New Book on Data and Power by Bruce Schneier.
From the post:
I’m writing a new book, with the tentative title of Data and Power.
While it’s obvious that the proliferation of data affects power, it’s less clear how it does so. Corporations are collecting vast dossiers on our activities on- and off-line — initially to personalize marketing efforts, but increasingly to control their customer relationships. Governments are using surveillance, censorship, and propaganda — both to protect us from harm and to protect their own power. Distributed groups — socially motivated hackers, political dissidents, criminals, communities of interest — are using the Internet to both organize and effect change. And we as individuals are becoming both more powerful and less powerful. We can’t evade surveillance, but we can post videos of police atrocities online, bypassing censors and informing the world. How long we’ll still have those capabilities is unclear.
Understanding these trends involves understanding data. Data is generated by all computing processes. Most of it used to be thrown away, but declines in the prices of both storage and processing mean that more and more of it is now saved and used. Who saves the data, and how they use it, is a matter of extreme consequence, and will continue to be for the coming decades.
Data and Power examines these trends and more. The book looks at the proliferation and accessibility of data, and how it has enabled constant surveillance of our entire society. It examines how governments and corporations use that surveillance data, as well as how they control data for censorship and propaganda. The book then explores how data has empowered individuals and less-traditional power blocs, and how the interplay among all of these types of power will evolve in the future. It discusses technical controls on power, and the limitations of those controls. And finally, the book describes solutions to balance power in the future — both general principles for society as a whole, and specific near-term changes in technology, business, laws, and social norms.
….
Bruce says a table of contents should appear in “a couple of months” and he is going to be asking “for volunteers to read and comment on a draft version.”
I assume from the description that Bruce is going to try to connect a fairly large number of dots.
Such as who benefits from the Code of Federal Regulations (CFRs) not having an index? The elimination of easier access to the CFRs is a power move. Someone with a great deal of power wants to eliminate the chance of someone gaining power from following information in the CFRs.
I am not a conspiracy theorist but there are only two classes of people in any society, people with more power than you and people with less. Every sentient person wants to have more and no one will voluntarily take less. Among chickens they call it the “pecking order.”
In human society, the “pecking order” in enforced by uncoordinated and largely unconscious following of cultural norms. No conspiracy, just the way we are. But there are cases, the CFR indexes being one of them, where someone is clearly trying to disadvantage others. Who and for what reasons remains unknown.