As a metaphor the internet affords all sorts of sensational and melodramatic language. I regular receive emails from public relations professionals representing clients who claim they are starting a revolution or changing the world forever.

Last week I got such a message regarding an announcement from Cisco, who are "the leading supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet." In this email, I was told that Cisco would make an announcement that would "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, business, and government" and that was all they could say.

Yesterday Cisco made their announcement, the introduction of their next generation router, the CRS-3, and the media seemed to walk right into the hype.

Surveillance technology may be the most corrupting and also the most intoxicating media proliferating in these rapidly changing times. Its use is a slippery slope sliding further into the surveillance society.

For example, a school district in Philadelphia has recently been caught spying on its students via cameras installed on laptops. The school board was able to do this through several thousand Apple Mac Books with spyware installed that they distributed to students. School administrators could access and activate the laptop camera whenever they wished.

The justification for including this spyware was that it would be used only if the laptops were stolen. The users of the device would not be monitored, but if they were to report it stolen, authorities would have access to this capability to find out where the device was and who had possession of it.

However, all of this came to the public's attention because, in a totally separate incident, school authorities provided as evidence a photograph they took of a student via a laptop, demonstrating that they had used this capability to spy on the boy. As they started to defend themselves, they also revealed that they had done this on other occasions, to investigate particular students.

This is a great example of the seductive power of surveillance, and the way technology can corrupt authorities. They are approved to use it in one way, but end up using it in others that weren't approved.

Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun, at least that was the sentiment expressed on CNN.com by one of silicon valley's hottest pundits, Pete Cashmore. It's a sensationalist statement, but one that speaks to many people's feelings, both positive and negative, about how personal information gets caught up in the world wide web.

Is privacy really dead? No, not yet. However, there's a growing chorus of people empowered by social media who are eager to declare that it is. This is partly because of the power of networks, and their ability to leverage your private information for personal gain and/or amusement.

Social media is also regarded as a popularity tool that allows people to emulate the celebrity culture we are immersed in. We can all become micro-celebrities who capture attention and influence, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The fear is that as this starts to become more and more prevalent, discarding privacy will become compulsory, expected behaviour necessary for graduating from school, getting that job, buying the home, and succeeding in life.

I've been super busy with work and not able to find room to write, although part of the problem is what I want to write tends to be complex, requiring time I don't have, to really play with the ideas. In the meantime I'll post some Flying Solo vids Wodek Szemberg put together based on a session we filmed last summer.

The Royal Ontario Museum has setup a new web cam that allows you to watch flesh eating bugs ravage a dead carcass! Granted it's in a controlled environment, so you shouldn't feel weirded out or anything, but some people do freak out at the sight of bugs gnawing on flesh.

This web cam is an interesting way to give people a behind-the-scenes look at how they clean up the skeletons that end up on display. Here's a couple of paragraphs from their press release:

For those who might wonder just how the skeletal remains of birds, squirrels and other vertebrate skeletons on display at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) acquire their gleam, a live webcam will for the first time allow a special glimpse into the Museum’s bug room. Not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach, and only open to curatorial staff, the bug room is the area in which animal specimens are placed and where a colony of beetles eat their way through animal flesh, revealing clean bones and performing a vital task in the preparation of artifacts for display or storage. ROM website visitors are invited to watch nature in action via live webcam footage of the bug room at www.rom.on.ca/insects.php from Thursday, May 14, 2009.

The bug room is a sealed, metal-lined, climate controlled room where a series of bug species make light work of cleaning skeleton bones. This month the live webcam will show Skin Beetles (Family Dermestidae) making their way through the flesh of a Golden Eagle discovered in Ontario’s Nipissing District and donated to the ROM by the Ministry of Natural Resources. As the room must remain in total darkness to mimic the natural habitat and behavioural patterns of the bugs, the webcam that is being used to capture the bugs in action has infrared capability, resulting in a black and white image.

Last week my CBC radio column covered the recent introduction of a 3D imaging surveillance system used at the Kelowna BC airport to screen passengers. Using millimetre waves the system is able to penetrate clothing and create a vivid 3D model of the passenger without clothes on. Thus it is a far more thorough system then the existing setup which only scans for metal.

Part of the focus of the column was on the privacy implications of such a system, and at the time CATSA (the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) was claiming it had the support of the federal privacy commissioner. I mentioned this in my column, but also expressed skepticism that the current steps being taken to protect passenger's privacy was not enough.

Turns out, the privacy commissioner does not support the pilot project, and does indeed have concerns with how passengers privacy might be violated. Here's a quote from the Globe and Mail:

"However, the privacy commissioner's office said yesterday it is concerned about the implications of the new system and it never told CATSA officials that the body-scanning technology meets Canadian privacy standards.

"At this very early stage we certainly don't know enough to endorse the project, so the suggestion that we endorsed it is perhaps a bit off," commission spokeswoman Anne-Marie Hayden said. "I think we're going to have to watch it closely and we're going to want to ensure that individuals' privacy rights are protected."

Thanks to Blair Campbell for alerting me to this. Goes to show that even when an organization says it is protecting your privacy you should still question that assertion, and try and think of unforeseen ways in your rights my be violated.

Over the past several weeks I've been working with my friend Danyon Reeves on the new Bob Rae website, running on the oh-so-lovely Drupal CMS.

Recently Privacy International came out accusing Google of being the greatest threat to privacy due to the fact that their massive Google machine is constantly absorbing and cataloging information. I had a chat with Nancy Wilson about this on CBC News Today:

I've been doing a number of panels, seminars, and appearances discussing facebook. Here in Toronto and generally in Canada, facebook use has exploded, so much so that the municipal and provincial governments have banned employees of the civil service from using it while at work.

In this panel, host Andrew Nichols interviews Nora Young and myself (Jesse Hirsh) regarding the appeal and general implications of the facebook phenomena.

There has been a number of news items in the past week or so that involve camera phones. They range from stories of global interest such as the hanging of Saddam Hussein, to provincial politics with the hit-and-run scandal in Nova Scotia.