-Caveat Lector-
But who will guard the guardians? What happens if the film is edited (like 60
Minutes)?
W I R E D N E W S
- - - - - - - - - -
Big Brother Is Your Friend
by Chris Gaither
BERKELEY, California -- The omnipresent cameras are coming, says science
fiction writer David Brin. The question isn't when, but what they'll be
pointing at.
Surveillance cameras will be perched on every lamppost and windowsill,
beaming the minutiae of daily life to police headquarters. Street crime will
plummet, Brin says.
See also: First Amendment? Not on the Job
After all, look at the low crime rate in Britain, where watchful bobbies have
access to more than 500,000 cameras.
It doesn't stop there in Brin's future world. Everyone carries a camera,
beaming images straight to the Internet. A cop pulls over a kid for speeding,
and the whole scene is played out in the public domain.
"What will the result be when this happens? A dramatic increase in
professionalism and in legitimate arrests, and also an incredible renaissance
in sarcasm on our city streets," Brin said at Saturday's California First
Amendment Assembly at the University of California, Berkeley. "Because
nothing like this will ever change human nature."
"Now,you may not like this image, but anybody who tries to harm you is going
to get caught," he said.
Brin, an astrophysicist and author of such novels as The Postman, painted
this surreal vision for attendees pondering whether freedom and privacy can
coexist in the next millennium, when businesses and the government will
probably know more about you than you know about yourself.
Because whether we like it or not, Brin said, the cameras are imminent. The
government already uses them as its eyes and databases as its memory.
"All you accomplish by banning them is making sure that elites have the
powers of gods, and that you don't," he said.
Take, for example, increased monitoring in the workplace, where bosses can
count their employees' keystrokes and time their bathroom breaks.
Here's Brin's solution: Turn the cameras around to the top 50 execs in the
company. Bosses can still spy on you, but you get to spy right back.
"Given a choice between privacy and accountability, all of us can be relied
upon to choose privacy for ourselves and accountability for everybody else,"
Brin said.
Brin's vision was not universally shared. Earlier in the day, an attorney
with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation put forth the
alternative solution to what she called the rash of "data Valdez incidents
that spill information out to anyone who wants to see it."
Citing such security breaches as Microsoft's baring of millions of Hotmail
accounts and the exposure of customers' credit cards numbers on an Italian
smut site, assistant staff counsel Deborah Pierce pushed for stricter
limitations of information sharing.
She called for banks and other consumer services to curtail their creation of
mammoth personal-info databases and for Big Brother to chill out -- a view
Brin would find naive.
"We need to stop the government's current fetish for collecting more
information than it really needs," she said.
But the information flow works both ways, Brin said. To prove his point, he
laid out this paradox: "In all of human history, no government has ever known
more about its people than our government knows about us. And [yet] in all of
human history, no people have ever been anywhere near as free."
Open government, gadflies, and a vigilant press reconcile the conundrum, he
said, because, "In all of human history, no people knew as much about their
government."
- - - - - - - - - -
W I R E D N E W S
Wired News is a real-time news service offering news
briefs and in-depth reporting on politics, business, culture,
and technology. For the most up-to-date coverage on the
digital world, go to ...
http://www.wired.com/news/
You are receiving this email because a friend or acquaintance
sent it to you. If you no longer wish to receive these messages,
please contact the sender, and not Wired News.
Copyright 1999 Wired Digital, Inc.
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
