From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Thu Mar 01 2001 - 06:40:48 MST
Here's an interesting article from The Atlantic magazine (which seems to
hit all the bases but Brin's:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/03/lester.htm
"New surveillance and information-gathering technologies are everywhere
these days, and they're setting off all sorts of alarm bells for those who
worry about the erosion of privacy. The result has been a clangor of dire
predictions. Books have recently appeared with such titles as Database Nation:
The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century (by Simson Garfinkel), The Unwanted
Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (by Jeffrey Rosen), and The
End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality (by Reg Whitaker).
Polls suggest that the public is gravely concerned: a 1999 Wall Street Journal-NBC
survey, for instance, indicated that privacy is the issue that concerns
Americans most about the twenty-first century, ahead of overpopulation,
racial tensions, and global warming. Politicians can't talk enough about
privacy, and are rushing to pass laws to protect it. Increasingly, business
and technology are seen as the culprits. "Over the next 50 years," the journalist
Simson Garfinkel writes in Database Nation, "we will see new kinds of threats
to privacy that don't find their roots in totalitarianism, but in capitalism,
the free market, advanced technology, and the unbridled exchange of electronic
information."
Greg Burch gregburch@gregburch.net
GBurch1@aol.com - gburch@lockeliddell.com
Attorney::Vice President, Extropy Institute
http://www.gregburch.net
http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"We never stop investigating. We are never
satisfied that we know enough to get by.
Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest
survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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