On Wednesday we talked about some pros and cons of the advancement of technology. With technological advancements, it has become increasingly easier to keep in touch with friends or relatives. It was brought up in discussion that if social networking services like facebook or myspace didn’t exist, we would probably lose contact with many friends.
Although today’s technology has many benefits like these, I thought it would be worth mentioning a recent article I read which describes the FBI’s plans to create a computer database of people’s physical characteristics including fingerprints and iris scans. The FBI say that if they do this, it will allow them to better identify criminals and terrorists. According to Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, countries that are already using images of palm prints they have collected find 20 percent of their positive matches from prints left at crime scenes.
However, this could be a major privacy invasion because it may allow the government to track people anywhere. Also, according to Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project, there will likely be thousands of cases in which people travelling by airplane will be mistakenly identified as possible terrorists and be thoroughly searched, resulting in unnecessary delays. In addition, the FBI is also planning a service in which an employer can ask the FBI to keep an employee’s fingerprints and let them know if the employee ever breaks the law. I feel that it should be carefully considered whether or not the benefits(safety) outweigh the costs(privacy).
Here's a link to the original article for those of you that are interested:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/04/fbi.biometrics/index.html?iref=newssearch
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2 comments:
Great post (and thanks for the link to the CNN story). I think you're absolutely right to be weary of some technological intrusions. As we discussed in class Wed, there's nothing inherently neutral about tech or communication. The issue, really, is how we take them up and to what ends we use them (or, conversely, to what ends they use us). In any event, this is where questions of ethics become most important...
I would guess that many people would find the shelter of safety more inviting, and others finding their privacy to be number one. If it is optional to sign up I doubt that the people signing up would be the ones committing the crimes. This is a tough one, I hadn't heard about this before. I like my privacy, but I think that it is obvious that everyone must participate for it to be most effective.
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