Friday, December 06, 2002

News: Tech becomes a tool for tyranny

A healthy distrust of government was a hallmark of this country's founding, and has protected us from much harm over the last 226 years. The founders may have disagreed about many things, but they all agreed that limited government power was a key to freedom.

Distrust of central government power was among the primary reasons for the designs of both our system of separation of powers and our system of federalism.

The founders distrusted government because they had firsthand experience with tyrants. They had seen that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Note the logical order in the phase. It isn't the corruption that comes first--it is power that comes first. When power is amassed and available, corruption comes as a result. So the trick is to limit power up-front--to prevent the amassing of too much power by any single person, or any single agency, or department, or government.

Another famous quotation, "knowledge is power," adorns the logo of the Total Information Agency (TIA). A visit to the Web site will take your breath away. Its name, slogan and logo reek of Orwellian elements. In fact, the Web site looks like either a parody Web site, or every civil libertarian's nightmare.

But it is not a parody. Nor is this a simple case of unwise choices of agency name and logo design. Rather, the name, logo, slogan and Web site contents are all a pretty accurate description of the intentions behind the TIA.…

You can't trust governments to do what they promise. You can't trust them to police themselves. You can't assume that, because something is not supposed to happen, it won't happen. So what you do is refuse to allow government to amass power. You don't let them develop the tools that can be used by future tyrants.

To those who say that safeguards will be built into the system, I say that the government has a pretty poor track record of following such safeguards. To those who say it will be impossible to use the database to violate the privacy of citizens, well, it's just a matter of who is sitting at the console. Your privacy policy is only as good as your most disgruntled employee with access to your database.…
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-975988.html

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