• Surveillance culture

    by  • September 15, 2008 • The Global Picture • 0 Comments

    Theres gotta be a record of you some place
    You gotta be on somebodys books
    The lowdown – a picture of your face
    Your injured looks

    The sacred and profane
    The pleasure and the pain
    Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
    And its your face Im looking for on every street

    A ladykiller – regulation tattoo
    Silver spurs on his heels
    Says – what can I tell you as I’m standing next to you
    She threw herself under my wheels
    Oh its a dangerous road
    And a hazardous load
    And the fireworks over liberty expode in the heat
    And its your face I’m looking for on every street

    A three-chord symphony crashes into space
    The moon is hanging upside down
    I dont know why it is I’m still on the case
    Its a ravenous town
    And you still refuse to be traced
    Seems to me such a waste
    And every victory has a taste that’s bittersweet
    And it’s your face Im looking for on every street

    Facebook, you know… who was that person at your party… big spiders that scrape it all into secret biometrics databases… how could it be otherwise, really, if the people who run that stuff are remotely rational.

    Solution: humane control of those capabilities. They’re too powerful to allow knuckle draggers to run the show any more. We totally screwed up the nuclear weapon, and wound up putting the whole world at risk, and the same kind of thinking is going into combat robotics, nano-bio technology, and biometrics. That has to stop – we need productive, better alternatives, not this current vector towards destruction.

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    About

    Vinay Gupta is a consultant on disaster relief and risk management.

    http://hexayurt.com/plan

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