2. August 2008 by Martin Suter.

So the Department of Homeland Security has revealed finally that it has the right to detain a person’s laptop at the border, possibly for months, with no suspicion of wrongdoing. (Washington Post article).

“The policies . . . are truly alarming,” said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government’s border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.”

Senator Feingold is half right.

How do you require reasonable suspicion on the one hand and prohibit profiling on the other?

As a very frequent traveler, I am often shocked at what I see in airports these days. A few weeks ago, as I was putting back on my shoes and belt, I looked over to see an elderly, rotund woman, in tears, as she was being patted down and humiliated in plain view. The TSA employee was patting under her breasts with the back of her hand, looking for what, I have no idea. C’mon…When was the last time a 70 year old fat lady tried to hijack a plane? Or a 45 year old high tech executive father of two? Or a high school student? Or a…

You get the idea.

We live in a world where it is somehow deemed more acceptable to humiliate old fat ladies than it is to say out loud what we all know: radical Islamists are the threat, not my 14 year old son or the old lady next door, or me.

How will the DHS proceed if political correctness is a requirement? Will they have to pull aside and seize an equal number of laptops carried by business people, students and children – analyzing these before returning them months later? At what cost to the taxpayer? At what inconvenience to honest Americans?? And for what?!?

We lack the resources to treat everyone as a potential risk.

Put some wood behind the arrow, but aim it at the bullseye, not at me, not at my kids and not at fat ladies in wheelchairs.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

Posted in Security | Print | 3 Comments »

1. August 2008 by Martin Suter.

Recently a colleague of mine and I had a fascinating discussion over drinks one night about a concept that Clay Shirky refers to as “cognitive surplus”. He then sent me a link to a speech Clay gave at the Web 2.0 Conference in April of this year, called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” (video).

I love reading something that really makes you think, and Shirky nails it. Effectively he describes the cyclical anaesthetization and awakening of Western society, and suggests that we’re in the middle of that cycle currently. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of his description of the pre-Industrial Revolution gin carts helping everyone in London to dull their senses, but I can totally relate to his modern day example: the sitcom. He refers to Desperate Housewives as “a cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking…” I love that line!

Obviously, Shirky is a fan of wikis, and uses Wikipedia as a unit of measure for productivity of the collective against which he compares non-productive activity, most notably the watching of television. He estimates that there’s 100 million hours of collective human thought in “all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in.” He doesn’t share his calculations, but he seems like a smart guy, so I’ll take that number at its face.

He then cites statistics on the amount of time spent watching TV per year – 200 billion hours in the US alone, or as he equates it to “two thousand Wikipedia projects a year”. Therein lies his “cognitive surplus”. People sitting on their couches as passive recipients of brain candy, rather than being active producers…Doing nothing as opposed to doing something.

Where we diverge is probably in our views on profiting from this cognitive surplus. While he doesn’t come out and say it, my guess is that he believes that society as a whole will benefit from contributions made from this cognitive surplus and the collective sharing of knowledge. That’s a little too warm and fuzzy for me. I’d take a slightly different view. If we were to look at this through an economic lens, then tapping into this cognitive surplus could grow our GDP at Chinese-like rates!

There is not a shortage of time, there’s a shortage of intellectual activity.

That’s my .02 (with much inspiration from Mr. Shirky)!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

Posted in Web 2.0, Education | Print | 1 Comment »