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Bruce Sterling on Geeks and Spooks

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the goring-sacred-cows dept.

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. :)

3 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lynch mob? by Lumpish+Scholar · · Score: 5, Insightful
    How does Bruce distinguish this from a lynch mob or posse of surveillance?
    The KKK wore hoods.

    If they wore T-shirts with their driver's license numbers writ large and visible from all angles, they wouldn't have formed lynch mobs.

    Read the text Mr. Sterling wrote between the last two sentences you quoted:

    I'm not suggesting that. I am suggesting secure, accountable devices with digital signatures built in. They're cryptographically time-stamped, their voice signals and photographs are cryptographically overwritten, proving their source. They are tamperproofed, and very sternly verifiable, and usable as proven evidence in courts of law. They're not civilian toys, they are genuine weapons of information warfare, in much the same way that an unarmed Predator surveillance aircraft is a weapon. They are people's media weapons. Their proper use requires some training and discretion; it's like a citizen's audiovisual arrest.
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  2. Re:Lynch mob? by Winged+Cat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, what happens when - not if - the identity information gets stripped out while it's being reported by others, because the others care about the dirt and not so much about who vouches for it? ("A bunch of people sent me video of you doing this thing we object to. No, I'm not gonna tell you who they are. No, I'm not gonna spend the bandwidth to forward you all that video so you can see it yourself and see if they're faked, or all actually the same person. I'm just gonna find you guilty.")

  3. Re:Lynch mob? by sphealey · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The KKK wore hoods.

    If they wore T-shirts with their driver's license numbers writ large and visible from all angles, they wouldn't have formed lynch mobs.
    That conveniently ignores the fact that the county sheriff usually knew exactly who the members of the lynch mob were, and his deputies were often part of the mob. So if an imbalance of power exists, having that information would probably only make it worse for those at the wrong end of the see-saw.

    sPh