First off, before I get to anything, I have always wanted to mention that I thought of the title for this whole column. In fact, it wasn’t even me, it was me ranting about a line from a children’s computer animated series. In said series, a large asparagus plugs in his Macintosh, and in response to the slow boot up, he shouts “BOOT, you transistorized tormentor, BOOT!!” That being said, I move on to the topic, which will be decided at about the time I hit the next paragraph…

The public of this great country is growing at an incredible rate. The rate at which our technology doubles is also great. Moore’s law dictates that computing power doubles every 18 months. It appears that we are holding to that, if not bettering it. With that, and a booming economy, the computing power available to the public is also increasing at a great rate. It won’t be long before bums on the street will be requesting that you email them a dollar via PayPal, executed via a PalmVII. However, with this increase of computing power comes an increase in the power of networking. I recall earlier days, when Prodigy had just come out. I had my mom lend me her credit card, I strung 60 feet of telephone cable across the floor, and signed up for a trial on Prodigy. The internet was at best a small thing. There was nothing of real interest. It was a mere toy at the time. That, along with the fact that Prodigy had not anticipated people signing up at the rate they did, caused problems with busy signals and whatnot. If you look at the internet nowadays, you notice that there is a much different cyberscape. No matter where you go, you can find information on anything and everything, stores selling things from eggs to explosives, auction houses, brothels, and (Grr!) boy band fan sites.

But, this power is not distributed only to the public at large. Corporations are moving support, staff, even entire operations online. But most importantly, the government has moved online. Anything you want from the government you can get online. You want to talk to the president? mailto:president@whitehouse.gov. Perhaps you just want to take a look at our current defenses, in which case you go to http://www.defenselink.mil/. Something even simpler, perhaps you need to check the postage for an eBay sale, US Priority Postal. Just skip on over to http://www.usps.gov/.

All this is well and good. But perhaps people can go too far. For example, I could tell you the details of any court case which occurred in the Wisconsin Circuit Court system. Sure, lots of companies online allow you to pay them money to do a background check on people, but most people won’t pay that unless they have a good reason. The government, on the other hand, posts important information for free online. With a relatively simple series of links from the Wisconsin State government’s site, you can get to: Wisconsin Circuit Court Access. Yep, every court docket and whatnot filed with the Wisconsin Court System. One might say, “There’s no big deal, it’s just for criminals” or “Don’t worry, it only gives important information like fine value.” Nope. Not the case. This system pushes invasion of privacy. It posts my home address, a description of my vehicle, including plate number, and even my drivers license number and birthday.

By now you want to check it out, so here’s the address:
http://ccap.courts.state.wi.us/InternetCourtAccess/.

I’m sure we all agree that we don’t want our mistakes for everyone to look at, especially when you have 19 aliases, multiple counts of felon possession of a firearm, trespassing, armed robbery with threat of force, theft of movable property, and use of a dangerous weapon (Case 99CF002767 if you are really interested in it).

I suppose that given the choice, I would rather have the internet be a place of freedom, but not so much freedom as to invade my privacy. Perhaps the government should spend less time restricting the actions of others, and more time investigating its own people and uses of technology.

Maybe I just don’t like my speeding ticket posted on the internet, I don’t know. If anybody is interested in looking me up (you were going to anyways) my middle initial is D, just so you don’t confuse me with the disorderly conduct kid.