Is informatization is bad thing in some way? Can it be dangerous?

Answer 1

When combined with ignorance in the proper proportions.

Answer 2

Its only deadly.

Informatization can be bad in a couple of ways, as the use of technology increases so does it's misuse. So using SSN's to identify all students in the US school system has lead to all sorts of abuses of information by criminals, essentially compromising the fiscal health of young citizens while their fiscal/economic lives are still in the crade - so to speak. But that's just what happens when corporations LIKE YOU.

Misuse of both personally identifying and other types of information at the corporate level presently borders on the criminal as it is. Companies like Choicepoint, Axciom and others have so much information and powerful computer systems to help sift through and "mine" data regarding your purchases, travel habits and other information which is "knowable" to determine things which are not explicitly allowed to be "known" - such as your specific income/salary.

They are quite good at making these estimates and the "average" estimate of income is never more than about 4-5% inaccurate, this has actually been proven to be within that 4-5% margin of error over 95% of the time. So they can't KNOW your salary - that's illegal - but they have enough information otherwise to "guess" it correctly 95% of the time.

Terrorists, used weak identification methods and identity theft to obtain credentials and credit based in Massachusetts, Michigan , Massachusetts , New Jersey,Texas, Virginia and West Virginia , it is unknown if they did so in other states, so far only New Jersey has made what could be considered appropriate measures to prevent fraudulent credentials from being passed off but at the expense of invalidating the identification credentials of the citizens of two counties of their state.

Additional areas of theft or potential for misuse are RAMPANT on the internet as spyware/spamware and such vaccuum up personal information on thousands or maybe millions of unsuspecting people every day.

Used by criminals or terrorists to finance or assist in perpetrating crimes or terrorist acts, yeah that could be dangerous.

Worse however, is government abuse, the vast power of the government to purchase and utilize supercomputing facilities to crunch communications and personal information (like Axciom or Choicepoint) and in many cases with their assistance means that since about the mid 1990's the government and increasingly does entertain the idea that the citizenry is essentially redefined as little more than just a big bunch of terrorists who have the vote.

It was painfully clear when Mr. Bush fought long and hard and chomped repeatedly at the bit to have rather vast data-collection computers assigned to target all American citizens for essentially permanent electronic survelliance. It was such a fundamentally reprehensable idea towards our constitutional rights that even the Republican controlled congress (often seen as a Presidential lapdog during the last few years) shot it down. (See total information awareness initiative - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office)

However it must importantly be noted that similar measures by the US and other allied governments in the international arena were completely successful and actually obtained useful actionable military intelligence called FININT for short by the analysts doing the searches.

FININT - financial intelligence - economic transfer info.
SIGINT - signals intelligence - computer/radio/internet info.
HUMINT - human intelligence - spys.


In what should have otherwise been considered a tremendously scandalous affair and certainly something for which people haven't but should have been prosecuted let alone fired, In 2003 and again in 2004, in the run up to the elections this international effort was dealt a probably fatal blow by Bush administration political folks speaking on Meet the Press and on other media outlets, who basically bragged and told the public about these methods in a desparate effort to be seen as being agressive against terrorists.

In the weeks following the initial 2003 broadcast(s), the trail of terrorist FININT that was being monitored evaporated and is no longer considered a viable avenue of intelligence gathering against Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations "in the know", as they now do not use e-mail or other means but an ancient and slow but effective physical courier system developed in the 7th century.

Al Qaeda for it's part switched to the physical courier system for economic transfers of any appreciable size, eliminated all but the most secure methods of electronic data transfer and have made a point of recruiting highly skilled computer-saavy operatives.

This will all come back to haunt us when we find that American Express or some other company that happily arbitraged their workforce to Pakistan or India has been thouroughly compromsized from within by Al Qaeda operatives gathering or having access to that same fountain of Choicepoint and Acxiom data.

There was a happy little "hacker" movie called "Sneakers" where one of the main characters "Cosmo" give an awesome little monologue "There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!" filmed in 1991-2, it just keeps becoming more and more relevant every day.

Cosmo was right - crazy...maybe.... but totally correct...

Choicepoint : http://www.csoonline.com/read/050105/choicepoint_letter.html
Acxiom : http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2005/05/b651807.html
TIA Initiaive : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office
FININT Failures : http://mediamatters.org/items/200609070006
Sneakers : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

Answer 3

i quess