X-Message-Number: 14448 Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 21:17:03 -0700 From: Lee Corbin <> Subject: Transparency vs. Privacy At 05:00 AM 9/11/00 -0400, Scott Badger wrote: >Personally, I suspect my activities could already be >pretty easily monitored if dark forces wished to do so >.. what with my usage of credit cards, the phone, >e-mail, etc. This is the conclusion that David Brin came to in his excellent "The Transparent Society". Though not very popular with some nanotechnologists, I find his arguments on the whole very satisfactory. In sum, we'd all be better off to embrace complete openness than to try to resist it. Far from allowing the government or other dark forces to control our lives, given the state of our society today, the impact will be quite the opposite: the dark forces are precisely the ones who are profiting the most from secrecy. In addition to their secrecy, at least in the case of the government, they also have impunity. But widespread knowledge in a democracy of just who is physically doing what to whom will tend to yield actually greater liberty and security for everyone, although needless to say, no one can say with any certainty that this will actually proved to be the case. I cannot give, however, more than a hint of the intelligent points addressed by the book. Beyond that, the case is also made that developments making privacy a thing of the past may be inevitable; for example, miniaturized robots that fly into people's homes and watch what passwords they type, and the ubiquity of street cams. Lee Corbin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14448