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More Transparency, Coming Right Up!
10/18/2006
By Terry Calhoun
I’m finishing this on a flight from Detroit to downtown Washington, D.C. And I’m writing about “transparency” once again because I can’t seem to stop thinking about that concept lately. I’m reminded of it everywhere I turn.
Walking to my gate in the terminal, I saw but could not hear a commercial on a flat screen television that showed a poor soul in a middle seat of an airplane trying to work on his laptop with some level of confidentiality. Of course you can’t do that on a flight, really, and I don’t particularly care if the attractive and obviously European (although so far silent) lady sitting in the next seat reads what I write.
But the fellow in the commercial apparently cares. He looks to his left, and the person looking at his screen on the left looks away, just as the person to his right starts staring at his screen, then he looks to the right and his co-passengers switch gazing directions. I hope the commercial is set to some kind of bouncy music. What is it selling? A screen that slips over your screen and presumably prevents the person on either side from viewing your screen. Then the poor fellow in the middle will be safe from spying.
Good luck with that.
Leonard Cohen is singing “Everybody Knows,” with incredible timing as these words go into Microsoft Word. And he’s right, especially if he’s singing about the future, because we’re heading for a future where everybody d'es know, or at least enough people know about enough things that everybody might as well know.
Over at DailyKos they’re trying to piece together allegations made by some of Virginia Senator George Allen’s college buddies that after a hunting trip he stuffed a deer’s head into the mailbox of an African-American home with official records that show him having been arrested or having some kind of warrant out in Albemarle County, Virginia, in 1973.
Meanwhile, a writer for Wired has written an algorithm that searches MySpace for the names of known sex offenders and actually assisted a local police force in Suffolk County, N.Y., with the apprehension of 39-year-old Andrew Lubrano, a man who was soliciting youngsters via that social network.
And at the same time, the New York Times writes about how commercial databases on private citizens are destroying the principle of “sealed records” that are expunged. (After a minor d'es community service and then stays out of trouble for a while, for example.)
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