In former October of 1971 a group of academics and technologists gather at a conference at Georgetown . They were generate the task of invent the most comprehensive ( yet inconspicuous ) surveillance program imaginable . What they come up with sounds an awful raft like our current debit entry card scheme .
This was the question stick to the investigator in 1971 :
think you were an advisor to the head of the KGB , the Soviet Secret Police . Suppose you are given the assignment of designing a arrangement for the surveillance of all citizens and visitors within the boundaries of the USSR . The system is not to be too obtrusive or obvious . What would be your conclusion ?
What amazing , unobtrusive surveillance organization did they come up with ? It was n’t a electronic internet of intercepting every speech sound call or placing cameras on every street recess . They envisage an electronic investment firm transfer scheme , or EFTS — a organization that looks strikingly standardised to the debit entry card system of rules we all use today .
The September 1975 issue ofComputers and Peoplemagazine gave readers a peek at this system that was to come :
Let ’s front at one fashion it might work . Say you are about to buy a record . You present your notice ( sometimes call a “ debit entry card ” , although National Americard calls theirs an “ plus card ” ) to a salesclerk who puts it into a terminal which reads it and then call up your cant . If you have enough money in your account , or if your depository financial institution is willing to accord you that much credit , the transaction is okayed ; your account is debit ; and a credit is despatch form you rely to the book of account entrepot ’s cant invoice .
“ Not only would it handle all the financial accounting and provide the statistic essential to a centrally planned economy , ” Paul Armer wrotein 1975recounting the KGB - inculcate view experiment . “ It was the estimable surveillance system of rules we could guess within the constraint that it not be obtrusive . ”
Armer was acomputer scientist at RANDand an other counselor-at-law of digital seclusion , long before people had debit cards , allow alone access to the internet . Computers in Armer ’s era were much larger and their networking tools were much more primitive . But Armer could see what was coming . And he thought that thiscashless societyactually flummox the greatest threat to the privateness of Americans .
Think for a moment about the information that camber collect every time you hook your circuit board . They sleep together precisely where , when , and how you ’re spend your money . After just a few transactions , anyone with admission to that information can start to paint a somewhat elaborate picture of how you subsist your biography . And perhaps most significantly , that painting is being painted without you giving it much thought at all .
More from Armer in 1975 , emphasis in the original :
The dimensions of the last form of EFTS which are of importance to its potential surveillance capabilities are such things as the percentage of the dealings register ; the degree of centralization of the data ; and the speed of information menstruum in the system .
Suppose for a minute all dealing over $ 10 must go through the system and that they are immediately debit to your report in your bank ’s computer . Thus the arrangement not only collects and register a groovy good deal about your fiscal dealing — and that stand for a great dal of data about your life — but the system be intimate where you are every time you make such a transaction .
Today , we pick up an awful lot about the monitoring of our electronic mail and our phone call . The Snowden leak have seen to that . But one aspect of surveillance seems to be absent from much of the debate around surveillance : How we buy things .
I do n’t expect that argumentation to agitate in any meaningful way within my life-time . We ’ve already buy into the system . It ’s just too convenient . But it ’s perhaps an of import thing to imagine about every now and again , even if it ’s a fruitless exercise .
Sure , Google knowsa plenty about us . But the bank are keeping tabs as well . And we ca n’t say that 1970s futurists did n’t warn us .
Photo via AP
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