There has been much discussion lately how assorted snooping organizations of assorted governments are creating the infrastructure of the Big Brother state as fast as their evil little hands can do so. Fortuneately for those who love Liberty more than Government, there are ways to defeat them. Long ago I said to some friends: “The hacker giveth and the hacker taketh away”, meaning what one programmer designs for a government or corporation, another programmer can bypass or subvert. It is, after all, nothing but patterns of ones and zeroes.
The advantage of numbers falls to our side. Whatever number of bright people any government collects for some nefarious project, there will be larger numbers of even brighter and perhaps more committed people out to undo the damage. There is a near certainty someone, somewhere on this large hunk of rock and water will find the work around. Minutes later, everyone will have it.
This brings me to the point of this ramble: those who are seriously interested in the technology of privacy may find of interest this talk from the 1999 Ottawa Linux Conference on “Linux and the Freedom Network” by Zero Knowledge of Canada. Right click and download. It’s a largish mp3 but well worth the effort. The sort of thing to drive Statists mad…
“The sort of thing to drive Statists mad…”
You say that like they’re not already…
😉
Game and point to Mr. Grotenhuls! 🙂
Alas, the Freedom Network was shut down by Zeroknowledge in (IIRC) 2001 – they refunded subscriptions and now concentrate on terminal-only products.
I don’t know whether the decision was motivated by financial or political considerations.
The problem seems (to me) to be that you need to be immune to political pressure in order to run this sort of thing. Can we say “Data Haven” ?
Or you need to be using a peer-to-peer protocol with no central, vulnerable, bankruptable server. I am myself in process of developing one such.
Check this this…
I got this from Drudge, but it’s worthy of your front page with a nice link to my blog.
Basically, in order to avoid kids getting lunches for free at a new school from being stigmatized, they’re barcoding their foreheads. Just kidding, they’re only using a retinal scanner. And, to make things easier, said retinal scanner will be used in the library too. Not that you need to pay to check out a book from the library, it’s just that it’s so much more convenient.
The principal informs us that we have nothing to worry about! The retinal scan is perfectly safe, and, best of all, this is today’s technology! “But this is not a James Bond school for spies. … This is not science fiction. This is technology that exists.”
Is this a media hoax, or a comedy routine that got mistakenly FAXed to the Seattle PI?