From: Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org>
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 08:33:06 -0800 (PST)
To: hal@rain.org (Hal Finney)
Subject: Re: Anon
In-Reply-To: <199611210202.SAA10970@crypt.hfinney.com>
Message-ID: <199611281629.LAA21815@homeport.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


	Brin's argument has two ideas that I find annoying.  One is
that the changes he forsees are inevitable, the other is that security
is not about economics.

	The idea that universal surveillance is inevitable is based on
the assumption that everyone lives in a city, and the technologies of
spying can be cheaply deployed.  A good deal of privacy can be
obtained by moving a small or large distance away.  Monitoring
technology is not cheap.  When it is cheap, the network links to
connect it all will still be expensive.  (etc.  The economics of a
surveillance state lead to something in the mix, people, cameras,
policemen to make arrests etc, being expensive.)

	The second mistake is related, and assumes that the rich can
be forced to give up the privacy that the poor have already lost.  The
expense of a defense is related to the effort involved in breaking
that defense.  If I have a mansion with grounds, I can deploy defenses
against the low cost cameras and bugs for less than my privacy is
worth to me.  I can also team up with my neighbors to have a well
defended enclave.

	So the surveillance state that Brin wants will not apply to
the rich, but only the poor.  I wonder if it will affect him.

Adam

Hal Finney wrote:
| As I mentioned a couple of days ago, science fiction writer David Brin
| has an argument against not only anonymity, but _privacy_ as well.
| Where cypherpunks tend to think of privacy as both beneficial and
| inevitable, Brin sees it as harmful and doomed.  He has an article in
| the December 1996 issue of Wired discussing his ideas.
| 
| BTW cypherpunk Doug Barnes is also quoted several times in the long
| article in that issue by Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age)
| about the undersea cables that carry most transnational information
| traffic.
| 
| Hal
| 


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume