tycho wrote:What happens when the suspect knows that Mr. Sherlock Holmes is able to profile a person by looking at seemingly unimportant data?
Or take the case where one is aware that her TV is spying on her? Or that the local store is programming her needs?
In all these cases I see people trying to be less and less predictable, and organizations getting into more scrutiny.
In the end, all this cyber activity is turning out to be the real security that we've been yearning for.
Organizations will need to be more innovative and unintrusive in order to widen their markets.
The idea of producers versus consumers can no longer stand. And information will be used to increase dynamism and flexibility.
The suspect becomes Prof. Moriarty
..on a serious note though, you can beat the watchers if you are so inclined and are a little tech savvy ...there are anonymizers, infrastructure like TOR, using encryption ..like pgp or gpg which is free, not subscribing to social media, not using debit or credit cards etc etc. But it is all so tedious, and for what? I am not engaged in criminal activity hence I find the amount of work required to stay partially hidden is not worth it. I say partially hidden because there are things which are impossible to do unless you reveal your identity. For instance, two western governments have my fingerprints and retina patterns on a computer cause I needed to travel there for business. Banks and other corporations have been known to share customer information with subsidiaries and partners.
There is no uncrossing the Rubicon, for the masses at least. The brits loudly complained about Google streetview sometime back ..so google switched off, they loudly complained again, it was brought back. Most systems have just data, volumes of it. Consumers of it get drowned in the flood. Its why even advanced countries have crime and disorder. More worrying would be systems developing knowledge. They would be sentient, that is scary. I think Google and IBM are already here. The rest want to sell you stuff.
Policy makers look to computer security to control crime, they havent succeeded much. That is because they are looking in the wrong place, looking at a tiny corner of a very large picture. Smart establishments look after the human being, mind, body, environment ...for example the scandinavian countries, that is why it is so calm over there.