Mitch Kapor did the principled thing last week and resigned from the board of Groove Networks, which was founded by his old friend Ray Ozzie. John Markoff's article reporting on Kapor's resignation also confirmed something that Mike Helfrich, VP of Groove Networks, hinted at during the Q&A at the Supernova 2002 conference. Groove is an integral part of Poindexter's Orwellian Total Information Awareness. (Mildly interesting factoid -- Mike Helfrich was on the panel right before Mitch Kapor spoke -- did Mitch listen to Mike's Q&A?)
One of Groove's biggest customers is the intelligence and defense community. As Mike said at Supernova 2002, driving a 757 into the center of the network does teach something about the problems with centralization, and the advantages of decentralization. Groove makes a lot of sense for intelligence work, when you think about. I've played around with Groove a little bit, and I am very impressed. And I don't have any problems with our intelligence community using good tools -- in fact I am delighted that they have good tools. But to have those same tools being used for Total Information Awareness is an abomination. As the article points out, commercial software developers are going to start wrestling with the same issues that physicists have wrestled with since World War II. To what degree are they responsible for the ends to which their tools are put?
Congratulations to Mitch (even if he didn't recognize what an asset I would have been to OSAF) for refusing to participate in TIA.
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