Lunch over IP

A Dark River Runs Through It

"Sometimes I think all this talk about Travelers is just a fairy tale. What's real is that I walk around London and I see they've put up more surveillance cameras and I start to get desperate. In a thousand little ways freedom is melting away, and nobody gives a damn". (Jugger, a character in "The Dark River")

Last summer I wrote a short review of "The Traveler", the first part of a trilogy by mysterious author John Twelve Hawks (that's a nom de plume, and nobody knows who's behind it: JTH claims he lives "off-the-grid"), set in the near future and dealing with privacy and social control.

The second installment is just out, titled "The Dark River", and it's as compelling as the first.

In "The Traveler, JTH told of a powerful group of bad guys, the Tabula, set on controlling society through the creation of a "Virtual Panopticon", and of a few people called "Travelers" who have the ability to escape the system by projecting themselves (their neural energy) into other dimensions (what the author calls "realms"), hence representing a threat to the Tabula.

The whole, in a context that resembles very much today's world -- the growing social manipulation and control enabled by a "vast machine" of computer networks, surveillance cameras, sensors and biometric IDs, datamining software, etc, and fuelled by a spreading sense of fear.

In "The Dark River", JTH goes a step further in his denunciation, taking the main characters through a series of events that we could easily imagine happening in today's New York or London. In the course of the story, the resistance starts to organize itself (for, presumably, a showdown that will happen in the third installment). Despite a few redundancies, the writing is gripping and fluid and the story is a plausible and captivating read. A serious cautionary tale.

Total information awareness rolls out in China

In 2002, the US government started developing a complex tracking system called "Total Information Awareness", later renamed "Terrorism Information Awareness" to make it less threatening to civil liberties. It was intended to track people and give law enforcement agencies easy access to personal data, using a mix of biometrics, data-mining tools and other technologies, and very few privacy protections.

Two years later, funding for the office running TIA was stopped, but components of the project are still being developed today. And now it seems that China has taken that blueprint and translated it, with the help of China Public Security Tech, a Florida-based company which has raised millions from two Texan investment funds. Story from the New York Times:

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets in Shenzhen in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card. (...)

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city (...) “If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future". (...)

“We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like IBM, Cisco, HP, Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system together.”

These and other companies have been providing other tracking and censoring technology to the Chinese government.

A state-sanctioned trojan in your computer

According to today's SonntagsZeitung (a Swiss Sunday paper), Swiss law enforcement agencies, both at Federal and Cantonal level, are considering using a software developed by the firm ERA IT Solutions to eavesdrop on Skype and other VoIP calls.

The software - a "trojan" installed on the eavesdropping target's computer - could be planted by policemen, "or sent to the machine by the Internet providers, hidden in the usual data stream", writes the paper. The software would record and report back to a central server the content of VoIP calls and other communications emanating from that computer, and could also be used to turn on remotely their built-in microphones.

In Switzerland this would be unlawful: the law that regulates the surveillance of telecom and postal traffic, adopted in 2002, does not cover Internet telephony. And the very idea that Internet providers may be asked to covertly send trojan programs to their customers' computers is unacceptable. "The project is kept secret in order to avoid a public debate", writes the newspaper in an ironic twist - after its article, goodbye secrecy.

And let's open the debate. Listening in to telephone conversations has become a thriving activity in recent years. Governments, law enforcement agencies and private corporations have discovered that it's an easy way to gather information about individuals and organizations that can be use to charge, indict, embarrass or blackmail them. The US government has extended phone tapping beyond the law and the constitution, unwarranted listening to domestic conversations with the usual excuse of fighting terrorism (the largest blanket ever manufactured). Greece and Italy are engulfed in eavesdropping scandals. In Greece, even the Prime Minister's phone was tapped. In Italy, a secret cell inside the main operator Telecom Italia has for years gathered wiretap information, independently and out of any control, to such an extent that they had direct connections with foreign secret service agencies, including apparently the CIA. In Italy still, generous use of judge-mandated phone interceptions (the laziest way to conduct an investigation) has produced miles of transcripts, mostly legally irrelevant but which, leaked to the press, have been used to discredit top bankers, football players, TV entertainers, entrepreneurs and investors, and even the son of the last King of Italy.

