Re:The Surveillance State Puts U.S. Elections at Risk of Man...
by vinceguidry on Saturday November 09, 2013 @09:10AM
(#6701659)
That favors the people, who will always have way more manpower to search and process the data than the elites who try to hide it. The more information in the public realm, the more that scores of interested scholars, journalists, statisticians, lawyers and other such professionals can use the tools of their trade to come to useful conclusions. Of course, most people could do nothing with such information, but released into the wild, even minor outrage can cause real change.
I think the asymmetry is becoming larger. Certainly in absolute terms we all have more information about one another than we did before, but the problem now is not having the information, it's searching through it to find the relevant information. Or being able to act on the information.
What can you as an ordinary individual do with a publicly available list of corrupt government officials? What can a corrupt president or FBI director do with a publicly available list of political opponents?