See-Through Society

Introduction

Governments like to think they're in control. Especially in times of crisis, they try hard to portray an image of being one step ahead of their enemies, wanting us to think they are able to take decisive action that will solve problems once and for all. Since 9/11 in particular, western governments have reasserted their commitment to monitoring the movements, conversations and keystrokes of anyone they suspect of posing a threat to national security. One of the most high profile examples of this has been the US Government's proposed Total (later renamed 'Terrorism') Information Awareness (TIA) scheme created by DARPA . Ambitious in scope, one of projects stated aims is "to create a counter-terrorism information system that increases information coverage by an order of magnitude."

The TIA project quickly sparked controversy and it didn't take long for a response to the idea. Government Information Awareness (GIA) is a website that allows anyone to post and retrieve information about members of the executive, legislature, judiciary and senior executives from US companies . Set up by a group at MIT's Media Lab, it plays the numbers game, believing that millions of eyes can outperform the efforts and resources of a few thousand experts. Their stated goal is to, "develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government."

This short paper argues that GIA is part of a wider dynamic, towards enforced transparency of institutions that have traditionally held positions of control. It focuses not so much on the information gathering activities of traditional institutions such as governments, law enforcement agencies or multinational companies but instead on the activities of non-institutional actors such as NGOs, activist networks and individual members of the public. It doesn't focus on privacy (that important topic is left to other contributors to the Foresight exercise), but instead on openness.

Back to the hackers

To look forward, it is often useful to look back and when it comes to thinking about the future of the internet it is especially instructive to look back to its origins. Despite its military funding and early applications, the internet wasn't really created with military objectives in mind. Instead it was created by hackers - not the stereotyped teenagers bringing down the Pentagon's computer system from their darkened bedrooms, but clever programmers for whom a 'hack' is just a neat programming trick.

In his book A Brief History of the Future, John Naughton tells the story of the internet pioneers - people who were interested in furthering their academic careers in Universities rather than in making money. Giving away information for free was in their interest, increasing their chance of being cited by other academics, and they designed the net with this sharing of information in mind (Naughton, 1999). Sociologist Pekka Himanen puts it plainly: "The Net and the personal computer would not exist without hackers who just gave their creations to others." (Himanen, 2001)

As the internet grew, a hacking community developed - with communication facilitated by the technology they were creating. This community evolved according to rules set by the original few - but there was never any internet authority to enforce them. Instead, they were maintained through a shared set of beliefs. In a recent book, Pekka Himanen tries to explain the "hacker ethic", the passion for technology that drives hackers to spend hundreds of hours programming code quite often for no financial gain. He updates Weber's notion of the Protestant Work Ethic for the digital age, describing the seven values of the hacker ethic as: Passion, Freedom, Social worth, Openness, Activity, Caring and Creativity (Himanen, 2001).

The values of the internet's creators are now embedded in the technology itself. Each new member of the internet community has to adhere to the technical rules of the internet. The rules are informed by the values of those creating the rules, just as the laws passed by a government depend on the values of the individual politicians in that government. For instance, without thinking about it, all of us circulate information to others for free via the net rather than charging for our thoughts. These rules are, of course, effectively subject to continuous negotiation - since that ability was also written into the system by the internet's creators. And there are signs that, as internet access spreads across the globe, the values written into the internet are affecting life off line.

Real world hacking

The Government Information Awareness project mentioned earlier bears all the hallmarks of being a hacker's creation. That perhaps shouldn't be surprising as MIT was one of the centres of development of the hacker culture throughout the 1960s and 70s. Another MIT project reported widely in the media recently is the Corporate Fallout Detector , a type of Geiger Counter for brands, which allows consumers to swipe bar codes as they walk around shops while the device uses a database of corporate misdemeanours to make a sound whose volume is dependent on the level of pollution the company responsible for the product has emitted.

But it is not just MIT graduate students who are using the power of the internet to shine light into dark corners. The protest groups involved in street protest have been some of the most avid users of the internet. A visit to the Indymedia site shows just how suited the technology is to activism . Video and audio clips, press releases, articles and photographs from 'actions' around the world are posted 24 hours a day. A whole new system of information transmission has been created for a group of people who are cynical about the lack of alternative voices in the mainstream media. As their catch phrase goes, 'Don't hate the media, be the media.'

Another example is the human rights campaign network for the support of activists in Indonesian controlled West Papua . Activists now use anonymous email from within the country to alert campaigners outside West Papua to the arrest of activists as soon as they occur. Word quickly spreads though email lists and websites and, often within minutes, police stations begin receiving faxes and phone calls from angry westerners telling them that they are being watched and that any maltreatment of the prisoner cannot remain secret.

Some of the more established NGOs have also latched