It's not uncommon to be talking with an Italian on the phone these days and be told: "let's take this offline and discuss it when we next meet"; many people now use fix and cell phones with the assumption that they are being overheard. That's a sign that a society of surveillance is moving forward in fact as well as in the consciousness of people. It's not a nice nor reassuring sighting. Over time, that translates into social  mistrust. Putting trojans on somebody's computer is the kind of things Internet pirates and identity thieves do. That the state may consider sanctioning this practice and even mandate Internet providers to plant them is outrageous.

Being user 4417749

Recently AOL released the logs of all online searches done by nearly 658'000 of its users over a period of three months earlier this year. The intention was honorable (to benefit academic researchers), the way it was done absolutely inept (putting a file up on a public website), and what the data reveal is staggering.

Quick summary: At the beginning of August, AOL - the big American Internet player - published on its research site a big compressed file (2 GB, compressed at 439 MB) for anyone to download. The file contained the complete list of all searches done through the AOL search engine by 658'000 people, randomly chosen among the 40-plus million AOL users. Each record was stripped of the person's screen name, which was replaced by an ID number. Elements in each record include the ID, the term or terms used for the search, the time stamp, whether the user clicked on a result and the corresponding visited website. There are an estimated 20 million web query records in the file. It looks like this (I've picked 15 lines randomly, relating to two different users):

Where is the problem, you may ask. Stripping the names and replacing them with ID numbers has allowed AOL to claim that the information was "anonymized", that there was no personally-identifiable data linked to the records. However, even a small familiarity with data-mining techniques makes apparent that similar search data is enough to identify people. Combining information about a specific city (searches for local news, for real estate listings, for shops or doctors or services, for train schedules, for school plays) with more personal data (many people routinely search for their own names or those of friends and family, or their phone number or street address, to satisfy their ego but also to check for example if someone else is using their personal information - think identity theft) can bring up pretty detailed profiles of specific individuals. The New York Times' reporters for example tracked down AOL user number 4417749, Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Georgia:

In the privacy of her four-bedroom home, Ms. Arnold searched for the answers to scores of life’s questions, big and small. How could she buy “school supplies for Iraq children”? What is the “safest place to live”? What is “the best season to visit Italy”? Her searches are a catalog of intentions, curiosity, anxieties and quotidian questions. There was the day in May, for example, when she typed in “termites,” then “tea for good health” then “mature living,” all within a few hours. (...) While these searches can tell the casual observer - or the sociologist or the marketer - much about the person who typed them, they can also prove highly misleading. At first glace, it might appear that Ms. Arnold fears she is suffering from a wide range of ailments. Her search history includes “hand tremors,” “nicotine effects on the body,” “dry mouth” and “bipolar.” But in an interview, Ms. Arnold said she routinely researched medical conditions for her friends to assuage their anxieties.

The file remained available for about 10 days, then AOL took it down and fired a few people. But in the meantime it had been downloaded hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and mirrored on other sites around the world. If downloading is not for you, someone has already put a search interface on the data. Which means that all that personal information is no longer to be stopped from circulating forever online. Marketers are already imagining possibilities to exploit the data (basically, what AOL did is give legitimate marketeers as well as non-legit spammers a list of most-searched terms). The event triggered a huge privacy debate in the US and beyond. And groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation already took legal steps, since AOL, whatever its intention ("This collection is distributed for NON-COMMERCIAL RESEARCH USE ONLY. Any application of this collection for commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED", reads the disclaimer) is obviously in total breach of consumer protection and confidentiality rules.

