By Marsha Joyner
Isn’t technology wonderful! You can see our TV 6,000 miles away. And Facebook brings everyone within a keystroke.
Just before the late evening news in Hawaii, my husband Kenneth said, “a tremendous 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck Chile.”
“That’s awful,” I responded and went to bed thinking no more of it.
Until 5:20am my cell phone rang and rang and rang—“Oh damn, nobody calls this time of morning unless it is bad news.” By the time I was fully aware the landline rang. “Yes Scott, no Scott—thank you Scott” Kenneth said and promptly turned on the TV. We have a Tsunami warning because of the earthquake in Chile.”
“Oh dear, I must get Kaspar’s (the cat) carrying case . . . do we have enough fresh water. . .I hate canned foods. . . etc,” I began the emergency check list in my head. Knowing full well that we have everything. Living next to the water demands a level of preparedness that most people do not have to deal with.
HoneyGirl (the dog) was breathing heavy next to the bed and Kaspar (the cat) was standing on my chest daring me to open my eyes. What a way to awake from a dream. Or am I still dreaming? No, this is real!
The TV news was showing lines at the gas stations and it was still dark. Local residents were scrambling to stock up on water, gas and food as sirens pierced the early morning quiet across the islands ahead of the tsunami. Some stations had enough gas, but other stations reportedly ran out. At supermarkets, residents stocked up on essentials like rice, water and toilet paper in anticipation of the high waters. The TV repeatedly ran the picture of a sign at a store limiting families to two cases of Spam. A must in every local menu.
My first of many calls was to Marilyn, my daughter, to warn her… “Damn!” The sleepy voice on the other end of the phone said. “Mom what a wake up call. Thanks Mom, I’ll get my young’ens together. Aaron is at the airport leaving for a class trip to America and Ashley has to go to class today.” They live at the top of a step hill in Maile, a very safe place to ride out a Tsunami. The home has an unobstructed view of the ocean. It’s about 50 miles from me as the crow flies. But then we have no crows. And I really don’t know how crows fly.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 28, 2010 at 10:16 pm
[This post is the the third in a series (1, 2).]
Like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I want it all.
I want my data to be free, I want to be in control of it and I want to have control over my privacy as well. Is that too much to ask? The watchdog group Privacy International released their annual report today about privacy around the world and put the US in the lowest category – “endemic surveillance societies.” Can we figure out how we can minimize surveillance while balancing privacy and the incredible opportunities that come from making at least some of our data open?
In the background of Marshall’s overview of contemporary privacy issues are discussions of our “post-privacy era.” Chris Messina, who has been involved in developing standards and technologies for handling personal data on the internet, writes:
My somewhat pessimistic view is that privacy is an illusion, and that more and more historic vestiges of so-called privacy are slipping through our fingers with the advent of increasingly ubiquitous and promiscuous technologies, the results of which are not all necessarily bad (take a look at just how captivating the Facebook Newsfeed is!)
Still … there needs to be a robust dialogue about what it means to live in a post-privacy era, and what demands we must place on those companies, governments and institutions that store data about us, about the habits to which we’re prone and about the friends we keep…
I think there needs to be a broader, eyes-wide-open look at who has what data about whom and what they’re doing about — and perhaps more importantly — how the people about whom the data is being collected can get in on the game and get access to this data in the same way you’re guaranteed access and the ability to dispute your credit report. The same thing should be true for web services, the government and anyone else who’s been monitoring you, even if you’ve been sharing that information with them willingly.
The history of the US government’s surveillance of its own citizens says to me that privacy has actually always been an illusion. Old FBI files show the government maintaining decades worth of minutia on people’s affiliations and associations. For example, in close to 1000 pages of FBI documents that I have on the Greater NY Council for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the early 1960s (when my father was the Executive Director), for practically every person mentioned there are lists of political meetings they were known to have attended and organizations they had been members of, often dating back to the 1940s.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 20, 2008 at 11:36 pm
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