Guest Blogger -- Bill Scannell

The Berkman Center hosted a luncheon series discussion earlier today with Bill Scannell, international media strategist and privacy activist. Here is Bill's guest blog post after today's event:

My brain hurts.

I just finished an amazing day of discussions with the Berkman crew on how to best square the circle of using public opinion to support litigation that will in turn effect legislation. 

The topic: privacy, an issue near and dear to my heart. 

The issue: the use of outside contractors ("partners") by the US government to do nasty things with our data and other personal information.

Those fine folks over at the Transportation Security Administration have been illegally using "partners" to merge commercial data with citizen's travel records in order to test the creepy Secure Flight air passenger profiling system.  As Secure Flight will not make flights any more secure but will be a huge windfall to "Big Data", how can we best remove the financial incentive from selling people's personal data and protect the privacy of individuals who wish to travel freely in their own country?

If the profits to be earned from data aggregation are outstripped by the costs of litigation, if ordinary Americans see Big Data as a danger to their well-being, if the companies that profit from the outsourcing of our constitutional rights are treated as State Actors, and if Congress is forced by public opinion (and votes) to rein-in Big Data, then America would be a freer, safer place.

Lots of 'ifs'...but one has to start somewhere.  I think I need to take a break from from putting out privacy fires and start thinking-out sane ways of fire prevention.  An anonymous sprinkler system, anyone?