This story involves AOL, but it is more generally symptomatic of the quantity and the quality of the traces we leave behind when we do even "normal" things on the Internet such as searching for information (a topic that I've already blogged here and here and here, and fictionalized here). Thelma Arnold's reaction when the NYT reporters called her - "I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder" - is typical of most Internet users. AOL's customers are identified by a nickname when they log in, but Google, MSN or Yahoo - and their commpetitors, and their local counterparts such as Search.ch in Switzerland or Alice in Italy - also monitor users through various combinations of digital tracking methods (profiles, IP addresses, cookies, etc) and log these data and keep them for various periods of time, as do most ISP. They claim they need the data to fine-tune their search algorithms or develop new features - short: to better serve the users. But of course they also use the data for marketing purpose, and the less scrupulous among them sell parts of the information. The mere fact that the data are logged and kept is troublesome, and generally speaking their privacy policies are not the most transparent, as a recent article in the San José Mercury News showed. In the US this has led for example to a long struggle between Google and the Department of Justice a few months ago, when the DOJ used subpoenas to gain access to Google's search logs. A judge rejected those efforts - but AOL now gave away publicly those very data.

Which, by the way, include search strings that betray intimate dilemmas ("fear that spouse is contemplating cheating", user 7268042), sound like desperate calls ("how to kill oneself", 9486162), may configure a crime ("how to kill your wife", user 17556639; "underage lolitas", 4797906) and much more. (In these last three examples, one wonders, should social services or the police intervene? That's just one of the many questions this story raises).

Figuring out what to do is tricky. Indisputably, search history needs more stringent privacy protection. Search engine expert John Battelle - who coined the term "database of intentions" to describe the collection of world's search requests - wishes for broad access. Jason Calacanis, one of the AOL execs, has blogged that "I want us to not keep logs of our search data". That appears very unlikely, given the business value of those data. Maybe the better compromise is mandatory - and independently verified - regular data destruction. But most importantly, people must be aware that every step they take online leaves tracks in the digital sand.

Travelling across a Vast Machine

In recent years, a typical response to the observation that electronic monitoring systems are becoming too powerful and are been misused (in particular by governments - for example the monitoring by the US government of the international banking transactions going through the SWIFT clearinghouse, or the widespread phone wiretapping in Italy) is that "honest people have nothing to fear". On the surface, that's commonsensical. In reality, that notion is a fallacy. Even honest people have much to be concerned with: mistakes, homonymy, inaccuracies, stolen identities, abuses, discrimination, the growing authoritarian temptation that's seeping into many governments to use monitoring technology just because it exists (ready-made rationale in this times of generalized fear: "to protect the honest citizen"), the risk that private or criminal organization get access to data and misuse them (to deny health insurance coverage, for example).

John Twelve Hawks - the pseudonym of a mysterious writer - has written a pretty good novel on this very notion that "honest people have nothing to fear", demonstrating how untrue it is. It's called "The Traveller", was published last year (I'm catching up on my reading backlog) and is the story of a powerful organization that wants to control society through the "Vast Machine" (an all-encompassing, next-gen Internet that reaches into every database, every surveillance camera, every bank transaction, every reservation system) and of the few that refuse this uniformity and try to resist by living "off the grid" (not using computers, credit cards, etc) and using the ultimate weapon: their humanity.

To a certain extent, JTH's narrative echoes "The Matrix" and Orwell and other sci-fi worlds. But rather than in a distant future his novel is set towards the end of this decade. In a postscript he writes that all the technologies he mentions (from quantum computing to computational immunology to RFID tags to surveillance cameras) are either already in use or in an advanced stage of development. That makes for a storytelling we - Westerners - can strongly relate to, although the character of the title is of a distinct breed, one of a few people that can project themselves (their neural energy) out of this world into other dimensions (what the author calls "realms"), a group the bad guys want first to eliminate (because "travelling" allows them to escape the system) and try later to use for their goals.

