After an introduction by Stephanie Perrin and Ian Kerr, I was the first to present. My topic was Intelligent Transportation Systems – the short paper for it is available on the anonequity.org website along with most of the other speakers’ papers. Next was Alex Cameron who talked about the similarities between the panopticon and digital rights management technologies. Although he apologized for talking about philosophy first thing in the morning, the audience was nevertheless very interested!

Ed Hasbrouck spoke about the undiagnosed post traumatic stress disorder that policy makers are suffering from. EPIC’s Marcia Hoffman spoke about the Hiibel case and various legislative initiatives that mistakenly put faith in the ability to detect terrorists by increasing identification requirements among citizens. Peter Hope-Tindall spoke about the latest biometric technology, as well as Canadian and American projects in the area. Veronica Pinero spoke about panopticism and how we should rethink the use of digital criminal records to prevent discrimination.

Ian Goldberg detailed the barriers of use for some privacy enhancing technologies and some new developments in the area of anonomized remailers, messaging, file sharing, and the WWW. Roger Dingledine spoke about TOR technology as a means to remain anonymous online. TOR basically involves servers not being able to see where data is coming or going beyond the next server it communicates with. Stefan Brands detailed the relationship between verifiers and identifiers in a multi-threat environment, ending with the promise of the next generation of identifiers.

Philippa Lawson spoke about CIPPIC’s consumer profiling research, answering the question of who is using my data and what are they doing with it? Valerie Steeves and Ian Kerr presented on virtual playgrounds and buddy bots. Val spoke about the embedding of commercialism into children at a young age through websites that invade childrens’ privacy. Ian spoke about bots that imitate intelligent human interactions. Children interact with these bots without realizing that they’re not people. Lillie Coney of EPIC spoke about racial profiling and the suspected terrorist rationale. Ian Spriel related his own experience with racial profiling one day while taking pictures by the docks in Seattle.

Stephanie Perrin spoke for a few minutes about RFIDs and European developments. Simon Davies followed with a chilling account of the national ID that will have 51 separate pieces of data. Both Stephanie and Simon talked about the lack of democratic process in both of their talks. The day ended with Steve Mann talking about sousveillance and how having to show ID is evidence of being owned.

Right now we’re listening to the opening keynote debate and we’ll have another blog installment soon!