Turning surveillance technologies inside out

Howard Rheingold suggests keeping an eye on Marc Smith at Microsoft, " who is thinking about ways to use tomorrow's panoptic snooping technologies -- cameras, microphones, even sensors of your bodily processes -- as a new kind of authoring." Smith reckons that since government and industry will be moniotoring our behaviour in intimate detail, why shouldn't we keep our own records, if only to challenge the official ones. That's pretty much David Brin's thesis. Smith sees his human body black box (equivalent to the airliner black box) as being primarily a positive life enhancer rather than a mere defence mechanism, however.