JTH also lives "off the grid", or so he claims. He is said to remain in touch with his publisher through an untraceable satellite phone, to live in NY, LA and London, and he's edited by Jason Kaufman at Doubleday, who also edited Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code". That's pretty much all that's known about him (USAToday tried to learn more) and some believe that the mystery is only entertained for the purpose of publicity. It seems indeed pretty difficult nowadays to really live "off" and still fly across the Atlantic, get paid for a bestseller, and so on; but it's possible that he lives at least "part-off".

JTH makes a strong case that networked digital technology has totally transformed our conventional view of privacy and that, coupled with the current state of widespread fear, it is becoming a dangerously powerful tool of monitoring, manipulation and control. Says one of the bad guys in the novel, discussing about Jeremy Bentham's panopticon: "If one knows and accepts that he is constantly watched, it becomes a fact of life", which influences behaviors and choices and progressively erodes freedom and humanity. "The Traveler" however is not a dark book: more of a cautionary tale. It suggests that freedom and privacy can be protected by small, consistent daily choices.

Looking forward to JTH's next book (this is the first of a trilogy).

[tags: John Twelve Hawks The Traveler The Traveller]

If digital data never dies, we better learn to forget

"We should probably start accepting the idea that when we were young we all did and said stupid things - and cut ourselves some slack", says Dan Gillmor, author of "We, the Media". It was over lunch the other day at the Aula conference in Helsinki and we were discussing the idea that the digital world is increasingly shadowing the real world, and that shadow, once it appears in one's life, may never go away.

To the point: our political system is built on an industrial-era information context, and that makes it unfit for the digital era. Consider: in ten or fifteen years many people entering political life will be those that entertain today personal blogs and pages on social networks such as MySpace, where they often share opinions, views, and very intimate details of their daily life in shocking details. In 15 years, one of them will be running for mayor and another for a parliamentary seat and so on (this applies also to job searches and to a larger social context, by the way) and out there there will be many embarrassing leftovers (or more) about them, which they willingly posted on the Internet.

Sure, we can hit the "delete" button, erase files and take down websites, even physically trash computers. But digital data has this most annoying attribute of being tendentially indestructible. In the journey between our laptop and the blog, data transits through many routers; in the trip from our outbox to a friend's inbox, e-mail does the same; backups are made; CDs and USB keys are all over; friends (and foes alike) copy and re-post and excerpt and re-mix; aggregators aggregate; Internet archives "photograph" the Web at regular intervals to keep copies; etc.

As John Battelle so rightly puts it: "We're living online, but have yet to fully realize the implications of doing so. One of those implications is that our tracks through the digital sand are eternal".

That's why, as Dan Gillmor suggests, we need to start working on cultural and social "forgetness" - he did not use that word, but the idea is that if you said or wrote or did something stupid in the past, unless it's criminal it should not come back to haunt you. Or else, it will be very difficult to maintain a functioning political system.

[tags: aula2006 aula06 Dan Gillmor  John Battelle]

Saffo on sense-making tools and the curse of cyberspace

Forecaster Paul Saffo, of the Institute for the Future, in a long interview today in the San Francisco Chronicle, on information overload:

I don't think information overload is a function of the volume of information. It's a derivative of the volume of information plus the sense-making tools you have. Think about the rise of info-graphics in newspapers. Those were sense-making tools to help people absorb information. (Now we have things like Del.icio.us and Wikipedia, they are the new) tools that help us make sense of information. I think it was Samuel Johnson who said, "There are two kinds of information in this world: that what you know and that what you know where to get." The tools help the latter, and that's what keeps us from going nuts. The sense of overload comes from the gap between that sudden jump in volume (of information) and the tools we have to make sense of it.

On data that never dies:

I worry about a society that can remember everything. The difference between our collective generation and the young generation is that we poured our souls out on paper that got easily yellowed and lost. The danger is that many of today's students are putting intimate ideas in cyberspace journals. So when today's 15-year-old is 40, some friend is going to drag out all of that idiotic stuff at their class reunion. The curse of cyberspace is that everything we want to preserve will get lost and everything we want to lose will be preserved.

