From: Scott Badger (wbadger@psyberlink.net)
Date: Tue Jun 30 1998 - 14:19:48 MDT
Dan Clemmenson wrote:
>Basically, Brin states the obvious: the technology of surviellence is
advancing
>exponentially, and we can't stop it. This means that government, and just
about
>anybody else with enough money, can find out just about anything they want
to
>about what an individual does in public. Brin's solution to the problem is
>simply to agree that all actions in public places are public, and give
access
>to the scanners to anybody at all who wants it.
[snip]
>Brin's solution is to say that since we can't protect our privacy from the
government and
>other wealthy organizations and individuals, then the government and others
should not
>have privacy either. This is what is meant by "so what?" When everybody's
public activities
>are reviewable by everybody else, the range of acceptable activity will get
a lot
>broader.
>
I saw Jim Halperin (The Truth Machine, The First Immortal) speak and he made
this same point. He seemed to say in The Truth Machine that terrorists and
criminals will have increasingly destructive weapons available to them and
it won't be long before we will be practically forced to create some means
of identifying the crazies (e.g. an infallible truth machine). He thinks
the price we will have to pay in terms of loss of privacy is the tradeoff we
will have to make.
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