Developments in information technology and society raise questions of the utmost importance for planners and public policy. For example:

• How can and should the encouragement of the free flow of persons, ideas and goods be balanced with the need for security, the protection of intellectual property and respect for national and local cultures?
• How should we balance prevention -- whether of crime or infectious and other diseases, as against due process and using resources on things that might never have happened?
• How can the tensions between transparency and accountability and the privacy and dignity of the person be balanced?
• How can citizen input and feedback via electronic means of expression (voting, e-mail) be encouraged, while guarding against fraud and misuse and popular democracy devoid of the institutional restraints that offer buffers of time and distance from the popular will?
• What are the likely social consequences and trade-offs in making government information ever more readily available (e.g., 911, tax, court, planning and meeting records)?
• Some policy uses of computer data increasingly rely on aggregate analysis and sorting of populations (what Oscar Gandy calls "the panoptic sort"). Under what conditions does this represent new legal, but socially questionable, forms of discrimination? How can rationality and efficiency as applied to the treatment of groups (whether statistical or organizational) be reconciled with notions of individual treatment and fairness? Should groups have a right to privacy and information protection just as individuals do?

The computer based information technologies which began appearing in the latter part of the last century were characterized by their ability to break through traditional borders of space, walls, time, distance, and darkness in the collection, storage, communication, merging and analysis of data.

These developments continue. We see processing speeds doubled every 18 months and storage capacities double every year. Every more areas of behavior are captured and analyzed. Brain wave and DNA analysis suggest new frontiers. Means of data analysis once restricted to governments and the largest organizations are available on a much wider scale to smaller organizations and individuals.

Diverse kinds and sources of data are increasingly woven into networks. Computing is becoming ubiquitous and automated. Sensors that passively read and involuntarily send remote signals to the internet and elsewhere, will increasingly be found in objects (e.g., computing and communications devices, switches, groceries, cars, tools, weapons, clothes), persons and environments (roads, walls, doors). Through a "value-added" model the aggregation and analysis of data collected in varying formats and for varying purposes, in turn creates new data and models. New data mining and aggregate analysis techniques appear. More information is also available for analysis because ever more is being kept, rather than culled. It is now less expensive to store information than to discard it.

These developments raise an array of intellectually and politically challenging issues. Drawing from a forthcoming book, the talk will consider some social trends and counter-trends and implications of these developments, cultural beliefs that underlie policies toward information technology as used for social control and management, and some principles for guiding public policy.

Gary T. Marx

He has served in an advisory capacity for many government and non-profit organizations (including the Kerner Commission where he first met Professor Bob Fogelson) and editorial boards. His work has been recognized by fellowships, awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Sociological Association, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation and the Century Fund. He is currently a member of a National Academy of Sciences panel writing a report on Privacy in the Information Age. He occasionally ventures out from his farm home on an island near Seattle for battery-recharging. He is spending the fall semester as the Carlson Visiting Distinguished Professor in Social Science at West Virginia University. Some of his research and additional information is available at garymarx.net.