Money Well Wasted

Another interesting video caught my attention a couple weeks ago. This one has received a huge amount of traction across the web in recent weeks, reaching the top 5 most popular articles on Reddit this month, and seems to be causing a good deal of distrust in the governments that are adopting these technologies. If what is in the video holds true, many believe that this new system was a very ignorant use of money, and the breaches in personal privacy that accompanied this technology but were presented as an unfortunate necessity just add to the problem.

Assuming the allegations made in the video are mostly reliable, it bring up an very important debate on whether enough credible research and scrutiny of newly adopted technologies is being done, and whether more 'radical new technologies' will be adopted for political reasons alone. It seems, in this case, that effectiveness of this technology was either never researched properly, or that it was deliberately overlooked by some individuals. The inclination to go with the high-tech and more radical system seems to be quite high in this field, as in many, but is enough consideration going into the effectiveness of these methods over the older ones?

Being a very frequent traveller myself, I have never really been concerned with airplane safety, since anyone that decides to actually check the statistics will know that you probably have a higher chance of getting killed during your hotel stay between flights than on the actual plane. However, it is certainly understandable that airport security was heightened to a great extent, and I can certainly see some validity in the paranoia that exists given the last decade. Naturally though, when I started to see the shiny new body scanners that would do away with traditional invasive searches, my first thought was, "where do I sign up"? I did not even think to question the effectiveness and reliability of this new technology - far smarter people than I are employed specifically to make sure that these things are tested. Given how much money and political attention these scanners were getting, I assumed they were fully legitimate and were designed to be fool proof. It seems though, that a young reporter with access to the internet has managed to defeat this system completely, and that there has been a loud but subdued minority trying to get the message out all along that this technology is ineffective. We seem to follow that which we do not understand, trust in those who shouldn't be trusted, and ignore those who try and inform - all on the basis of convenience.

I believe this to be a significant problem with the 'information society' that exists today. There is an unprecedented amount of information delivered in new ways every day. The difficulty comes in sorting through this abundance of 'facts' and opinions, so that only the valid and verifiable ones are shared. It could even be thought of as a free market of information, which everyone has access to in both ways - read or produce - but that requires some set of rules or regulations to be truly useful.

This brings me off on a bit of a tangent which, for brevity's sake, I'll discuss in my next post. Suffice it to say, I have a renewed appreciation of the collective governance of information on the Internet, a realization which, almost paradoxically,  I came to after taking part in what some people might call a 'nerd war'. But, more on that to come.