what do you make of this?

http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml;jsessionid=RH3LHJZCYP44CQSNDBCSKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleId=18823028&_requestid=2083

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/03/11/kapor_quits_groove/

Ray Ozzie, CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Microsoft, is an investor in SL. Ray became the CTO of Microsoft when his previous company, Groove Networks, was acquired by Microsoft in 2005.

Apparently, Groove Networks was discovered in 2003 to be cooperating with the TIA (Total Information Awareness) program. The TIA program was halted by Congress as being, possibly, illegal. Congress passed an amendment barring TIA from gathering information on Americans without Congressional authorization. We all know how well that worked.

Ray Ozzie's longtime friend, Mitch Kapor, also an SL investor, left Groove Networks in 2003 to "pursue other interests." Mitch seems to give different answers about his resignation from the board of Groove Networks. One answer is that he wanted to spend all his time on non-profit endeavors. The other answer is that he was "troubled" by TIA (and, we suppose, Groove's involvement.)

Mitch said, "I'm a very committed civil libertarian, and along with other civil libertarians, I have significant concerns about the potential damage to our freedoms from the TIA project."

Mitch left the Groove board, but, apparently, remained a major Groove shareholder.


discuss.

Well I found this:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/

which seemed to indicate a collapse of the project, but I would expect it had simply been pulled underground.

It is possible to think that someone with big moral concerns about the issue should have sold his shares too, but it is also possible that he decided to keep them in order to be able to have access to information about what they were doing?


In the UK I am most concerned about the information gathering which is becoming run-of-the-mill here, but in our usual Professor Branestawm, haphazard way. The Connexions scheme gathers information about young people 13-19 and keeps it, and that information may include some VERY intrusive stuff. See
http://www.arch-ed.org/archives/databases_02.htm

Joined-up government sounds like something you might want, until you realise that it allows the UK government to share information around which used to be confidential. In the case of young people, that may include health, mental health, police and housing, for example, all sharing "confidential" information which would in the past have stayed in one of those specialist areas.

As a home educator, I am enabled by the law of the land to home educate my children, without permission from the local education authority. Which makes it rather strange that some local education authorities have started to send round a questionnaire on families to police, social services, health, housing etc, alerting them to the fact of a family's home education and asking for "input".

I am extremely alarmed by the change in culture in the UK which assume that if you object to the authorities collecting information about you, you must have something to hide. The old feeling that the state ought not to interfere in things which don't concern it has more or less gone. EVERYTHING concerns government, and most people lie down and fill in the forms.

The one saving grace in the UK is that government often loses them.
Cali