pascal said:
Democoder
Public data has never been collected the way TIA proposes, then nobody really cared about this before. The potential capability of data collection, centralization and analysis is huge.
The public data is collected, it's just not aggregated. Credit reports, property holdings, IRS data, car registration, utilities, phone records, ISP records, INS records, toll road records (and other photos of your license plate tracked), medical records, and innumerable daily shots of you on security cameras everywhere. All TIA is proposing is to aggregate them. People are up in arms about it because the government is doing it, but today, your records are already bought and sold by marketing agencies and aggregated together. The fact is, you never had any privacy to begin with.
IMHO this "world of no secrets and a world of freedom" will be ilusory because will be unilateral and too idealistic. Let me remind you another idealistic thing: comunism.
Not saying I agree with it, I'm just making the point that privacy and freedom are orthogonal. Someone can have complete knowledge of your activities, but that in no way precludes you from doing anything you want, gathering with whomever you want, practicing whatever religion you want, making whatever speeches you want, and any other basic human right.
It is only when people USE such information to restrict your activities that freedom is impinged on, which is why we need laws restricting how law enforcement get get access to such information, rather than trying to stop collection, since it's impossible (unless you're willing to accept cryptoanarchy).
My other point was, so-called liberal ACLU types like Stallman and Brin are in fact opposed to privacy, do Kramer's claims do nothing to bolster his status as a defender of human rights.
In my capitalist point of view the human being is not prepared for any idealistic thing. Being more realistic TIA is about control and money.
No, more realistic, TIA is about people with a paranoid need for security. it would be about money if it was done in the private sector.
However, I may be against TIA now, but here's a basic problem we have in society and I don't know how to solve it:
Our ability to destroy is increasing at a much faster rate than our ability to protect. In just a few years, making weapons of mass destruction will be easily done at home just like people who write software viruses today. What will you do in 10-20 years when anyone can buy a DNA sequencer and do their own bio-weapons experimentation at home? Moreover, the knowledge to build weapons is rapidly transmitted over the internet. (See Bill Joy's manifesto about biotechnology and nanotechnology)
When a single individual can kill millions, at this point in our history, can we really trust people who are given the gift of full privacy? Is it a risk that's too big to take? It's one thing to argue security vs liberty, but will liberty matter of some teenager hacks up a virus and kills a few billion people? You have to be alive to taste liberty.
I simply don't know if at our stage of development, humans are responsible enough to handle the privileges of privacy. You may be opposed now, but the first time someone designers a custom WMD in private and kills a few hundred million people with it, you will be asking about whether we can have something like TIA and somehow maintain our civil liberties as well.
