There’s an excellent article about Data Reuse on Wired by Bruce Schneier. In the article he talks about the American use of census data to populate Japanese-American internment camps. Of course, he very easily could have been talking about the German use of census data in the Holocaust, which was going on at the same time.

Either way, the point is the same: Data Reuse can be a very ugly and oppressive thing. It is also a complex problem to solve that involves both law and technology. In the American case, there were laws preventing this sort of use of the census data. Those laws were suspended. In the German case, the data was organized in such a way that it was difficult to access efficiently. The technology was improved.

Solutions to problems like this aren’t easy to create, particularly in an instant gratification culture. The Cathedral of Chartres was built over a 75 year period. When it was completed, the people must have thought it would last forever. Projects are not built with that view of history anymore. People of that era never built things thinking they would be obsolete in a few years anyhow. The Colosseum in Rome was used as a stadium for 500 years. Market Square Arena in Indianapolis was used for 25 years.

I understand that planning for the future in an era where the future seems to change so rapidly before our eyes is not easy, but if we do not pause for a moment, think about the broader historical context of what we are building, then we will are setting ourselves up for failure.

Schneier closes with some well-worded thoughts about this:

History will record what we, here in the early decades of the information age, did to foster freedom, liberty and democracy. Did we build information technologies that protected people’s freedoms even during times when society tried to subvert them? Or did we build technologies that could easily be modified to watch and control? It’s bad civic hygiene to build an infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state.