"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin.
my source being a 1962 National Geographic I picked up the other day.
just something to think about as the focus is on stopping terrorists, not protecting the wider public's rights. not to say that things shouldn't be done. just that we ought to be thinking very carefully about their real effects.
at the dreaded panel, the Vic. Privacy commissioner said something clever; that laws brought in during hard times should at least have sunset provisions, so that when the immediate danger is over, we can stop and think about whether we really want to live with them; things like increased surveillance, greater police rights to search.
so I now have to go sit on a platform with the Victorian Privacy Commissioner (who was my law lecturer in journalism school), a marketing type and an emergency services type, and try to be entertaining about privacy, GPS and emergency medical treatment.
oh dear. have volunteered to speak at a mapping conference on a panel.
it will be a hypothetical about GIS systems (geographic(ly based) information systems) and their impact on privacy.
I will be the token journalist. I am interested in this stuff, but I hope they don't expect any facts from me. I'm good at opinion and random, inaccurate recollection of something I read somewhere.
maybe I need to do some homework.
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