information technologies

After listening to Alexander Finger's presentation, entitled "Civil Rights 2.0 and what European Governments do to fight them" this morning, I had the feeling that the only way to preserve my privacy would be to withdraw completely from civilization and lock myself in a cave. His perspective on the way technologies can be used to collect information on us and our daily routines should be enough to raise the hair on the head of any citizen. Instead, not only does there seem to be no public debates on many practices of data collection and retention by authorities, but a large number of people seems to feel that it a lesser evil to preserve the physical safety of honorable citizen. I was already aware of the "big brother" issue, but I must say that the examples offered by Alexander Finger make it appear in a much more concrete light.

- A few years ago, an east-german journalist decided to run an inquiry on a child pornography website that was hosted on a server located in Philipines. He thus paid with his credit card to have a full access to the website and then went to the prosecutor to ask him to launch an investigation about the owners and "customers" of this website. The problem is that he was confronted with a crime, but no physical and identifiable suspects. The judge then asked the credit institutions to turn in informations about all the German cards holders who had performed online transactions of a certain amount during a specific time span. In the process, not only did the judge asked the banks to produce suspects, when one usually looks for suspects, but made hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, potential criminals.