Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!OZ.AI.MIT.EDU!Wayne From: Wayne@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU (Wayne McGuire) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Filtering A Global Hypermedia Network Message-ID: Date: Sun, 22-Nov-87 10:16:00 EST Article-I.D.: MIT-OZ.MDCG.WAYNE.12352654309.BABYL Posted: Sun Nov 22 10:16:00 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 24-Nov-87 06:28:38 EST References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 49 A global hypermedia advisor doesn't need to be a big centralized system in the sense of storing the full text of all the documents in the world, but it should be a supreme index of indexes--a clearinghouse of pointers to pointers to pointers ad infinitum to all the information chunks and information chunk types (including the full text of documents and document elements) on all the networks in the world. An analogy might be the Harvard Union Catalog, which stores easily accessible pointers to all the works in the many libraries in the Harvard library network. But a GHA would be much more powerful than, say, the HUC, since it would embody the best knowledge of the best experts in the world about the conceptual structures of their domains. I am not being cynical about privacy, merely realistic. Regarding "intimate habits of mind": certainly one's banking and telephone records, which chronicle in exquisite detail what one buys and with whom one communicates, provide an in-depth psychological profile to the eye of an acute analyst. Holland and other nations may be passing laws to restrict access to these records in the usual case, but the security and intelligence establishments of most of these countries can find loopholes and exceptions in these laws through which to drive fleets of Mack trucks. As a general rule, whatever flows through a telecommunications channel should not be considered private. James Bamford in _The Puzzle Palace_ outlines the methods of the NSA for intercepting and analyzing global telecommunications. England's Government Communications Headquarters and the Soviet Union's KGB (or the Soviet equivalent to the NSA) are engaged in the same activities. They don't capture everything, but they get enough. They probably have as much regard for the spirit and letter of the public privacy laws as do drivers on the Massachusetts Turnpike for the 55 mph speed limit. As far as protecting your privacy from the general public, I assume that with a global hypermedia advisor one could choose how much of one's profile to make public, or one could choose not to interact with the system at all. Current online database vendors like Dialog and Mead Data Central are already foreshadowings (albeit extremely primitive) of a GHA. It is interesting to recall that under the reign of John Poindexter, of Irangate fame, the NSC was seeking to gain legal access to the records of these companies, which store sensitive information about the search targets and patterns of their users. As I recall, the NSC was denied legal access by Congress, but then there is always the problem of illegal access, which is relatively trivial to accomplish wholesale by intercepting telecommunications. Wayne