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IT does more to hinder democracy than it does to enhance it

Instead Google entered into an arrangement where by they would contact the blogger and give him or her 3 days to respond anonymously to the allegations. There was no response from the blogger so Google handed over the IP address to the court and plantiffs despite there being no legal requirement for them to do so.

"The anonymity of the Netflix Prize dataset has been broken by a pair of computer scientists from the University of Texas, according to a report from the physics arXivblog. It turns out that an individual's set of ratings and the dates on which they were made are pretty unique, particularly if the ratings involve films outside the most popular 100 movies. So it's straightforward to find a match by comparing the anonymized data against publicly available ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) (abstract on the physics arxiv). The researchers used this method to find how individuals on the IMDb privately rated films on Netflix, in the process possibly working out their political affiliation, sexual preferences and a number of other personal details"

Hushmail, a longtime provider of encrypted web-based email, markets itself by saying that "not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer."

But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals targeted by government agencies that are able to convince a Canadian court to serve a court order on the company.

The foundation shelved the study, which it has not made public, after a group of local business people bought the paper, because it did not want to appear to be competing with the new owners, Ms. Rimel says. But she remains deeply concerned about the state of the nation's newspapers and has agreed to serve on the board of ProPublica, the new investigative-reporting project.

"Everybody from the Founding Fathers on have said we need a free, robust press, and a market failure in journalism is a deep public-policy problem," she says.

Transformational Government, dressed in the language of consumerism, is what NO2ID calls “the database state” – management of citizens’ lives through centralised computer systems; pooling and cross-referencing information about people gathered on any pretext for any purpose, amounting to mass surveillance. Once your relations with the state preserved your privacy, being limited to relationships with bodies that were separate from each other. A single department was powerful, but it did not judge you on your whole life.

Transformational Government changes that. You will have a single permanent record, and your identity managed (or determined) by the state. That will be held together by cross-referencing databases – which is what a National Identity Register is needed for. ‘ID cards’ are the concrete expression of this register, but strictly speaking are not necessary: numbering you and making constant reference to the central file will do.

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