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

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