Crowdsourcing, Wikileaks, Cyberwar, and More

A roundup of news stories that the Open Society Information Program team has been following this week.

Google Ends Secret Wifi Data Gathering as International Privacy Watchdogs Investigate
Google vice president Alan Eustace has stated that his company is "mortified" that its Streetview cars have been "inadvertently" collecting and storing personal data while scanning wifi networks. The Streetview cars, which travel the world taking photographs to upload to Google's controversial Streetview service, had also been gathering information about the location of wifi networks to improve the company's geolocation services, a practice Google say they will now stop. Privacy watchdogs in the UK, Germany, France and Canada are currently investigating the issue.

Livejournal Bloggers Expose Suspicious Government IT Contracts in Russia
Global Voices report that Russian bloggers with IT expertise have launched a new campaign to scrutinize government IT tenders, after they noticed that the Ministry of Health was inviting companies to tender for contracts on unfair or suspicious terms. The campaign has already seen at least three tenders canceled, with one official responsible for a suspicious tender being forced to resign.

What Will the Internet Look Like in 10 Years?
The Internet Society have shared the results of a scenario-planning exercise they engaged in to reveal plausible courses of events that could impact the future "health of the Internet." The results are presented in a compelling way, and represent a useful framework for understanding current issues such as censorship technologies, the rise of web giants like Facebook and Google, and cybersecurity concerns.

Judging the Cyberwar Terrorist Threat
In this essay for the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh gives context and depth to Western governments' current obsession with cyberwar, tallying the potential cost to civil liberties of an over-reliance on the military to respond to cyberthreats.

Ten Theses on Wikileaks
Internet scholars Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens present 10 competing analyses of the status and prospects of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks. This week Wikileaks disclosed hundreds of thousands of US Army reports pertaining to the war in Iraq, which revealed greater civilian casualties than previously reported, and allegations of widespread torture of detainees.

How Useful Is Humanitarian Crowdsourcing?
Ushahidi critic Paul Currion of humanitarian.info attempts to advance the debate on crowdsoucing and humanitarian response: "My critique of crowdsourcing - shared by other people working at the interface of humanitarian response and technology - is not that it is disruptive to business as usual. My critique is that it doesn't work."

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