From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Fri May 05 2000 - 04:52:36 MDT
Zero Powers writes:
> Surveillance has *nothing* to do with freedom. You are free now to do
No, of course not. Nothing at all. Slavery is freedom.
> anything that is legal. You would have that exact same freedom in a
Currently, you can do a lot of perfectly innocuous, but illegal
things, which won't result in any persecution, because no one will
ever find out about it. You simply can't do this in a landscape
studded with intelligent sensors, and machine executive (I suggest
mandatory teleoperated explosive cranial implants for everybody. Well,
almost everybody.)
> completely transparent society. Your only loss of freedom would be the
Even in the first iteration, this is quite wrong. It is totally wrong
in the second iteration. A completely transparent society is heaven,
if everybody is an angel (but angels don't need glasnost). It is a
good approximation of hell, if the citizens are less than perfect.
> freedom to commit a crime and get away with it. If you have a problem with
> giving that up, I think that says more about you than it says about society.
Individuals make laws. Fortunately, bad laws are not enforcible, not
on the long run. Deployed ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure
boosts stability of totalitarian regimes. These are not known for
making good laws, but are well known for making many people miserable.
Do you want to make many people miserable, you included? Then, vote
for transparent society.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:28:25 MST