Data Mining: Russian Style

Samizdata has a thoroughly chilling (even for me) post on Data mining: Russian style.



Seems a businessperson checked into a hotel in Moscow. Within a couple of days, someone is reading his mail and accessing all of his business information in Beijing.



He tells it from point of view of cybernetic warfare, and that it is. But the capacity to do this is not limited to governments. It most certainly is not limited to totalitarian governments.



Yes, it's a real problem when the totalitarians do this. But with less anonymity and more tracing of pathways, it would be stark raving obvious that someone was setting themselves up to accomplish this.



We need less anonymity, not more. Only then can one user be certain that the data is going where it needs to, and nowhere else.