http://prospect.org/article/want-predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities
A wonderful article from colleague Virginia Eubanks. She points out that this is not an individual concern, but a community concern. It is not a privacy issue but a civil rights issue. We need to move from a fixation on privacy towards a future based on digital human rights. The alarm is raised when it stops being strategies used to keep in check the unruly people not like us – the immigrants, the welfare recipients, the radicals in foreign countries – and starts being a strategy to keep an eye on us middle and upper middle class. But instead of us decrying the breach of our privacy, we need to come to see how human rights have been violated throughout, not just ours but those on whom these techniques have been used for decades.
Thanks, Virginia, for a wonderfully thoughtful piece!