For my final entry, I chose to analyze Hasan Elahi's FBI, here I am! talk at a TED conference. Elahi managed to make a very serious topic into a comical one. While the grim reality is that in this present day and age, there is no true meaning to the word "privacy", Elahi has taken it upon himself to relieve the government from having to do any extra work to follow his daily activity. Modern day technology and government intervention has taken away people's sense of privacy. Such scandals like that of the NSA phone tapping have caused people to feel uneasy. The state of national security that we currently live in has caused many innocent people to make he FBI's terrorist watch list. That's exactly what happened to Hasan Elahi after he was detained in the Detroit airport after flying back from a presentation he was doing overseas. As he mentions, when you know you are being monitored, tracked and documented, you begin to feel as if you are losing control over your life. Therefore, in order to get his control back, he began documenting every single moment of his life, including traveling, food eaten, toilets used, all since he knew that the FBI was doing it to him anyways.
I found it rather humorous and daunting at how one sided this invasion of privacy is. While I think most can agree that national security is extremely important, it is also curious to realize how little we know or are allowed to know. Elahi points to that we are not allowed to take pictures of federal buildings, but meanwhile the government is allowed to tap into our phones and private messages and use other forms of AI. This brings us into the recent use of drones. It is not an unknown fact that drones have the capabilities to not only conduct surveillance in its surrounding area but also they are able to record conversations and view activity inside of buildings. While the government is not actively using drones to conduct surveillance within the United States, private corporations such as Google have been known to use technology such as their google cars in order to tap into home wi-fi networks and view private information. It is also unsettling to know that while the government is able to brush aside people's concerns about unlawful activity by claiming that it is not listening to everything, or that it is for the purpose of keeping us safe, individuals are expected to hand over their entire life history.
When Elahi was first detained in Detroit, he was asked a series of questions concerning his whereabouts and random dates, particularly those surrounding the attack on 9/11/2001. Luckily for him, he actually had his entire schedule very well documented. However, even after having shown proof of his whereabouts, he was still asked to go to the FBI office multiple times over the course of 6 months and undergo 9 consecutive polygraph exams. After that, Elahi felt the need to contact the FBI every single time he chose to travel, so that they would not think that he was fleeing for any reason. He then took it to the extreme of "watching himself" which is of course very humorous but also eerie that he felt that was his only option to regaining control over his privacy.
Again, all of this makes a full circle and comes back to data collection and security measures taken by government officials to combat terrorism. At what point does the cost outweigh the benefit? While it is understandable that government agencies are dong their best and using all resources possible to find actual threats, it is also not permissible that their data collection would lead to errors such as adding the incorrect people to their terrorist watch list. Accosting and completely violating an innocent person's right to privacy without having concrete evidence is crossing the line. The use of AI has left too much room for error, in which government officials feel they can fully rely on their data to make a difference and when they are wrong, they still seem to deny any responsibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment