Transparent Society

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Futurist David Brin, writing in 1996, concluded that privacy-busting technology was inevitable, and suggested the best path forward is to tightly control the deployment of cameras indoors (except for e.g., Police Headquarters!), go ahead and deploy them widely outdoors, and then make the feed from any of the cameras deployed publicly available. So it's not just "Them" that can watch, it's everybody, basically so you don't end up with a watchers' watcher problem.

You do end up with everybody living in the 21st equivalent of a small town, where people generally know what other people are up to, but hey -- that's the way people have generally lived for millenia.

To read more about it, look for Brin's The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, ISBN:0738201448.

Excerpts:
 * http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html
 * http://www.kithrup.com/brin/trans_chap1.htm

-- Peter Kaminski, 20010827

Also see: "Three cheers for the Surveillance Society!" -- http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/08/04/mortal_gods/