yet another database

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu Jan 23 13:10:33 PST 2003



>
> <http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,57354,00.html>
>
> More Checks on U.S. Travelers By Ryan Singel
> 02:00 AM Jan. 23, 2003 PT
>
> Connecting the dots is usually child's play. But privacy
> advocates say that a government plan to apply sophisticated
> computer algorithms and "fuzzy logic" to unconnected
> databases to sniff out terrorists violates the privacy of
> American travelers.

That is an idiot's hope for security. Anyone who fears the new computer powered "library of information" should read The Library of Babel in _Labyrinths_ by Jorge Louis Borges. Here is my favorite quote from it.

"[w]hen it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some [section of the Library]... Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native [dwellings] and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion... Others went mad... The Vindications exist... but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of man's finding his Vindication... can be computed as zero."

I think this new hoopla is more about jobs for computer programmers than about security, sort of industrial-informational-military complex.

Wojtek



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