Panopticon – the 15th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy – is taking place this week at the Westin Hotel in Seattle.
The list of speakers and participants is a privacy who's who. It includes Stefan Brands, well known to readers of this blog given his crossover into identity technologies, as well as Daniel Solove, who I just wrote about – not realizing he was actually in the city – and a host of others. As if this wasn't amazing enough, tomorrow will begin with a debate around the work of the brilliant and disturbing identity futurist Steve Mann, from the University of Toronto. I see him as the cyborg Iggy Pop of identity, passion incarnate, with wires in his brain:
For many years, Dr. Steve Mann has been working on wearable computing. He now goes everywhere recording and broadcasting on the Internet his every movement and experience. As surveillance in society grows, Steve fights back by recording his own version of experience, which he claims as his inalienable right. Is sousveillance the only weapon individuals have, or are more cameras just adding to the problem? We will hear from a panel of experts with widely divergent views: Dr. Mann, the Cyborg; David Brin, author of The Transparent Society; Dr. Ivan Szekely, drafter of information and privacy legislation in the former eastern bloc state of Hungary; and computer scientist Dr. Latanya Sweeney of Carnegie Mellon. The panel will be moderated by Anita Ramasastry of the University of Washington Law School. > Organizer: Stephanie Perrin
I was scheduled to be away from Seattle this week but my plans changed at the very last minute – I wonder if you can still get in?
