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Bruce Sterling on Geeks and Spooks
apsmith writes: "Bruce Sterling's
latest Viridian piece is a written version of a talk on why we're in such a mess with crypto, why the computer industry is going nowhere for the next few years, and what Lawrence Lessig, the NSA, Echelon, Oliver North and Abdullah Catli have in common. Thought-provoking stuff, even if you might not agree with quite everything ("Why don't you geeks just sit down with your cheap, crappy plastic boxes, and shut up? Here in the TV biz, our boxes look nicer anyway!")." This is a lunch-time talk, and it's meant to be entertaining, and it is. :)
we geeks have all the cash and all the culture cred, and we're rich and sexy and cool
Is this guy in denial, or what?! Sounds like the wet dreams of (insert favorite tech company CEO/Microsoft poster boy here): "I'm rich.... and SEXY.. and COOL... and I'm an 3l3t3 ha(k0r to boot!"
A good read, though. Nice afternoon entertainment..
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
The point of this device would be to arm the population in surveilling and recording acts of unconventional warfare.
Now, if you turn the entire population into anonymous snoops and peeping Toms, it's a nation of snitches, which is very destabilizing. I'm not suggesting that.
This is the civilian militia Minuteman version of surveillance.
How does Bruce distinguish this from a lynch mob or posse of surveillance?
I read through those paragraphs several times, and I really can't figure out how Bruce gets around the destabilization problem that he himself points out. Somehow the fact that these are really sophisticated, cool devices is supposed to make them immune to mis-use.
Bruce decided that our government should be the primary distributors of crypto, and that it should arm private citizens with secure transmitting devices. At first, this sounds like a great idea: the masses rise up in defense of their great nation and take the evil barbarians by storm! The intelligence agencies would love it because they would now have information streaming in, and they would not have to go through the trouble of getting a warrant for a wiretap or bugs. However, the problem arises when you consider the government presumably giving the worlds most powerful crypto to Joe and Jane Citizen These are the people who the government would not trust with conventional military hardware, much less something with the capability to destroy people's lives by ultimately providing their closest held secrets to Washington, free of charge. It brings to mind several scenes from Orwell's 1984, where it was the 'private' citizen who turned in his fellows to Big Brother.
Yeah, right.
"Holy shit! Citizen CX29BR7 just saw Homeland Defence Squad HDS4787 gunning down dissident JF78Z4 and reported it as a terrorist act. Homeland Response Squyad HRS5651 has been dispatched to terminate CX29BR7."
...this guy should switch to decaf? Oh, and maybe lay off the hallucinogens just a tad. Not totally, but just a tad, because we all know writers need hallucinogens.