Most important ideas for 2033 - security blogs

Most important ideas for 2033 - security blogs

Personal security passes, a digital warrant contained in the writings and other stored ephemera in one's blog.

Dave Pollard's cooking up some more excellent thoughts. His first of a series of important ideas for 2003 concentrates on blogs. This item, I'd like to revisit.

"Blogs could be the platform for a proxy for each of us as individuals, our electronic filing cabinet and electronic identity - A blog consists of information about you, and knowledge you've accumulated. What if you expanded it to be a repository for all the information about you and all the knowledge you've accumulated, your 'locked' filing cabinet. You control it, you decide what does and doesn't go into it, and who can have a temporary key to what parts of it. Then at work, it could be your proxy, the repository of knowledge that shows your value to your employer and the value you've added to the company. And it could be your resume. At home it could be your medical patient record. Your bookshelf catalogue and refrigerator/pantry inventory and recipe book. Your bio for the dating service. Imagine the applications that could be built on this knowledge. Your intellectual property, under your control. Amazing. Scary."

One of the applications would be the policeman stopping you to see if you're a terrorist or not. Easily he'd be able to access you blog with bills or other background knowledge you have about yourself on his mobile device. Looking at your posts he'd see if you're an extremist. If you didn't write, he could question you on your utility bills, your movements, interests.

I do see the day when it is a legal requirement to have a blog. For this very purpose. All your school, employment and bank records, bills, passports and other legal documents will be sent there by government agencies, utility companies and so on. Your library books, music choices, phone calls, browsing statistics, every conceivable record would be there, including GPS information from mobile devices. Transport records, car ownerships, bus or train trips. FOAF is only the start.
Big brother? Sure.

As a way of finding criminals, of checking out truths, researching backgrounds, probabilities, understanding motivations. It couldn't be beat. Where as finger printing, or retinal checks could if there's no previous history of wrong doing.
Thought police? Sure.

In a civilisation where 99.999% of people are good, honest. Where 0.001% are bad, dishonest and out of them the tiniest minority are evil. Where that evil, in years to come could wipe out thousands, millions even billions of people, I don't mind. I welcome big brother, as I do with the zero tolerance of New York's drive to eliminate crime. As I do with the CCTV cameras now everywhere.

Thirty or forty years, after the second, or third WMD attack on the West the public will say yes to anything.
Security will be our new morality.