i googled 'conspiracy theorist' and a picture of my house came up

September 14/07 - This week's readings, especially Hauser's "Garment in the Dock", deal with a critique of power relations brought about by consumerism. This got me thinking today, as I began to consider the surprising accuracy and the meticulous nature of Spokane's investigation employing reverse-commodity fetishism. The prosecution's entire case was built on and facilitated by evidence derived from the bank's CCTV surveillance system. These days, of course, any discussion of CCTV surveillance will likely come to address London's huge public CCTV system and its surrounding controversy. But instead of London's largely unproven Orwellian experiment, it was a much larger form of surveillance that caught my attention this week.

The morning of our discussion, I came across this Scientific American article about Google Inc.'s Google Earth image provider, Digital Globe, launching a new and more powerful satellite (funded in part by the Pentagon's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to the tune of half a billion dollars) into orbit.

According to sciam.com, "The new satellite will also provide far more accurate data, including the ability to pinpoint objects on the Earth at three to 7.5 meters, or 10 to 25 feet. Using known reference points on the ground, the accuracy would rise to about two meters."

Apart from this project's blindingly obvious implications of US military and Homeland Security interests, I am led to wonder about Google's role in digitally mapping every inch of the globe in the name of Progress. Am I the only one left wondering where corporate/state rights end and personal privacy rights begin?

I don't mean to sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist suspecting elitist treachery. In its present state, the technology is relatively benign in terms of potential for abuse. To be sure though, imminent logical steps to improve the software's market value will introduce high-resolution imagery accuracy to the square inch and, in the not-too-distant-future, REALTIME coverage, most likely starting in dense metropolitan areas. I posit that the threat lies not in the September 18th launch of this particular satellite, but in the direction this technology is taking, as dictated by the omnipresent logic of capitalism.

Will the populace have much to say regarding policymaking such advancements would require? In this instance of state-corporate back scratching, I guess we'll have to see. I'm not suggesting that we all need distress over the eye in the sky that may someday be watching us walk to the post office to buy stamps, it's just something to think about. A lot of influential people in a lot of expensive suits certainly are.