Dan writes:
> Here's an obvious scenario leading to illegal transparency: if
> surveilance technology ever becomes as ubiquitous and cheap as David
> Brin thinks that it might be, Congress could pass laws prohibiting
> certain kinds of observations or the use of certain kinds of equipment
> on the grounds of "protecting personal privacy"; these laws would be
> funded by special interest groups with secrets to keep and would even
> be supported by a large fraction of the populace, perhaps even a
> majority. (Who wants some pervert watching your every move?)
>
> Of course, for their next trick, the government could completely
> eliminate the black market for surveilance equipment by monopolizing
> its use, er, I mean, limiting its use to select law enforcement
> officials only. It's to keep the streets safer, you see.
This is a plausible and frightening scenario, but it is not what David
Brin described as his transparent society. You seem to be saying that
transparency is unstable and will degenerate into Orwellian surveillance.
That may be the case, but for the sake of the argument it would be
helpful to assume that David's dream works out and we do in fact have
mutual transparency.
The problem in a nutshell is, you can outlaw peeping toms, but the only
way to catch someone breaking the law from the privacy of their home
is to be a peeping tom yourself. Maybe you could make an exception in
this case, and say that being a peeping tom is illegal, except for the
case of peeping at a peeping tom. But then, how would you know that you
could legally peep? Alternatively you could accept anonymous evidence of
peeping, but that runs into issues of fairness, provenance of evidence,
facing the accuser and so on.
I think what David envisioned was that being a peeping tom would be
shameful, and so no one would do it because they would know they might
be caught. But that still has something of the same problem; if you're
caught you don't have to feel much shame since you know that the person
who caught you was committing the same crime. It seems more likely
that customs would evolve to allow peeping, if such technology came
into existence.
And if so then that makes the IP problem harder to solve than ever,
which was where I came in...
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:37:51 MDT