Spying Technology!

The New York Times covers an interesting conference in 'Technology for Spying Lures More Than Military'. In perhaps what is the biggest type of gathering of this kind, around 20,000 'experts in the business' meet in San Diego to check out the latest in high-tech surveillance gadgets and discuss undercover investigations, background checks and interrogation techniques:

'But many of those attending the ASIS International “Maximum Security” conference will not be there on behalf of the United States government or the military. They work for corporate America, where security is a big and sometimes controversial business, as the executives of Hewlett-Packard have found in the wake of revelations of a covert-operations spying scandal that the company conducted against its own directors and journalists.

Companies worldwide spent an estimated $95 billion on security last year, according to the Freedonia Group, a market research firm in Cleveland. While that’s a broad figure that includes spending on emergency planning in case of a terrorist attack and protecting corporate records from hackers, an increasing portion went to high-tech equipment like spyware and specialized data-mining software that was deployed in-house so companies could better see what their own employees were up to.'

Perhaps more academics should be attending in order to protect their research freedoms as well as learning more appropriate methods for obtaining field material?