Can somebody please explain what Google did wrong?

They drove around with a car, taking photos of the public surroundings of their car (that’s how they make StreetView).  While so doing, they picked up and recorded whatever wireless signals were coming in to their car.

Now people are whining that they are being spied upon.

Does anybody really think that preventing this kind of conduct has anything to do with making our communities secure against unwanted surveillance?  Is this line of defense the best we’ve got?

If you stand at your doorway, yelling at the top of your lungs about many intimate, private details of your life, is it fair to accuse a passerby of illegal (or unethical) surveillance because they happen to be recording their surroundings with an audio recorder?

Do you think that members of congress will rally to your defense, accusing those same pedestrians of spying on you?

There are plenty of very secure options for wireless communication.  If you aren’t using any of them, that’s your prerogative.  If you abstain from secure practices while at the same time communicating about sensitive issues which you bizarrely regard as private, that’s your problem.

On the bigger issue of Google being a scary monster of information collection… Sure, I see your point.  While on one hand, the information they collect is, in every practice I know of, voluntary (search phrases, email contents on Gmail, advertising clicks, cookies, the Google Toolbar, and many other methods), it’s not any less scary that they know more than anybody else about the modern polity.

I’m not usually a defender of google or any other giant corporation – I’ve expressed my fair share of google skepticism.  In this case, I think they’ve actually done wrong by repeatedly apologizing, but I guess that’s a PR move.

Nevertheless, their amazing (and thankless!) gift two weeks ago of releasing the VP8 codec to the public domain under an open source license was perhaps the single most significant act of bolstering independent radical journalism in the (still short) history of website-based video delivery.  Still not as profound as the movement that Miro represents, I’ll grant, but big (and a LOT more expensive).

To my mind, Google gave us as $124.6 million dollar gift, and I think we have a responsibility to accept it in full if we want to take advantage of it. That means in turn taking full responsibility for our network presence.  If your upload stream includes poignant, radical, inspirational content encoded in a free codec for the world to cherish, good.  If your upload stream (and wireless connection) includes unencrypted content that you irrationally regard as private, bad.

UConn SSDP had a really cool (and under-reported) pre-conference to SSDP’s Northeast Regional Conference in April.

Several of “the usual suspects,” including myself, spoke. There’s no doubt, though, that Eric Sterling stole the show. I have seen him speak 10+ times, and he is one of the best and most engaging public speakers I have ever been exposed to. Fortunately my camera was rolling:

Of course my readers knew I never had any illusions that Barack Obama was going to be a good President or that he was anything but a corporate lapdog. I thought it was fairly obvious after he voted to strip Americans of their right to trial by jury when they were spied upon by telecommunications companies with whom they contracted in good faith.

That said, I understood how and why many of my intelligent friends were inspired by this man’s powerful words.

Finally, now, a year after the election, people are really realizing that Obama is, at least in the worst ways, as bad or worse than Dubya Bush was.

But why? Obama’s support for warrantless wiretapping, torture, wars of aggression, bank bailouts, and all the rest of this dreadful administration’s crimes are scarcely printed in the New York Times or the Washington Post. When a tiny flashlight is shone on one corner or another of these facts, the context is always “The Obama Administration, continuing the Bush Administration’s policy of….” as if their hands are tied or as if they are somehow less culpable for the murder and torture that they commit each day.

One source, however, has consistently, without fail, continued to break the news and place it in a wide, intelligent context each and every time Obama tightens the vice-grip of totalitarianism that people more readily associated with Dick Cheney. That source is Salon.com and particularly Glenn Greenwald’s column on Salon.

Today, Greenwald writes an awesome expose on Obama’s use of the “State Secrets” privilege to cover up the shadowy wings of the White House, one of the many skills he has learned and improved upon from his predecessor.

This was just brought to my attention by Jessica Sloan, a friend of mine who is a Registered Nurse (and also a daughter of a Registered Nurse) in New York.

Now, without any legislative backing or public hearings, the New York State Health Commissioner has made an “emergency executive order” demanding that Jessica, her mother, and every other medical service professional to be vaccinated with both the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccines.  If they decline to allow this, they’ll lose their jobs.

Remember, these are not government employees.  They are private citizens who have worked hard to build a career around helping people be healthy.  They know better than anyone the risks of being, or declining to be, injected with swine flu vaccine.

A recent small protest on the steps of the New York State Capitol in Albany got a bit of news attention, with local TV coverage,

Later, a lawsuit filed got more coverage, and the decision of a New York State judge got even more coverage when he issued a restraining order against the State, preventing it from vaccinating people until a hearing is held.  The hearing is scheduled to begin October 30.

Many health care professionals have said they’ll be fired rather than allow themselves to be injected with the vaccine.  As with all flu vaccines, it’s quite risky.  In addition to the typical risks, though, the plaintiffs say that this vaccine was rushed to market hastily and has already caused more sickness than usual.

Does anybody have the relevant documents?  I’m looking for, but cannot find:

• The text of the mandate
• The brief filed by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and the response, if any, from the state
• The restraining order
• Any kind of press release from the State defending the mandate

I have started a facebook group.  Please invite!