On digital tech:

Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions.

On multitasking:

Sometimes I wonder if this pressure to constantly respond begins to look like a disease-state. We've become more and more interrupt-driven. If you have six tasks to do in an hour, you can't just take 60 minutes and divide and have 10 minutes per task. You have 10 minutes per task minus the time required for context-shifting. That will be the next big challenge: figuring out how to fight the distraction-driven mode we're in and stay focused on one thing long enough to get it done. Every new thing upsets people. We all know someone that has a teenage kid who sits in the room and the television is on, their iPod is on, they have the computer on and at least three other electronic devices going while they're doing their homework. It drives the dad nuts, but he can't complain because the kid's a 4.1 (GPA) student (for non-Americans, that indicates a top grade - BG). Think about reading: Today, parents would love it if their kids read books more because the parents understand the books. Just over 100 years ago, parents were upset because their kids were reading dime-store novels. Parents would say, "I don't want you inside reading anymore. Get outside and play." I guarantee you, in 50 years or so, parents are going to say, "You're not going outside to play until you finish that video game."

ESE (Evil Search Engine) movies: a scenario

John Battelle (whose blog is a must-read) has posted a scenario worth pondering:

There is a ton of information about all of us that we willingly (social networks, registration data, search history, etc.) and sometimes unwillingly (clickstream data) leave, forever, on third party servers.
Now, we may trust those third parties not to mess with our data, and not to do evil things, and for the most part, I am quite sure they won't -- if they do and they get caught, they'd be crucified, and the competition is just one click away. (...) But Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, etc. are not small companies. They are made up of thousands of individuals, a few of whom just might be, well, a bit off balance.
Imagine that an engineer at a major Internet company decides he has a thing for young blond women (...) and has access to pretty much all the information he wants on all the young blond women that use his company's services near where he lives (by zip, keyword, etc.).
(...) A series of unsolved rapes begins, all of which involve young, pretty blond women.
(...) The police, hungry for any lead, obtain a search warrant for the engineer's home, and (...) they take his home computer (...) unearthing the trove of information. (...) The national and international media absolutely go batshit.
(...) And the main hook of the story? How easy it was for the killer to identify, track, and manipulate his victims because of the data he had access to at his workplace. A privacy nightmare! Who KNEW that we were so exposed?!

Notice the keyword "forever" ("leave, forever, on third party servers"). In a subsequent reply to a reader's comment, Battelle added:

Perhaps I should have named the company in the scenario, and the press subsequently called the story the "Google Rapist" or somesuch. Imagine what happens to Google's brand when the entire world, for a period of months, thinks of "rape and killings" when they think of Google, and think it all happened because Google knows too much about you...

Very intriguing scenario indeed: it would make for a great ESE movie (as in Evil Search Engine movie: watch out for this new category of thrillers to start playing at a theatre near you soon).

(John's full post; full disclosure: John is my former CEO at the Industry Standard magazine).

Now, reverse his premises, and out comes a totally different script. In keeping with John's naming convention, and since it's everyone's favorite, let's use Google: remembering however that what follows is fiction (albeit fact-based), and it could be rewritten around any of the Internet's "big ones".

John writes that we may trust the Googles and Yahoos "not to mess with our data and not to do evil things", because if they do, they "would be crucified", so he builds his credibly scary scenario around one of their employees going "a bit off balance".

But imagine that the whole company not only goes off balance: it is designed to go off balance at some point in the future.

Imagine that all the idealism Sergey and Larry infused into the odd letter to shareholders they appended to the Google's IPO prospectus ("don't be evil") was just a front.

The scenario could go like this.

