A group of approximately 75 people came to the Levine Science Research Center Thursday night to hear Cory Doctorow, co-editor of boingboing.net, speak about the power technology has to enable or restrict personal expression.
The speech, part of the 2006-2007 Provost's Lecture Series titled "Privacy at Risk?" argued against the use of technology as a means of spying on citizens, emphasizing the power of computers and the Internet to enable new forms of collaboration.
"[The Internet] is the largest, most ambitious book the human race has ever written," Doctorow said, discussing its ability to bring people with similar interests together. He added that employing technology to track citizens, however, makes people more suspicious of each other and less willing to collaborate.
Doctorow said that tracking people's behavior to try to find the rare guilty person can negatively impact many innocent people in the process. He pointed to library content filters that block academically relevant information as an example.
"If we're all presumptively guilty, none of us have any rights," he said.
Doctorow covered a wide range of issues, from radio-frequency identification tags to biometrics to peer-to-peer file sharing. He expressed concern that children today are being conditioned to live in a police state and cited his recent trip to Walt Disney World as an example.
Visitors were required to place their fingers on a scanner or show identification before boarding a ride to ensure they had not "cheated the line," he said. When Doctorow refused the finger scanner and attempted to show identification instead, a Disney employee told him, "It's not a fingerprint-we're merely measuring the unique characteristics of your fingertip."
Doctorow said he was struck by children's willingness to comply with both the finger scanning and mandatory bag searches at the front gate. "Everyone has to be fingerprinted," he recalled being told by a 10-year-old boy.
Doctorow said attempting to restrict free speech on the Internet will result in failure, and people will find other outlets for expressing themselves.
He related a story of a friend who checked his personal website's message board and found two students discussing which girls at their high school were skanks. Their school, he said, had blocked social websites like MySpace.
"[Doctorow] understands how small changes in technology and society can have big consequences, and he's good at explaining those consequences to people," said James Boyle, a professor of law who suggested Provost Peter Lange bring Doctorow to Duke.
Joshua Smith, a graduate student in physics at North Carolina State University, said he learned about the lecture while reading boingboing.net.
Smith said the continuing emergence of social collaboration online along with the desire to use technology to expand authoritarian control would continue to cause conflicts in the future.
Senior Gideon Weinerth said the topic of the speech could be characterized as "a struggle between those who have power and those who do not."
He added that he agreed with Doctorow's view that computers should be tools of empowerment rather than restriction.
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