Yesterday, Cory Doctorow linked to his short story, Scroogled. The story, in general, was about what will happen when the government will start to be as efficient as Google. The story explained that “The U.S. government had spent $15 billion and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.”. Wired, however, think differently. Writeprint, a tool developed use semantic web features to “combat the Web’s anonymity by studying thousands of lingual, structural and semantic features in online postings. With 95 percent certainty, it can attribute multiple postings to a single author.” (…).

95 Percent certainty is a great figure, as one might think. Actually, it isn’t when you’re Brandon Mayfield. Mayfield’s fingerprint was mistakenly identified as belonging to one of the terrorists in the Madrid bombings of 2004. The reason? Mayfield was a practising Muslim and a target of FBI’s war on terror. Mayfield was profiled as a terrorist because of small similarities to a physical fingerprint. (Also, Mayfield succeeded in changing a part of the PATRIOT Act and deeming it unconstitutional in a recent appeal).

95 Percent accuracy? Is that good enough to have when a person’s life is in discussion? or is the question actually whether we want to profile a person?

Let’s assume that the remaining 5 per cent are redundant, but let’s assume that a person blogs about political subjects. What is the exact probability that would make him prone to this WritePrint? I can almost certainly say that one hundred per cent. Even when not criticizing the government or writing about state secrets, just for example, let’s assume that a political blogger would blog about Hillary Clinton‘s support of the alleged air strike in Syria earlier this month, or maybe that Burmese troops use automatic weapons against dissidents. Will that be “Probable Cause” under the PATRIOT Act (or any other international equivalent) to start profiling the blogger?

After granting Probable Cause, Cardinal Richelieu‘s “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him” (…) tend to be something greater. No longer will one need to bring six lines to the Cardinal, the Cardinal can find anything he wishes at the click of a button.

Now, who’s profiling who?

When We interviewed John Perry Barlow (Hebrew) last month, he said that we were saved from the government’s hands mostly due to their incompetence and that giving up one’s privacy, as well as the state’s privacy is the only mean to get anywhere with technology (expect more later this week from JPB). Once the government will stop doing clandestine work and open up all its records, I assume I’ll give up mine.

Proliferation of Privacy might be the only way to stop being accused of terrorism, while being clear from any other act. Proliferation of Privacy might be the only mean to gain privacy again. The same logic that states that Weapons don’t cause security, unless you have them, goes for Privacy. As long as other have their privacy, why should I give up mine?

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of governmental authorities I will find something in them which will make you paranoid.”