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Why audiophiles are dying out
There’s a fascinating piece in today’s New York Times about a new legal fight: Should border guards be able to search through the contents of your laptop when you’re entering the US? Apparently this question is being decided, as we speak, by several federal courts. The administration argues that yes, it should be allowed to look through your hard drive, partly for practical reasons — for example, they’ve discovered people with child pornography crossing the border — and for legal reasons: A search through a hard drive is no different than searching through one’s paper records in a briefcase. Most federal courts have agreed with this reasoning.
But one judge — Dean D. Pregerson of Federal District Court in Los Angeles — recently disagreed, and barred the results of an airport laptop search. Why? Because, as the story notes:
“Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory,” Judge Pregerson wrote, in explaining why the government should not be allowed to inspect them without cause. “They are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound.”
This is incredibly fascinating stuff. It’s also going to become more and more crucial, because — as I’ve noted in a recent Wired column, and my profile last year of Gordon Bell, the guy who’s outsourcing all his memory to a terabyte hard drive — we’re offloading more and more of our grey matter to our silicon matter. Pregerson is precisely right. In an era where the line between our artificial memory and our real one is becoming increasingly blurry, searching through a hard drive is going to be more and more like reading your mind.
Here’s an easy prediction: Anyone who’s worried about memory-privacy at the border will start storing most of their silicon thoughts online, where border guards won’t have access to it. Of course, leaving all your stuff on Google Drive has its own problems; it’s another easy place for the government to subpoena. So there’ll be other solutions, probably, including steganographic memory storage — hiding documents inside other documents — and new forms of crypto. Either way, interesting times ahead, eh?
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
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North Dakota the most outgoing state, according to study of “the geography of personality”
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September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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