Sensing Technology As Open Source's New Frontier

destinyland writes "Christine Peterson coined the term 'open source.' Now she's proposing the same collaborative sharing approach to sensing technology 'to improve both security and the environment, while preserving — even strengthening — privacy, freedom, and civil liberties...' The Open Source Sensing initiative welcomes individuals and organizations, and warns that 'We have a short window of opportunity for guiding this technology to protect both our security *and* our privacy.' Peterson says that in the long term, 'open source defensive technologies will likely be the only ones capable of keeping up with rapidly-advancing offensive technologies, just as open source software is faster at addressing computer viruses today.' And the EFF's Brad Templeton warns that 'Cheap, ubiquitous sensing has the potential to turn the worlds of privacy and civil rights upside-down... It's not enough for governments to watch people; people have to watch governments.' His solution? 'Learning from the bottom-up approaches of the open source community.'

The "Bad Guys" can look at the source...

[Bakkster]

But so can the smart good guys. More (and possibly better) penetration testing and verification also means that there are fewer exploitable holes. Sounds like a win-win, both from the standpoint of security and privacy.

Re:I propose...

[thedonger]

propose that politians should have no privacy. All their records should be open long before the regular citizen should go through that.

Politicians are regular citizens. Maybe if more people realized that fact it would be easier to not be afraid of them, and we then could really get some change going in this country.

Totally Different Ideals

[Ohio Calvinist]

The problem is that a lot of the OSS community breathes the philosophy that "all information should and must be free... except for information about me, which should be confidential or not exist in digestable form at all." While an overstated and oversimplified sumation of reality... if those are two guiding principals, then where the rubber hits the road is quite difficult, if you're designing multipurposed software that doesn't have a very narrow scoped-purpose at design time, and you're really concerned that your work is going to be used in ways that violate either of those provlems. FOSS is a widget... if some company builds gears it has to know that one buyer might be using them to build hospital machinery and the other harpoon guns for whales. If OSS says you can use it, execpt for these purposes, it isn't very free as in freedom anymore.

Re:Nuclear WMD Sensing?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you find out your neighborhood has an irregular--perhaps even mildly dangerous--amount of radioactive activity. Watch the lawsuits roll in ...

I dislike barratry and other abuses of our legal system as much as anyone, but you know, we are a society of laws. Now, if my neighbor's house is in fact dangerous to me and my family, well, yes, I would like a legal remedy. The other options are (1) suck it up, do nothing, and suffer the consequences or (2) settle things outside of any legal framework. While in theory (2) sounds like a good idea, and can work well sometimes, it can also get nasty. I think the legal system often gets a bad rap, because it's always present during disputes. Thing is, the disputes are really what's nasty, the legal system is supposed to be the most civilized way we've thought of to resolve them.

Re:I propose...

[Daffy Duck]

Let's get closer to the mark and make it a felony for a candidate to accept money from anyone who isn't eligible to vote for them. Fewer felons to keep track of that way. :)

Re:I propose...

[mcgrew]

On item one, if I can contribute to any candidate who can vote on any legislation that affects me, why can't I vote for or against any candidate who can vote on legislation that affects me?

On item two, the nambla candidate isn't likey to get many votes OR much campaign cash. I can't vote against the nambla candidate by voting for the Republican and Libertarian candidates, now can I?