Brin (was Re: Capitalism)

From: mark@unicorn.com
Date: Thu Sep 03 1998 - 09:11:16 MDT


Dan Fabulich [daniel.fabulich@yale.edu] wrote:
>The impression I got was that Brin thinks encryption will be pointless when
>one can maneuver a fly-sized camera into your home and watch you type in
>the cleartext of your message before you have a chance to encrypt it.

Which merely means the paranoid will wear head-mounted displays and write
by selecting letters or words with eye-movements, or something similarly
hard to see. And a few years later we'll be performing encryption and
decryption on hardware attached directly to the brain. In any case, finding
me and sending in a thousand fly-sized cameras to read what I'm typing
is much, much, much harder than scanning my plaintext email for keywords
at some centralised server... and as others have pointed out, we'd also
be able to see exactly what the government is doing, so we'd know that
they were sending these cameras around.

Brin's society is a paranoid fantasy which cannot work without stopping
new technological developments and becoming a police state that would
make 1984 look like utopia.

    Mark



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