Securing our Freedom

Many discussions about protecting American freedoms and the American way of life take place in rhetoric about the American Armed Forces and their campaigns abroad.  Fighting threats from terrorists, protecting American interests abroad and helping to depose vicious dictators.  But what about protecting our freedoms at home? Our individual freedom to privacy?

The first major controversy regarding American’s privacy and communications technology came  in October 2001, with the passing of the USA PATRIOT Act.  Among many other things, some of the most controversial aspects of the Act gave the Federal Government the ability to wire tap phones, access IP addesses and collect customer communcations history without securing a warrant.

Fast-forward to 2012. Companies like Google and Facebook collect our information for everything we do through their service (for example, Google keeps track of every single website you visit and analyses that data to provide “better service” to you and to “customize your internet experience based on your interests and patterns in search history”).  As our assigned reading for the week, by CNN’s Andrew Keen, points out, as we continue to demand a more personal experience from our smartphones and other ICTs, it will require such devices to gather, store and analyse more and more of our own personal data.  Your iPhone has a GPS in it that tracks your every move – helpful for when you lose your phone, but scary that a private company knows your exact location at all times (assuming you have your phone on and on you).

It’s hard to believe that congress hasn’t taken more action to regulate and protect our private information.  In fact, the government has done the opposite! President Obama signed a 3-year extension of the USA PATRIOT Act on March 26, 2011.  Only recently have our congressional leaders begun to look at the security of our personal information and information-storing companies like Google, Facebook and Apple. Al Franken (DFL), a Senator from Minnesota, is leading the charge on privacy. If this information is so unsecure in our country, imagine the possibilities of implementing this kind of technology in the developing world, where dictators, military regimes and government’s with less respect for civil liberties, may have access to all of their citizen’s personal and private information.

For more information, I have included a link to an op-ed written by Al Franken (MN-DFL) on Wired.com.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/opinion-franken-privacyliberties/

New Tools for Transparency in Remittances

It is well-known that remittances serve as a pillar of many third-world economies, especially in countries falling within the economic spheres of major superpowers that exist nearby. As noted in the article this post discusses, these remittances can comprise up to ten percent of a nation’s GDP. An archetype of this economic dynamic is Central America and the Caribbean and the remittances its people receive from relatives working in the United States. What I had never thought about, until I read this article, was the method by which remittances are transmitted. To be honest, I just kind of looked at remittances as free-flowing, as money that simply left one country and reappeared in another.

This article makes clear that that sort of simple understanding of the process is plain incorrect. The method used to send money and the provider offering this service can drastically alter the cost of sending remittances. The lack of transparency in this process and the generally uninformed nature of those sending remittances has led to an unfortunate lack of competition in the remittance provider sector, resulting in some workers paying vastly more than they would have had to otherwise to send money home to their families. On a macro level, this can have a pronounced effect on the economies of remittance-dependent countries.

What this article is discussing is the advent of a new tool meant to shed some light on this opaque industry. The tool is a website called Envia Centroamerica and offers people sending remittances to Central American countries a rare opportunity to compare the prices of service providers, allowing them to send greater portions of their income home. Hopefully, this will inject some much-needed competition into provider industry. As the article notes, sending US$200 to Central America can cost anywhere from $8 to $333 (more than the money being sent!) depending on the method and provider used.

ICT4D programs are generally the source of a great deal of controversy as people debate the effectiveness and appropriateness of various projects. This project, to me, is a rare one with very few drawbacks. It does not work outside of the market or foster dependency–rather, it seeks to make an important development market function more efficiently. As a watchdog more than a direct aid program, it does not have the same hardware-without-expertise problems plaguing projects like OLPC, which people accuse of simply dropping off technology in poor countries without explaining how it can be used effectively. And it’s benefits are direct and difficult to dispute–it will save impoverished families money that can be used productively for other purposes. My only qualm with this project is the possibility that many workers sending remittances will not know about it. As useful as the website is, it is of no value to people that don’t know about it. I had never heard of it until doing research for this blog post, and I wonder what portion of workers, documented or otherwise, are aware of this service. Until word of this service is spread, its effect will be limited.