an Orwellian future

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: For IP
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 13:08:29 -0700
From: Donald Dulchinos <dopod () indra com>
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

Not sure if this is quite right for IP, but as I watch the back and
forth on IP especially around privacy and security issues, I
understand the nature of public policy is such that arguments must be
narrowly framed in a for and against manner.  But there are larger
societal and technological trends that seem to overwhelm some of the
arguments.   I've started a web site around the ideas in my new book,
Neurosphere (www.neurosphere.org) which might be of interest to some
here.  An excerpt from the book follows...

“…The war on terrorism as proclaimed by President Bush is the
incipient form of conflict within a neurosphere, not across borders
but within the skin of a single global entity.  The war will not be
confined to Afghanistan, or Iraq, or any small collection of
countries.  The Al Qaeda network is said to operate within more than
60 countries.  It is a stunning fact that they operated most
successfully in Florida, a state it will be hard for Mr. Bush to
declare war upon.  And it seems increasingly clear, after 5 years of
war, that the supply of fresh recruits to the terrorist cause will
continue to grow.

So how do you find and defeat this enemy within?  On one front of the
war, Richard Clarke, cyberspace security adviser to the President
War, says “We must secure our cyberspace from a range of possible
threats.”  But how does one secure an asset whose value comes
precisely, like airline travel, from its openness and ubiquity?  An
asset whose value, says Bob Metcalfe’s network effect, increases
exponentially with the number of computers, of conscious nodes,
connected to it?

The Panopticon, the surveillance technology of the 21st century (yet
a word coined in the 19th), is about to be unleashed without the
niceties of protected civil liberties or the illusion of privacy.
This will mean that someone could be watching you, but also that you
will be watching everyone.   For every knee jerk libertarian
encrypting his banal emails there is a webcam exhibitionist begging
you to look and see.  We can run but we can’t hide, and perhaps we
shouldn’t try.  The march of technology is inexorable.  It is in
human nature.  And for those who scoff at the idea of universal
access and point to the majority of the world still without
electricity, let alone Net access, I would point out the ability of
the poorest desert nomad to get hold of Kalishnikov technology all
too easily.  And that is where history comes in...”

Don Dulchinos
www.neurosphere.org


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