Week 3 / The Big Brother on Menwith Hill

Topic 5

The reading assignment for this lesson, was about the Echelon. Unbelievable huge and old system of information surveillance of planet. In fact i don´t really believe it. I am quiteskeptic, according the information in this lesson it should looks like really huge system, which should be able to watch almost the whole information traffic on the planet. And even before the computer age. Simply i can not imagine how it worked/(could work :). OK, i am able to understand how was possible to collect these data (data is just a collection of facts, without any logical systematization), but the ability of sorting so huge amount of them and creating information (data which are processed) without computers, i can not even imagine it.

Since the invention of computer it is possible, of course. But before..? I can´t believe it. May be the American and British army had the computers really many years before.. it associated me the CharlesBaggabe´s Analytical engine. and the fictions based on the hypothetical scenarios (what if...)

If it´s really true... it mean, that google indexing (or something very similar) exist much longer before 1996.

The aspects of surveillance are everywhere and each day it is worse. the rise of amount of CCTV in the streets of the cities. It will looks like in the dystopian fictions and cyberpunk novels in few years, preventing crimes before they happen (allusion for minority report) The cell phones, which have almost each person still with, and which allow to watch the moving of the people in the real time, just for example google latitude, or here another article about this topic.

Even worse "EU funding 'Orwellian' artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for 'abnormal behaviour'", so some time i am a lot afraid of impact of ICT and Internet on the society. It´s really ambivalent.It can cause the social/new medial revolution, but also it can create totalitarian state much more effective then ever before. We will See.