Pulsepolitics
Pulsepolitics // How social media is changing politics
// posted by Greg // 04.22.2008 at 3:34 pm //
NJ, More then just great tomatos, smoke stacks and Newark.
The Garden State, home of the the NY Giants, the Jersey Devil, Bon Jovi (and Springsteen) has 1-uped it’s 49 competitor states again. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has marvled at the 16 lane Garden State parkway or graduated from the illustrious Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. What has the Garden State done, you ask? NJ has become the first state to declare that individuals have a right to privacy online!
According to the article this change in the law reflects how people use the internet i.e. like a phone, or the mail. Both methods of communication for which users have an expectation of privacy. My question is this? If the police/security apparatus want to monitor our net usage is it really an invasion of my privacy if all they see is my i.p. address? In other words I don’t care if the police think that 223.125.542.234 has been frequenting porno hourly, however if they had my full name I might be a bit urked out?
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Actually the boundaries between phone and internet are rapidly disappearing. Each day more people is adopting the VoIP phones or doing voice calls using popular services like Yahoo or Skype and traditional companies are adopting more digital standards. With the fast adoption of the technology there is no going to be much difference between phone or Internet based communications and then this legal discussion and normative agenda about privacy on internet communication should continue very actively.
Even the difference between TV and Internet are going to disappear in some point; many companies like Comcast or AT&T are offering many choices where everything is going digital. Technological speaking this digital world will allow to know exactly what we see (TV or Internet), who we talk to (voice or written communications), what we talk, who we know (on-line communities), what we do (our own agendas are some where in the web) at the point that some body having access to that data almost can infers what we think.
It sounds scary but it is a reality; last year an article in blog.wired.com called the attention (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/att-invents-pro.html) about a programming language invented by AT&T for Mass Surveillance originally intended for “marketing” research but actually useful for effective surveillance intelligence.
Well the omnipresent digital technology is already everywhere and we are adopting at a very fast pace. Now the question is how fast and how appropriately our legislators around the nation (an the globe) would be able to assimilate this new reality and adjust our state and federal legislations to protect our fundamental principals of freedom, democracy and privacy.
This New Jersey Court ruling is a late call in the sense that something must be done about privacy in this digital age, let’s hope to see more efforts in this field sooner than later.