The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Living in the north, we often feel a bit disadvantaged compared to people who live in the south. While this may be true for some things, we should definitely feel advantaged when it comes to living free from surveillance. In a growing wave, many people are starting to question how free they are living in our society. Since the September 11th terrorist attacks, most governments have been working on new sets of laws and methods to track people who live in their nations. Beginning with simple things like the Air Miles Rewards programs, databases collecting massive amounts of information on our spending, traveling, and surfing habits have become widespread. People have grown used to being tracked and followed. The OnStar program on GM cars is a perfect example. While being a valuable service to help people in accidents, and those who have locked their keys in their cars, OnStar also has the potential to track the position of your car 24 hours a day. Another technology intruding upon daily lives is surveillance cameras. Most urban centres are filled with cameras following every pedestrian and vehicle. Starting in London with concerns about violence by the Irish Republican Army, and now spreading to most other major cities in the world, downtown areas are filled with cameras and tracking devices. According to urban legend, it is now impossible to be off camera in the downtown areas of cities such as New York, Tokyo, and London. Many newer technologies which were only in infancy before the September 11th attacks have quickly grown to adulthood. For example, biometric face scanning software has quickly matured from technology on the drawing board, to the point where it is now being placed in schools in various districts across the U.S. to look for missing children, and also for people on various police watch lists. Another issue arising surrounds national identification cards. Once only something for scary science fiction novels or strict dictatorships, these cards, which will hold things such as our fingerprints, a DNA sample, and family information, are being investigated by the governments of many countries, including our own. The scariest project I have heard of yet, though, can be found on the Pentagon's DARPA website. DARPA is the agency of the Pentagon responsible for research and development of long term projects. One of the DARPA projects currently being worked on is called Lifelog. This is an attempt to create an entire record of someone's life. From phone calls made, TV shows watched, places traveled, and websites surfed through. Lifelog is an attempt to record absolutely everything a person does in their lives and feed this information through a database which searches for patterns. The idea is to uncover patterns of behaviour which will lead to terrorism suspects, and others the government feels like tracking. I don't consider myself to be a paranoid person, but if it's been a few years since you last read George Orwell's 1984, it may be time to renew your relationship with this classic novel.
