment be used to report intimate moments of students (article)? What about personal text messages in a cell phone that has been confiscated (article)? Should a program that analyses employee video streams and uses this information to infer the stress levels be also used to calculate the productivity and overall performance of a worker, something that can lead to his lay-off or promotion (article and patent)?

The threat of misusing sensitive data becomes more imminent with technological progress. Pervasive computing and sensor networks open endless possibilities that the Big Brother always wanted but couldn’t afford. Universality and data integration increase the processing efficiency but also make the effect of a potential leak even more devastating to human privacy. Often technology precedes regulatory and safety mechanisms and some may claim that this is what is happening in the recent attempt of the federal government to launch a system that would bring together thousands of city-owned video cameras that would feed video into a central office at the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (article).

Questions like who will have access and analyze the data, and for how long these data will be stored will also determine the risk to privacy in such monitoring systems. As algorithms become more sophisticated we can transition from a supervised or semi-supervised monitor scheme to a fully unsupervised one, where image processing and machine learning techniques will render any human-data interaction in the majority of cases unnecessary. This in turn reduces the risk of leaks and malicious human actions, one of the major concerns today. Regarding the storage of the personal data, there is again a trade-off between privacy and enhanced protection. Although the amount of information that passes through an ISP is vast and prohibiting to be stored for large periods of time, this may change in the near future. Storing everything can provide a fossil record of communication that may prove valuable to future investigations, but also seriously increasing the harmful effect of a severe security breech.

For all these reasons we have to push for a close regulation - not prohibition - of governmental monitoring of human communication. The question of who is going to watch over the watchers is always there, but I am optimistic that in a mature democracy sufficient regulatory mechanisms will be implemented and updated whenever necessary (as was the case with the creation of FISA in the 70’s).

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