Why are we here?

August 22, 2006 CLTS

In what could almost be described as an existential crisis, I have been asking myself why/whether to host a personal website for exactly the same amount of time that i have been sitting on iankerr.ca. I registered the site right around the first bong of the new millennium; it has taken me six years to execute. When I bought the domain, I had no clue why or what I would use it for. I confess that I mostly did it so that no one else would cybersquat.

Look out: The eyes have it

January 12, 2004 CLTS

This article was first published in the Globe and Mail on January 12, 2004. The published article can be read here.

When Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published their landmark Harvard Law Review article "The Right to Privacy" in 1890, they talked about privacy as "the right to be let alone."

At that time, they were responding to the arrival of the camera in society. They could not have imagined the challenges to privacy that exist in the wired (and soon-to-be-wireless) world that we live in today. For example, how are our rights affected when cameras or computer chips are implanted into our bodies? Who are we, actually? Where do "we" end, and the machines begin?

Will Technology Kill Anonymity

December 11, 2003 CLTS

This article was written by Kate Heartfield and can be downloaded here.

Age of surveillance goes under the scope

September 15, 2003 CLTS

A true surveillance society can now be achieved, anywhere in the modern industrial world, if that is what the population or leadership wants.

That sounds like something George Orwell might have said in one of his more paranoid moments. But I’m afraid those words come from someone who’s a lot closer to us, both in space and time.

Indeed, the words aren’t from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but from 1999, and the writer wasn’t George Orwell, but David Flaherty, the former B.C. information and privacy commissioner. Mr. Flaherty’s words accurately captured the state of information technology in 1999; four years later, the threat of a surveillance society is greater than ever.