It's a sunny morning in 2010. In a London neighborhood kids stroll to school, shops open, executives turn on their computers, commuters exit the tube a national politician is having breakfast on the veranda and checking his voicemail – to find a very angry message from a woman he slept with a few times a few years back, when both were already married, and who now lives in Moscow. "How could you!" she screams into the phone, adding an hysterical outburst filled with invectives about her husband finding their old e-mails on the Internet, or something like that. At the same time a staffer at a big multinational, carrying a laptop, hurries towards his boss' office and walks past the assistant and in without knocking: "Sorry sir but we have a problem", he says hastily opening his laptop on the desk and pointing to the screen, "I just found the blueprints for our new device and the financial projections are out on the Internet". A few miles from there, a writer does a "vanity search" on her name, and up comes the still unfinished manuscript of her next book, there for everyone to download and read, and the second result is a nasty e-mail she wrote two years ago to her agent complaining about her publisher; scrolling down she's horrified to find personal documents, pictures, transcripts of old intimate IM chats with a flirty Italian journalist. At the Foreign Office meanwhile, alerts are inexplicably pouring in related to classified reports on international security matters "having been leaked" and ending up in many foreign hands (and in those of tabloid reporters). And other similar events.

By mid-morning it has become clear to everyone that something very nasty has happened: suddenly vast layers of personal privacy and corporate and governmental secrecy seem to have been peeled off, and a global panic is mounting. How did e-mails and private documents of any kind, sensitive corporate data, classified information, recordings of voice calls, intimate pictures, the stuff of parallel lives, of commercial competition and of institutional hypocrisy, end up on the Internet, for all to see and to download?

When America starts waking up, a couple of hours later, the panic goes global (more scenes of personal and organizational alarm here as discovery of private and sensitive information online continues, long-forgotten correspondence threads reappear, personal duplicities are unmasked, corporate and political secrets revealed, security holes exposed). The national security agencies piece together an explanation: it's Google. More than any of its competitors, for over a decade Google has been amassing unimaginable amounts of explicit information (the stuff search systems find online: biographies, maps, addresses, personal websites, blog posts and comments, pictures, family links, political leanings, governmental documents, corporate information, newspaper articles, and so on, and the stuff Google has added, think of scanned books). This includes plenty of things that should have been out of Google's reach, but were not (files negligently left unprotected on servers etc).

Soon, a darker picture comes into focus. Over the years, unbeknownst by its users, Google has also been creating a colossal store of implicit information: the footprints and mindprints that people leave behind when using online services (personal registration data, social networks links and behaviour, clickstreams, search interests, lists of people they "googled", of products they "froogled": the stuff Battelle calls "the database of intentions") as well as the texts of e-mail messages that went through Gmail, the recordings of phonecalls and transcripts of IM sessions carried by GoogleTalk, the contents of private and corporate hard-disks that GoogleDesktop "searched" (and sent back to the mothership), all the bits and bytes that have travelled through Google's wi-fi hotspots in San Francisco and other cities, not to mention all the personal documents that many people "backed up" on Gmail taking advantage of the generous multi-megabytes free storage allowance, and so on. It was a gigantically complex computational effort, but an absurdly easy crime to commit, because Google was realizing its sinister plan under the best cover ever: providing really useful services to users, for free.

And that morning of 2010, Google opened it up, made all those exabytes of information public. It's just a fraction of the world's information, of course: Google is only one of several big Internet players, and not everyone uses Gmail or Orkut. But because of Google's centrality to the way hundreds of millions of people use the Internet, it is enough to subvert the world as we know it. And because of the still-significant inequality in Internet usage, there is way more information about America and Europe on Google's servers than about the rest of the world. Suddenly millions of people are exposed naked, in a more-than-literal way, their virtual life meticulously recorded for years, and so are millions of public and private organizations. Chaos takes hold in personal relationships, local matters, corporate activities, diplomatic affairs, security issues. Everybody seems to be fighting with everybody. There is an epidemic of suicides. Blackmail is rampant. Lawsuits exponential. The stock markets, confronted with a flood of revelations about listed companies, close. Businesses call for governmental intervention.

