Big Brother is... making music videos

British rockers The Get Out Clause performed their song "Paper" in front of the now-ubiquitous CCTV cameras in London - then requested the footage under the terms of the Data Protection Act and cut it together to make the video. Pretty smart.

scary new world

From Wired -- Visible Man: an artist and professor mistakenly put on the terrorist watch list can't clear his name... so instead he started a web site, TrackingTransience.net, that makes his life an open book.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

Why do this?

The idea is to give them all info in real time, so they feel no need to investigate him.
So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

So it's both an interesting reaction and a FUCKING SCARY SIGN of the lengths we have to go through in this new security state.

The Future of Reading

"The Right to Read," by Richard Stallman.

He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do. And there wasn't much chance that the SPA—the Software Protection Authority—would fail to catch him.

Found this in a complaint about the Kindle and fears of Big Brother taking over our information. As if that could happen! What? It could? Never mind.

no more anonymity

This article in Popular Science describes a guy's experiment to try living off the grid and leaving as little personal information in his wake as possible. His conclusions: it is no longer possible to do this.

Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of National Intelligence, who proclaimed in a speech last October that “protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won.” Privacy-minded people have long warned of a world in which an individual’s every action leaves a trace, in which corporations and governments can peer at will into your life with a few keystrokes on a computer. Now one of the people in charge of information-gathering for the U.S. government says, essentially, that such a world has arrived.

The reporter's own experiment follows that setup.