I'm listening to The Current on CBC and they're interviewing the product manager for Google Maps about the Street View feature. The question: "Couldn't this technology be used by terrorists?"
Let's go ahead and answer this oft-repeated question once and for all: of course it could. Practically any technology or information source that's useful to the general public would be useful to terrorists. Terrorists benefit every day from self-service gas stations, sliced bread, walk/don't walk signs, and pocket dictionaries. All these advances, and many more, have helped terrorists in their daily lives and in their evil plans.
They also help the rest of us. There are very few technologies or infrastructure improvements that are useful to Good People that aren't also useful to Bad People. It would probably hamper the work of terrorists if we tore up the public roads, forbade the sale and transport of household cooking oil, and mandated inconsistent and illegible spelling in all print publications. It would also cause the rest of us a lot of inconvenience and harm.
Of course, the converse is not true: there are plenty of technologies that are only useful for doing very bad things. The question we should ask with any technology is, "Does it have enough general-purpose usefulness to offset possible misuses?" Rigging every railroad bridge in North America with dynamite and a convenient nearby plunger is an initiative that has very little utility for anyone with good intentions. Enhanced mapping tools? Probably not in the same class.
We live in a world where evil folks use the tools of everyday living to take civilian lives. If we turn our technological society back to the Neolithic, it's not going to change that -- it's just going to take longer for people riding donkeys to come brain us with stone axes. I don't think it's worth it.
tags: technology terrorism dailylife