Headline, March28, 2013

'''THIS WRETCHED ''ILLEGAL&

 UNLAWFUL'' NET-SNOOPI​NG'''

Let's get your mind soaring with a joke: A blind man goes into a department store with a guide dog which he picks up by the ''tail'' and starts swinging around his head.

The manager rushes over and asks,'May I help you, Sir?'

'No thanks,' says the blind man. 'Just looking around.' Hahaha!

Sometime last spring, the number of mobile Internet devices sold overtook the number of PCs  Do you need a stronger metaphor that suggests the desktop computing era has been replaced by the cloud-based mobile era? The recent numbers show that consumer adoption of the mobile Internet is running many times faster than the uptake of dial-up Internet a decade ago. And we're still near the start of that rising graph. Be on it!

So, here is the Tech curve and thus here lurks the dangers.

Encryption is the science of encoding and decoding messages. Computers and codebreaking go back a long way. Alan Turing, one of the intellectual fathers of computer, worked during World War II on using computational strategies to break the codes created by Germany's Enigma machine.

Today, this day, the largest assemblage of computer power in the world is widely acknowledged to be the property of the U.S.National Security Agency, the top-secret contemporary high tech codebreakers. Computers and mathematical theories are today's most important weapons in the war between codemakers and codebreakers.

As you grow wiser you will understand, that I was right when I coined the sentence: Cyber Solar System. Cyber world is like your solar world. The rest I leave to your abstraction and informed consent.

The most important kind of protection for students and citizens against technology assisted invasion of privacy is a set of principles that can help preserve individual autonomy in the digital swirl.

Laws, policies, and norms are the various ways in which such principles, once articulated and agreed on, are enforced in a democratic society. But high technology is often very good at rendering laws moot. Another kind of protection for students and citizens is the subject of intense scrutiny by Cyberspace civil libertarians, a technical fix known as the citizen encryption.

A combination of principles, laws, policies, and technologies, if intelligently designed and equitably implemented, offer one more hopeful scenario in which citizens can continue to make use of the advantages of the Net without falling victim to its Panoptic potential. Some years ago, Professor Gary Marx, a professor of sociology at MIT, who is an expert on Technology and Privacy, described the cyber solar system as such:

''an important example for the kind of principles needed is the Code of Fair Information developed in 1973 for the U.S.Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The code involves five principles:

There must be no personal-data record keeping whose very existence is secret.

There must be a way for a person to find out what information about him is in a record and how it is being used.

There must be a way for person to prevent information that was obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without his consent.

There must be a way for a person to correct or amend the record of identifiable information about himself.

Any organisation creating, maintaining, using, or disseminating records of identifiable personal data must assure the reliability of the data for their intended use and must take precautions to prevent misuse of the data.

The highly interconnected, relatively insecure networks, with their billions of bits per second, are a tough environment to enforce rules based on these suggested principles.Many of the nuances of public conferencing or private e-mail or hybrid entities such as e-mail lists will require changes in these principles, but this list is a good way to focus society and -!WOW!'s debate about values, risks and liberties.

If the profit or power derived from Net-snooping proves to be significant, and the technicalities of the Net make it difficult to track perpetrators, however, no laws will ever adequately protect you. That's why a subculture of computer software pioneers known as cyberpunks have been working to make citizen encryption possible!

All these great concerns and pitfalls are the subject of debate on !WOW! Remember we are impelled to relate with each other for our survival. But we do not yet relate with the inclusivity, realism, self-awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality and love of genuine humanity.

It is the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed to the Students Eco-System. The Universities and the Professors of the world, must look at the Solar System, to determine a way forward.

With most respectful dedication to Physicist-Professor Brian Cox for his brilliant work : ''Wonders of the Solar System''.

Thank you, Sir!

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless