From: Michael S. Lorrey (mike@datamann.com)
Date: Wed Mar 29 2000 - 12:06:29 MST
Zero Powers wrote:
> >From: "Technotranscendence" <neptune@mars.superlink.net>
>
> >[super big snip of lots of great material]
> > > So ubiquitous surveilance promotes despotism; since despotism is nasty,
> >to
> > > the extent that we can prevent ubiquitous surveilance, we should.
> >
> >I agree. This has historically been the case too. Look at any
> >dictatorship
> >that has survived longer than a few weeks, and one typically sees huge
> >secret police organizations and neighbors turning in neighbors a la
> >Orwell's
> >_Nineteen Eighty-Four_. Granted, this is not ubiquitous surveillance, but,
> >it appears, the close one gets to it, the worse life looks.
>
> Exactly! What you're talking about is certainly not ubiquitous
> transparency, in fact it is not even close. As you point out, totalitarian
> governments thrive on *secrecy*. Mutual, power proportional transparency
> effectively brings and *end* to secrecy. Ergo...
According to Soviet archives, at the height of its power, the KGB employed 1 in
5 citizens as informants. They HAD a ubiquitous system. It was used more
effectively by an organization that could collect, filter, and analyse the
information the best (i.e. the KGB), than by the average person.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:27:43 MST