As time goes by we’re seeing our technological progress constantly reshaping almost every aspect of our lives. In this blog I want to talk a little about a couple of news stories I found recently which really got me thinking.
The first news story I want to mention is this report from the BBC. The story details allegations leveled at the NZ government by Glenn Greenwald – the American reporter who played a central role in bringing Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing revelations to mainstream attention. Now accusing the NZ government of having instigated project ‘Speargun’ (a scheme which would entail the collection of vast amounts of citzens’ metadata without their consent), Greenwald teamed up with Kim Dotcom to bring this news to a gathering of 1000 people. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange also made appearances via video link.
This kind of news should come as a shock but I’m starting to get to the point where I don’t feel shocked. These kinds of revelations seem to be coming out of the woodwork and starting to get me very cynical about first world governments. In this age of technology information is power and the more you have about a population, the easier they’ll be to handle and control. Who could resist exploiting this ever apparent fact?
A more positive technology story which came to light however is this report from the NZ Herald. A police department are using Facebook to catch criminals and enjoying a success rate of 95%. If Facebook is proving to be an effective way to nail offenders, why do we keep hearing about these plots to collect and hoard vast amounts of data about us. It’s hard to know the truth but surely these stories wouldn’t be so frequent if there wasn’t something suspect going on.