Transparent society: automated monitoring of employees

I own Minority Report. I need to watch it before it's entirely passe.

For example, Social Intelligence is marketing employee behavior data mining to corporations. Forget spotting terrorists with Total Information Awareness (oh, you've already forgotten?), it's much more profitable to spot employees with a substance problem. Plus, it doesn't freak out the Tea Party if corporations do it.

If corporations don't buy, SI argues, they'll be sued the next time an employee goes postal. They should have known, lawyers will argue (and they will).

SI is also opening a subsidiary that will use bots to generate optimal online identities; burying the signal in noise. This service will be sold to employees. (I'm pretty sure Stross covered this in Accelerando, but there's lots of prior art here.)

I was joking about the employee service. SI might as well do it though. If they don't, someone else will.

There are several business opportunities here. I'm particularly looking forward to the related hire-a-hacker fund. Ten thousand people will anonymously donate a dollar for an SI related initiative.

(via Schneier).

PS. The Schneier comment thread includes some examples of name collisions and identity errors. I have one of those. My true name is somewhat unusual, and one time I flew in to give a talk only to be met by two police officers. They were looking for me as a material witness in an arson investigation. I was dressed for the presentation, so their expressions were funny to watch. Evidently I didn't look like the guy they expected ...