In a tense meeting in the sit-room the NSA suggests first to temporary shut down the root servers and "block" the Internet so that it can be "cleaned up", just to realize that such action would bring the whole world to a standstill. The Googleplex in Mountain View is sealed by police; FBI and government engineers physically shut down Google's servers one by one – but server farms are located all over the world, and the information is mirrored there. The US government takes then the unprecedented step of ordering ICANN to delete all the Google and Google-related domains from the root zone, but the process is slow because a couple of years before, yielding to international pressure, the Americans accepted more global oversight over ICANN – and it now quickly becomes apparent that behind the procedural difficulties they are putting up, China and other countries are not willing to let go immediately of this unique chance to skim off Google everything they can about Western governments, businesses, and citizens.

Not to mention that it will take anyway a few more hours before all the root servers can be updated with no-Google domain lists. And in the meantime everyone is very busy searching and copying: for if they're horrified about what's out there on them and don't trust Internet companies anymore, everyone is also very eager to search under the skin of neighbors, colleagues, siblings, competitors, husbands and wives,...

The blogosphere goes nuts, the news media too. Mostly with "disclosures" on people and organizations, and "crucifying" Google ("Big Brother" and such). Some try to make sense of what happens to a society when suddenly all personal and private information becomes public and transparent and searchable and retrievable and forwardable. Others remember that back in 2005 already, Google went ballistic over a news.com report about the risks of "the information that Google collects and doesn't make public". Columnists write "full disclosure" columns totally redundant with what googling their name brings up. Two maintain that they had said so and that's the reason why they never used a computer. One points out "the unreserved foolishness of using Gmail (or Hotmail of YahooMail for that matter) for personal correspondence from the office so that there would be no traces of it left in the corporate mailing systems". Conspiracy theorists have a field day. Sergey (Mihailovich) Brin was born in Moscow, so the old KGB thing is brought up by a Republican Senator: was he "planted" there by the Soviet dark powers that be? Is he a kind of "Manchurian entrepreneur"? Both he and Larry Page are Jewish... (etc). Someone evokes "The Net", the 1995 film where Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock's character) is stripped of her identity, but what is happening here is the opposite scenario: this is not about deleting an identity, it's about magnifying all possible identities to gigapixel resolution, with more devastating (and globally subversive) effects.

Of course Google is dead as a business. Sergey and Larry and Eric Schmidt are wanted. But does that matter? In a few days, after patiently preparing for years, Google has really transformed the world in the most unpredictable (really?) and irreversible way. Maybe, in a mocking sort of fashion, they even meant to forewarn us when they wrote the first sentence of the IPO letter: "Google is not a conventional company".

(The scenario continues: a note coming out of a ...fax takes the story in a totally unexpected direction; motives are gradually revealed; and so on).

(Let me plagiarize John here: for anyone in Hollywood reading this, the screenplay is in the mail... - and thanks to him for the link)

UPDATE - readers comments:

Marco: Would this be entirely bad? If the playing field would actually be fair (unlikely, but just imagine) and the same amount of information was available on everybody and every organization. Wouldn't people have to think about their actions much more and consider the consequences? Without being able to cover up ones mistakes, being held accountable for ones actions, wouldn't we live a better live? Alright now, I 'll stop. There are plenty of negatives about this scenario and there are plenty of occasions when secrecy is crucial. However, not all is bad and there are probably some good things in a scenario like this as well.

June: What if the friendly search engine revealed a sinister under-belly? What if it reneged on its corporate mantra, "Don't Be Evil." Such ponderings are fueling one of the most entertaining memes in the blogosphere: The Evil Search Engine Scenario. TEDGlobal producer Bruno Giussani and The Search author John Battelle have been swapping Hollywood-worthy stories of a world in which Google switches sides.

Dino: You're forgetting one other vital fact. Eric Schmidt used to work for a Utah-based company. Forget the Russians, man, it's the ultimate temple conspiracy to expose the immoral underbelly of Sodom!

And more following the "comments" link below.