> I fully agree with you, which means that I see few ways to preserve > the liberty that privacy represents than to withdraw from much of > civil society while it shares ever more...
I see a couple, but much like Dan, I'm not optimistic about them. The first is this: *stop talking about privacy*. What people are calling 'privacy' is really a large number of concepts which are all being glommed together under the umbrella of 'privacy', but these concepts may not all belong together at all. Figure out what *precisely* you're concerned with, and start talking about that -- but "privacy" as a word has become so vague it's almost useless. If we can't describe precisely what we're afraid of losing, we're going to lose it and we won't even be able to accurately tell people what we've lost. The second is a more general observation: authority tends to behave best when it's forced to submit to oversight. Corporations behave best when they're forced to answer to public shareholder meetings where anyone with a single share to their name can demand answers -- and if they don't get them, there's hell to pay. Politicians behave best when there's a free press following them around and asking them rude questions. Terrorists wear masks not to hide from the authorities, but to hide from their own communities -- social oversight would make their job impossible. Unfortunately, oversight only works when those in charge take it seriously. We as a society would rather watch reality television than television about reality: we'd rather watch _Big Brother_ than C-SPAN hearings about whether government has become Big Brother. The third is that those who *do* care, tend to care in deeply broken ways. I can't tell you how many times I've run into self-styled privacy advocates here in the U.S. who are furious over how the U.S. has been reading their email. The only problem is there's very little evidence of that occurring. Reading email metadata, maybe, but not email content. When I try to explain that to them I usually find myself wondering inside of two minutes why I ever bothered trying to bring fact and reason to what is fundamentally an argument from passion and emotion. I have had people literally yell in my face over the metadata-versus-content distinction. When the front line of advocacy appears to be detached from reality in one way, and the body politic is detached from reality in another (reality television), well... how does one fix this? My reading of what Dan's said (I apologize, Dan, if I'm getting you wrong) is that he sees no way to stop the technological assault. I don't think that's quite true, though. If we were as a society to suddenly say, "stop this, right now, let's establish some laws to protect the essential core of privacy," we'd do it. The problem I see is the old one of the Eloi and the Morlocks... and I feel like an Eloi who fell down into the Morlock tunnels and spent just barely enough time down there to get a sense of just how bad it's going to be. Now I'm waving my arms and screaming at the other Eloi that they aren't going to like what happens when the Morlocks come, but nobody's listening to me. I'm getting in the way of the latest special about the Kardashians, you see... _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
